Spokane Housing Authority opens its largest project

240 affordable apartments located in Spokane Valley

Offering 240 units of affordable housing in the Dishman Hills area of Spokane Valley, the Orchard Vista Grand Opening marks the completion of an affordable housing project that broke ground this time last year. A household qualifies for the affordable complex if gross income is at or below 60% of area median for the Spokane metro area. Under 2025 HUD figures, that is about $42,350 for one person and $48,400 for two.

“Our one-bedroom apartments are $1,165,” said Nicole Gose, a property manager at Orchid Vista Apartments. “At a regular market-rate property, you’d be looking at $1,500 to $1,600 a month.”

The project came in at roughly $68 million, receiving funding from the state, the city of Spokane Valley, Seattle Foundation’s Evergreen Impact Housing Fund, along with CitiBank and Washington Trust Bank.

“It’s the largest project that we’ve ever done in our history,” said Pamela Parr, the executive director of Spokane Housing Authority.

Out of 240 total units, 106 are currently leased, with 58 currently occupied. Gose expects the remaining units to fill up within the next few months. She says the project has been very efficient, in both speed and spending.

“We were able to produce the units for 30% less than it would have cost us otherwise by creating this public-private partnership with the Inland Group, and it was also delivered much faster,” Parr said of the contractor for the project.

Mayor Laura Padden praised the group for coming in under budget, saying that affordable housing is important in addressing the growing Valley population.

“As the city grows, there’s always a need for more housing at all levels, so this is one of the steps, and a pretty large number of units,” Padden said.

“We’re all for affordable housing and also homeownership, so we’re trying to go across the spectrum,” she said.

The site is also going to include a childcare center, which is planned at 4,500 square feet on the northwest corner of the complex. The SHA won $126,000 from the state for the center, which will be YMCA operated. The SHA estimates the site to include two classrooms of 18 to 20 children.

“We’re creating housing near jobs, and by adding a childcare center, we’re going to add the access to childcare as well for people to work,” Parr said.

The funding for the childcare center is not yet fully secured. In addition to the $126,000 the SHA has won, it has already put in $580,000 of its own funding into the acquisition and site prep.

“It’s a little different. You have to find separate funding, and it’s developed in a different way. That’s going to take us a little bit longer.” Parr said.

Troy Slack is a member of the Teen Journalism Institute, funded by Comma Journalism Lab and Spokane Teachers Credit Union.

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‘CHRONIC NUISANCE’

Spokane issues order for Division Street 7-Eleven to find solutions

Dozens of people stand outside the 7-Eleven at the corner of Second Avenue and Division Street, huddling together in tight groups, lounging about on luggage, leaning on shopping carts or rocks. Some are incoherent, hunched over or appear to be passed out. It’s a common sight a block from the main entrance into downtown Spokane from Interstate 90.

The problems have persisted for at least nine years, but city officials say that’s about to change.

Spokane officials issued a chronic nuisance order to the 7-Eleven in July and are now in talks with the convenience store’s corporate office to find solutions to the problem, according to city spokeswoman Erin Hut. The order refers to 125 incidents the city is aware of over the past two months involving drugs and loitering. A similar notice was sent to the convenience store two years ago, Hut said.

The order requires the owners of the 7-Eleven to contact the city officer who issued the nuisance notice and establish a plan to eliminate the problems on their property, according to the Spokane Municipal Code.

Joey Bains, who owns the property, confirmed that he received the order from the city and forwarded it to tenant Kahar Momand, who manages the 7-Eleven.

Momand, who also goes by Alex, declined several times to be interviewed for this story. He’s been the tenant and manager of the store since November 2017.

Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown was part of the decision-making process to send the order and said that community safety, which includes helping the homeless and others milling about the 7-Eleven, is her No. 1 priority. That hasn’t changed since the Spokane Complex fires, she said on Friday.

“I am incredibly frustrated that we are in this situation again. This business is making a profit off vulnerable people, and at a minimum, should use a portion of that profit to secure the property and prevent these recurring problems,” Brown said.

