Maurice Smith: Spokane needs to look beyond the known and commit to solving homelessness
Call this my takeaway from Camp Hope, where I served as the day manager from September 2022 until it closed in June 2023:
Spokane needs a “homeless moon shot.”
It was the early days of NASA and America’s space program. Cape Canaveral was a nondescript extension of Patrick Air Force Base (now Patrick Space Force Base). NASA was barely 3 years old, working out of left-over World War II Quonset huts, and test-firing rockets to find one that would work. It all came together on the morning of May 5, 1961, when Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard successfully rode a Mercury-Redstone 3 rocket in his Freedom 7 capsule 101 miles into space. Three weeks later, on May 25, 1961, still basking in the national glow of that success, President John F. Kennedy shared a vision with a joint session of Congress. He announced that the United States “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” Speaking to a crowd at Rice University in Houston in September of 1962, Kennedy elaborated, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Yes, they were hard. NASA didn’t have any of the things it needed to meet the president’s challenge. Not the rockets, not the capsule, not the moon lander … you name it, they didn’t have it. But in 1969, Neil Armstrong captivated the attention of a nation and a world by stepping onto the surface of the moon. Achieving that goal took a larger-than-life vision that called on the best and the brightest to step up and make it happen.
When it comes to homelessness, Spokane needs a vision for something bigger and better. Spokane needs a homeless moon shot, one that includes five major components:
1. A coherent and positive vision of becoming a community where it’s hard to be homeless, where no family has to sleep in their vehicle in a Hillyard parking lot because they have no other option; where no family with school-age kids have to double up with friends or family because they have no place to call home; where no one is forced to sleep unsheltered on the streets or in the parks of our community due to a lack of appropriate shelter space or housing options.
2. An achievable goal of eliminating chronic unsheltered homelessness (which is currently 40% of the known-and-counted homeless) in the next four years. It’s time to get our unhoused people off our downtown streets and sidewalks and out of our parks, not because law enforcement chased them somewhere else (with nowhere to go), but because we found appropriate housing options for them.
3. A specific, practical and sustainable action plan of problems to solve and specific steps to take (unlike the 17 pages of aspirational but impractical and nonactionable verbiage in the previous administration’s Homeless Plan 2.0).
4. A new metric to measure housing outcomes for money spent. I’ve proposed an annual homeless white paper written by expert practitioners in specific areas summarizing the status of homeless services, how many people went to treatment, how many got housed, the per capita housing cost for housing outcomes, a complete financial summary of public monies spent on homeless services and outcomes. There’s more, but you get the point.
5. A sustainable financial infrastructure. Spokane has no financial infrastructure for funding homeless services, and presently grossly overpays for services. The monthly cost of the city’s TRAC shelter for the 18 months through April 2024 is $807,766 per month to shelter 350 individuals. That’s a monthly per-person cost of $2,307. The city would have been better off housing 350 unsheltered homeless individuals in apartments and providing each person $2,307 per month for rent and living expenses. Instead, according to CMIS data as of mid-December 2023, 54 people from TRAC had moved to housing while the remaining 296 … not so much. A better vision for homeless services would include a sustainable financial infrastructure combined with a better metric for what the city is getting for the money it spends. It’s time to do different, including being transparent about homeless services.
Finally, from January 2022 to January 2023, homelessness in greater Spokane grew 36%, a rate three times the national average of 12%.
It’s clearly time – even past time – for a different community vision, one of meaningfully addressing homelessness in a manner reflecting the five components described above. It’s needs to be a vision and plan that, while practical, is currently beyond our reach, but is very doable if we’re willing to roll up our collective sleeves and commit ourselves to it.
And, like Kennedy’s “We Choose the Moon” speech at Rice University in 1962, it won’t be easy. In fact, it will be hard. And that’s probably the first genuine indication that it’s both the good and right thing to do.
Maurice Smith is a documentary filmmaker on homelessness in Spokane and a community producer for Community-Minded Television (Comcast 14). He can be contacted at risingrivermedia@gmail.com