Bonnie McCoy has been living at the Trent Resource and Assistance Center, or TRAC, for two years. The 68-year-old came to Spokane to live near her son but has been waiting for a home of her own.
"I've been following him around from place to place since my husband died about six years ago," McCoy says. "I lived in Richland for two years and had an apartment there. Section Eight had housing. But when I came here, there wasn't anything immediately available, and this was the only place, so I've been staying here."
McCoy has a cowboy hat and a wheelchair she calls Silver Scout, after the two horses in The Lone Ranger. She also finally has an apartment lined up. Her move-in date is Nov. 1. It's pretty good timing, because TRAC is set to close on Oct. 31.
On Friday, Oct. 25, there were about 60 people staying at the warehouse-turned-homeless shelter, which the city has been paying for since September 2022. TRAC can host at least 250 people, but the focus for the past few months has been getting the number of guests down to zero before it shuts for good.
Not everyone will transition into housing like McCoy.
Dallas "Pandora" Whitt has also been at TRAC for two years. Whitt met fellow shelter guest Dawn Pavie about a year ago, and the two started dating.
TRAC was originally intended as an emergency shelter, but Pavie and Whitt say it's become their home. So far, they haven't found anywhere elses to move into together. They might end up on the street again.
"Where the hell are we supposed to go?" Whitt asks.
When TRAC closes, Spokane's homeless shelter system will lose hundreds of beds without being able to replace them.
TRAC is closing because there's no more money for it, says Dawn Kinder, Spokane's director of Neighborhood, Housing, and Human Services.
The city's goal, which was announced by Mayor Lisa Brown this spring, is to move away from large warehouse-style shelters to a network of small shelters scattered throughout the city. The proposed network could be cheaper and hopefully would allow providers to give people more personalized attention and service recommendations.
City staff hoped they could create the network by the time TRAC closed. But as of this writing, there are only two city-funded scattered site shelters operating, with a total of 60 beds. They're already full.
Temperatures are also dropping — on Oct. 24, the low dipped to 31 degrees. Per municipal code, the city is required to open emergency warming shelters when temperatures go below freezing.
With extremely limited funds, city officials and service providers are caught between two bad options: spend money they don't have on emergency warming shelters that address an immediate need but perpetuate an unsustainable system, or spend time investing in a more sustainable system while, in the meantime, leaving people out in the cold.
STUCK IN A LEASE
There is no indoor plumbing at TRAC. The bathrooms and showers are outside, and you're lucky if your shower is even lukewarm, Whitt says.But since TRAC opened in September 2022, the city has spent over $16 million to keep it open. The lease that former Mayor Nadine Woodward's administration signed with the building's owner, Larry Stone, costs $28,000 a month.
"We still will be under this lease, unless Larry Stone changes his mind about that," Brown says.
The lease extends for about three more years, the mayor says.
But the original contract the Woodward administration signed with Salvation Army, the shelter's operator, went through the end of June this year. Kinder and her team renegotiated the contract to extend through the end of October, but the city can't afford anything more.
"We do not have the ability to support that investment long term," Kinder says. "It was fully funded with one-time money."
Kinder also says that large emergency shelters aren't designed to be efficient paths out of homelessness.
"It's designed as the crisis response arm of what happens when somebody finds themselves without a home. That's not the permanent fix," she says. "I think what we saw, especially in the prior administration, was just to put out enough shelter beds to kind of make it go away. ... That did not translate into a ton of people being successfully housed and maintaining that housing. That translated to 400-plus people in a warehouse with no bathrooms."
Long-term solutions include investments in transitional housing, rental subsidies, and behavioral and mental health services, Kinder says.
Still, the city is left paying for a big, empty building in the middle of a shelter crisis. What will they use it for?
"We don't know yet," Brown says. "I mean, it is possible that we utilize it for surge capacity. But again, you have to have an operator for that."
Surge capacity is the term for extra shelter space opened only when the weather gets really cold or really hot. Some people don't want to stay in shelters unless temperatures get extreme.
When the weather gets really cold, Brown says it's possible the city could pay an operator and use TRAC as extra shelter space to help people avoid frostbite and other injuries.
Does that mean TRAC won't actually close?
"The question is funding and [finding an] operator, and what we want it to be," Brown says. "At this point, we still have entities coming forward that will potentially fit into the scattered site model. That's the model we're going with."
SCATTERED SITES AND NAVIGATION
On North Cedar Street in the Garland District, the old New Apostolic Church has shiny pink paper bats decorating its north side. Sunflowers with heavy heads bend over a sign that reads "The Cedar Center by Jewels Helping Hands."The 30-person shelter in the empty church was piloted last winter. Overseen by Julie Garcia and her team, it provides beds, space for a CHAS community clinic, private rooms to meet with service providers, safe lockers for medicines, and a communal room for activities like arts and crafts.