“They are using our police department as their own personal security service, which takes away critical capacity to respond to other emergent needs. I am looking closely at what stronger enforcement actions we can take, including whether changes to our municipal code are needed for further accountability.”

Spokane Municipal Code says that it is a civil infraction for any person to fail to respond to the notice within 10 days. The business owner is required to create an approved abatement plan after 15 days.

…

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A one-of-a-kind partnership helps house community college students

Homeless undergrads at higher risk of dropping out

After Bilal Ali graduated from high school, he wasn’t able to think about college. His father had just died, leaving him on his own, and he was scrambling to support himself.

When he turned 21, he feared he was missing his chance to get a degree entirely and he enrolled at Highline College in Des Moines. But he still had to work overnight to afford the rent for the two-bedroom apartment in Renton he shared with six older men and he was struggling with so little sleep. Looking back, he doubts he could have finished.

Then, an innovative housing program at the community college changed everything.

Since 2020, Highline College has paired students facing homelessness with housing vouchers provided by the King County Housing Authority, covering their rent for up to four and a half years or until six months after they graduate.

There are 34 community colleges and 37 housing authorities in Washington alone, yet Highline’s is the only program of its kind in the country, experts said.

Fifty students have obtained two- or four-year degrees or certificates in the program’s first five years.

Highline staff argue the results so far show the program is worth the investment.

Community colleges – which serve a broad range of people, including high school students and single parents – can be an affordable path for many to get better jobs. But their students are more likely to struggle with housing. A recent study found 14% of Washington community college students were homeless. At Highline College, it’s 18%.

These students can be especially at risk of dropping out. But Saido Alinur, who oversees the program at Highline, said the housing assistance encourages them to finish.

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Spokane’s Second Harvest offering free food and hygiene items at walk-up centers

Second Harvest is holding distribution centers and Community Care Hubs at the Wolff Family Child Hunger Solution Center and partnering with Excelsior Wellness on Indian Trail Road. There will be food, hygiene products, and cleaning supplies for people impacted by the Spokane Area Fires, as well as the opportunity to volunteer.

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From the Editor -

Now is our chance to gain a deeper understanding of the nature and meaning of homelessness. Many of the people experiencing homelessness prior to this fire had had their own personal catastrophes to deal with. Whether it is domestic abuse, other threats of violence, drug addiction, loss of a spouse, loss of a job, they have all experienced tremendous loss.

The losses from these terrible fires can help bring the realization that we are all possibly one day away from a catastrophe that could render us without a home.

I have done a couple of shifts as a RN with the Spokane County Medical Reserve Corp down at the Convention Center. After an initial census approaching 300 people, by yesterday it was down to about 80.

The convention center is being managed by the Red Cross. I can now testify firsthand that it is a top notch organization, full of caring people. I have a dear friend who has been deployed, initially he thought to Yakima, but then the fire hit and he is right here at home. At one point, they needed specific supplies to support the mission, and this good man drove nonstop all the way to Wenatchee and back to bring them. These are the everyday heroes in this battle.

He also had an interesting anecdote to relate. He said one lady asked him if they were making sure not to admit homeless people. “Because they are dirty and they will mess things up.” My friend replied “the Red Cross accepts everyone”. She was not happy with that answer.

But of course it is the absolute truth.

Donate to the Red Cross of Spokane!

Dan

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Dan Simonson

<dsimonson@mac.com>

Young adults experiencing homelessness brace for uncertainty with Volunteers of America youth shelter set to close

The organization says funding cut from the state’s budget left them no option but to close the shelter with short notice.

Dozens of young adults in Spokane are now being told the place they’ve called home will close in the next couple weeks, leaving some with nowhere to go. The Volunteers of America’s young adult shelter will end overnight services its run for more than half a decade in mid-August.

“With tight budgets, unfortunately, we had to make a really tough decision,” says Fawn Schott, CEO of Volunteers of American of Eastern Washington and North Idaho.

Schott says the shelter was created in a partnership between the city, county and state during the pandemic to help people ages 18-24 who were experiencing homelessness, so that way they didn’t feed into the adult homeless system.

For the last six years, the shelter has operated with leftover pandemic relief funding, but that money has been slowly dwindling for the last few years. Schott says at the end of June, the end of their fiscal year, the organization discovered they weren’t getting nearly $600,000 they anticipated receiving from the state, after those funds were cut from the states biennium budget.

“It was quite a surprise to us,” Schott says. “We had budgeted already a close to $700,000 loss and were working on fundraising for that by January, so with the sudden loss of $580,000 more, there was really no way that we could close that gap on that, unfortunately, in such a short window.”

Schott says while the shelter will still be available to provide housing and financial services, the immediate decision directly affects those who relied on its housing stability.

“I’ve been homeless before, so I know how it feels,” she said. “I mean, I needed time and I was a working adult.”

Kitara Johnson, CEO of Gabriel’s Challenge, has already met with a handful of shelter residents from VOA who say they don’t even know where to start when it comes to finding a new place to live.

“They know the reality is that they are going right on the street, which is why this has been a safe space for them that even provided them meals,” Johnson said. “So for that to go away so quickly, they have been devastated.”

The VOA is planning on opening up another 18 bedroom overnight shelter come October 1st; Schott says in the meantime, other organizations that have bed availability, like Jewels Helping Hands, have reached out to see how they can help with the transition period.

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From homeless to a place of their own: How ‘A Tiny Home for Good’ is helping people rebuild their lives

Syracuse, NY —

Andrew Lunetta saw the same pattern over and over while working at homeless shelters in Syracuse, New York.

Men would leave, move into the cheapest housing available, and soon return looking for a bed.

“It was a matter of months, sometimes weeks, that the same men would come back to the shelter,” said Lunetta, 36.

After nearly a decade, the lesson was clear to him: People were not failing at housing; housing was failing them.

Lunetta began asking residents what they wanted in a home. Repeatedly, they told him no roommates, no shared spaces, just a place of their own and support that would continue after they got housed.

That sparked Lunetta to create A Tiny Home for Good in 2014. The Syracuse-based nonprofit has built 23 tiny homes and refurbished almost two dozen other properties for people experiencing homelessness.

Lunetta says tiny homes offer “a sense of calm.” For people coming out of shelters – especially those dealing with trauma, mental illness, or substance use disorder – that can make the difference between short-term housing and long-term stability.

‘A radical concept’

The homes are small but complete, with a kitchen, bathroom, and a washer and dryer. Residents avoid the shared hallways, roommate conflicts, and constant noise that can make other housing arrangements difficult to sustain.

Yet the housing itself is only part of A Tiny Home for Good’s model. Lunetta and his team provide the long-term support that he says tenants need to succeed, whether that means help managing addiction, mental health care, or the day-to-day resources and work that stabilize their lives.

“The expectation that someone was going to get better after dealing with 10 years of homelessness, that they were going to all of a sudden make the right choices, that’s not the truth,” Lunetta said.

That support looks different for each tenant. Some need daily check-ins; others need less frequent contact. What matters most, Lunetta said, is patience and consistency and the understanding that progress will not look the same for everyone.

The work also extends beyond housing and case management. Staff and tenants gather for weekly walks through the neighborhood, and the organization hosts groups and activities that give residents a chance to connect and build relationships.

“For a lot of our tenants, that is a radical concept, to be invited to be a part of a walking group, or a writing club,” Lunetta said. “It’s just something that I think a lot of our tenants have never been afforded before.”

A Tiny Home for Good’s model meets tenants where they are. Tenants sign standard leases and pay rent based on income, usually capped at 30 percent. There is no sobriety requirement, no mandate to participate in counseling, and no deadline by which they must leave, Lunetta said.

For some, the housing is permanent. The organization’s first tenant moved in nearly 10 years ago and still lives there. For Lunetta, that kind of long-term stability is part of the goal.

“For some, my hope is that they’re going to be with us for the rest of their lives,” he said.

The organization now also renovates multi-bedroom homes for families experiencing homelessness.

Related audio

5 Good Things: Meet the CNN Hero who offers more than a roof over the heads of people experiencing homelessness. | CNN 5 Things | CNN Audio

‘Freedom to just exhale’

For resident Rhea Holmes, her tiny house meant the difference between life and death. After her husband of 26 years died, her life took a devastating turn. Consumed by grief, she lost her housing and spent eight months living at his grave.