"We've learned that 24-hour care is less impactful to the neighborhood," Garcia says. "To keep people from camping in the neighborhood, it's just easier to keep them and care for them all day long."
The Cedar Center doesn't allow camping or drug use within a mile radius around its shelter. It also has a curfew from 10 pm to 6 am when residents have to be inside. It's also specifically focused on serving people who are elderly or disabled. (Garcia doesn't think it's the best way to help people with mental health issues or substance use disorder.)
The Cedar Center is an example of a scattered site shelter that the city wants to see more of.
Brown's team chose Empire Health Foundation to identify potential new scattered sites and to operate a navigation center to guide people who are homeless to the best place for them.
The navigation center is located in the Cannon Street shelter in Browne's Addition. Empire Health has taken over operations from Revive Counseling Spokane. Revive piloted a navigation center at that same location for people relocating from Second Avenue and Division, which was designated an encampment in March.
Now, with Empire Health as the operator and Revive hired to continue working there as a subcontractor, the Cannon navigation center is supposed to take referrals from multiple homeless service providers, not just Revive. But so far, other providers are having trouble understanding what the navigation center does or how to get in touch.
"It's always hard to get somebody at a shelter to answer a phone," Kinder says. "Frankly, they are short-staffed, very busy places. So it is not surprising to me that some folks have tried calling and not gotten an immediate answer. I'm not thrilled by that, of course...[but] Revive and Zeke [Smith, president of Empire Health,] have been very responsive to that."
Still, thanks to Revive's work at Cannon, three people have moved from TRAC into the Cannon Shelter, where up to 30 people can sleep each night, and finally into transitional housing, says Kim Proffitt, Revive's supervisor at TRAC. Revive would like to see more people moving through the system, but they're limited by other constraints.
"There's not a lot of places for people to go," Proffitt says.
Kinder says Empire Health will announce a new scattered site location similar to the Cedar Center at the beginning of November. Hopefully, a handful of others will come online throughout the winter, opening up at least 100 new beds, Brown says.
But finding scattered shelter sites isn't as simple as finding abandoned church buildings, Kinder says. By state law, good neighbor agreements have to be signed by community members who are willing to have a shelter near their homes before a site is selected.
Even if a neighborhood is willing, not many empty or partially used facilities are suitable for sheltering. A major issue is providing showers and sufficient plumbing. Old churches that were built mainly for Sunday morning congregations don't typically have pipes that can withstand daily use. They almost never have built-in showers.
"We've had to replace the sewer system at Morning Star," Garcia says, referring to the church that hosts Jewels Helping Hands' second scattered shelter in Spokane's Northwest neighborhood. "I mean, you have a service on Sunday, maybe [you're open] a couple days during the week, and you have 10 to 15 people using the bathroom. [For shelters,] you need to have bathrooms accessible for 30 people all day long. No one's systems can withstand that."
INCLEMENT WEATHER SHELTERS
Finding, outfitting and opening scattered site shelters is taking more time than the city can keep TRAC open for. While the system changes, the safety nets in place for when the city needs emergency beds aren't going to be able to catch very many people.Under the city's current budget, there is $250,000 to use for inclement weather shelters — another term for emergency beds opened when the weather is especially bad.
It's up to the City Council to determine how that money is spent and to codify what "inclement weather" means. Under the current municipal code, the city is required to provide warming shelters when predicted lows are at or below freezing.
The city estimates that $250,000 could cover the cost for about 100 emergency beds for 35 nights, or 350 beds for 10 nights. These beds are supposed to be last resort fallbacks.
Spokane sees an average of more than 130 days with a low of 32 degrees or colder, according to research done by Nicolette Ocheltree, manager of housing and homelessness initiatives for the City Council, and Jackson Deese, legislative aide to Council member Zack Zappone.
Instead of paying for new pop-up warming shelters, the city is focusing on adding emergency beds in existing facilities to be as cost effective as possible. But no matter how you slice it, there are not enough beds currently to keep everyone warm this winter, Kinder says.
"Yes, the shelter beds are not being immediately or potentially ever replaced," Kinder says. "[But] emergency shelter is not a solution...Even if we had the money, I don't believe the smartest use of them would be in perpetuating a system that does not produce results. We're pivoting, not to be inhumane, but to ensure that the long-term paths out of homelessness becomes real." ♦
Editor's Note: This story was updated on Thursday, Oct. 31 to reflect the correct number of beds available at the Cannon Street shelter.