“That was the only place that I felt was home for me,” Holmes said. “Whether I lived or died, it didn’t matter to me.”

In January, she moved into her tiny home with only the clothes on her back, an iPad and a phone. Now the space is filled with plants, pictures, and her belongings. Holmes says the home has given her “hope, freedom, peace.”

“It’s like freedom to just exhale,” Holmes said. “Your nervous system is now able to rest.”

She also credits the organization’s case management with helping her rebuild important basics of her life, including replacing her birth certificate, driver’s license, and Social Security card.

“My case manager has helped me regain my identity.”

Her story, Lunetta said, challenges the assumptions many people have about who experiences homelessness and how quickly life can unravel.

“The homeless population are still human,” Holmes said. “Any time your life can change.”

A Tiny Home for Good now houses 47 people, and Lunetta plans to keep growing, with 23 construction projects in the works that will house more people.

“I still don’t love being called a landlord, but it is true that’s what we are,” Lunetta said. “I think that what this population needs is landlords who care – and it’s absolutely what we do.”

Want to get involved? Check out A Tiny Home for Good’s website and see how to help.

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How Can We Reduce Homelessness? These Success Stories Point the Way

(Paywall - email dsimonson@mac.com for full text)

Programs aimed at families and veterans offer a road map to address the problem in the coming decades

June 11, 2026 at 2:23 pm

Homelessness has been a vexing problem throughout American history, an issue riven by disagreements among policymakers and legislators over how best to help people in need of shelter.

Today, a collection of national assistance programs is making progress in aiding two such groups in particular: families and veterans who are homeless. These gains offer a road map to address the larger problem in the coming decades.

The most-recent survey available, from January 2025, puts the homeless population in the U.S. at about 746,000, including about 134,000 children, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Of late, federal agencies, primarily HUD and the Department of Veterans Affairs, have spent about $6 billion annually on direct homeless assistance; individual states spend billions more.

And therein lies the challenge to reducing homelessness significantly: how and where to spend these dollars. Two different answers have evolved—and clashed—since the late 19th century.

The first approach argues for “indoor relief,” placing individuals primarily in institutions like poorhouses, or today’s public shelters. The immediate advantages are evident: getting people out of the elements and supplying basic needs—a bed, bathrooms and meals. But problems are evident, as well. Costs are steep (a single bed, studies show, averages $30,000 annually), capacity is often quite limited, and living conditions, at their worst, can be miserable. What’s more, most shelters aren’t designed, critics say, to end the poverty they purport to treat.

A shelter in Phoenix. Eduardo Barraza/Zuma Press

The second approach involves so-called outdoor relief—providing cash for the homeless and trusting that the extra dollars (when coupled with income from work) will help recipients find, and be able to pay for, housing on their own. But this answer, according to critics, rewards sloth and creates a class of welfaredependents. To head off that outcome, these same critics invariably call for ever-stricter restrictions on eligibility and cuts in the cash provided.

The better way

What to do? Despite its shortcomings, the second approach—directing additional income into homeless households—has proved to be remarkably successful when it comes to helping families and veterans.

Thirty percent of the homeless population consists of families, most of whom are households headed by women with preschool-age children. Their stories, for the most part, are distressingly similar. They typically are unemployed or hold low-paying jobs, making it all but impossible to meet the cost of both rent and child care. They frequently come from crowded multifamily households where domestic conflict often leads to (informal) eviction. And they often find themselves fleeing domestic violence.

Enter Housing Choice Vouchers, a HUD program started in 1998 that merged two earlier assistance programs. The basics: If a family qualifies for aid, the government becomes a partner in paying rent. The family is required to contribute 30% of their monthly income toward the rent, and the government covers the balance. A key feature: Most vouchers are portable. If a family relocates, say, for a better job, they can carry their assistance with them within a given region.

The challenge is that only 25% of households eligible for these vouchers get them, as Congress has been reluctant to fund expansions of “permanent” rental assistance for nonveterans.

Since 2010, congressional support has again shifted to time-limited subsidies to address homelessness. Sometimes called “rapid rehousing,” these programs provide relocation grants, debt relief and temporary rental assistance, and contributed to a 33% drop in homelessness by 2022. Assistance that helps families get through a child’s preschool years can be particularly invaluable. Homelessness rates drop precipitously once the youngest child is public-school age, when child-care costs ease and parents have more mental and physical capacity for work.

While even temporary rental assistance helps, only 18% of homeless families receive it. In a recent study, I estimated that a 5.9% annual increase in homelessness assistance for each of the next five years could enable all homeless families who currently go without rental assistance to exit homelessness with at least a temporary subsidy. A refundable child tax credit, which proved to cut child poverty rates in half during the pandemic, would be an even stronger approach to stabilizing the lowest income families. This would enable many to pay rent when faced with a crisis that threatens a loss of housing, thereby avoiding homelessness altogether.

Veterans’ success

An equally compelling success story involves veterans. Since 2010, Congress, in a bipartisan effort, has funded about 100,000 permanent Housing Choice Vouchers to pay for the rent of veterans who are experiencing “chronic homelessness,” meaning they have been homeless more than a year and have a disability. Homeless veterans facing more-acute circumstances, such as a recent job loss, a relationship disruption or a health crisis, are eligible for homelessness prevention and rehousing subsidies, along with referrals to VA services. About 140,000 people in veteran households benefit from this program each year, which provides emergency cash assistance, move-in expenses and temporary rental assistance for up to two years.

The Veterans Village of Absecon, N.J., a renovated motel, for veterans in need of a place to live. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

These two programs combined have driven a 55% reduction in veteran homelessness since 2010. In that same recent study, I found that an increase of 8.1% in assistance annually for five years would close the gap between demand and supply for homeless veterans.

As encouraging as the gains have been for families and veterans, much works remains to be done when considering other segments of the homeless populations. Among them:

Nonveterans. Single adults who aren’t veterans account for most homeless households, at 78%. But assistance for these individuals is in short supply. Among nonveteran adults who are chronically homeless and disabled, only 9.4% will receive a voucher in a given year, as compared with 48% of veterans. Only 13% of nonveterans facing an acute crisis will get emergency cash or rapid rehousing assistance, as compared with 65% of veterans.

Most single adults who become homeless each year are homeless under acute circumstances, meaning they are potentially reversible with timely assistance. For instance, 45% of newly homeless single adults are actually employed, but don’t have sufficient income or savings to get into an apartment. Ideally a rapid rehousing program that helped with move-in deposits and expenses, and temporary subsidies like those for veterans, would have a major impact.

Substance abuse. For unhoused individuals who are in recovery from alcohol or drug dependence, recovery-oriented housing provides a pathway out of homelessness. Such programs, though, are in short supply. More investment in these options, including Medicaid-funded rehousing subsidies for people leaving treatment facilities, would greatly increase access to these units, as well as recovery rates.

A homeless person’s tent on a bridge overlooking the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles in 2023. Jae C. Hong/AP

Mental disabilities. Ask the average person what homelessness looks like in America, and the answer invariably involves urban encampments—people with severe mental disabilities or serious addictions living in tents and squalor. Part of that picture is true. But people often confuse the homelessness crisis and the behavioral health system crisis because these two crises converge—a dearth of affordable housing, and a lack of residential and inpatient treatment options. Our best experience suggests that we need to treat these conditions as distinct crises and separate how interventions are funded and administered.

One lesson of the pandemic was that hotels and motels mobilized to house the unsheltered were successful in bringing people indoors who were otherwise reluctant to stay in congregate shelters or withstand involuntary hospitalizations. Private rooms and bathrooms along with on-site services created a new model that enabled many people to engage in treatment, safely, voluntarily and consistently. Pandemic-era rental assistance provided many with a pathway into permanent housing, including some hotels and motels that converted to housing.

The blame for homelessness, its growth and persistence, can be pointed in many directions. Culpable forces abound. But our successes in reducing veteran and family homelessness, and our improved knowledge about what works and for whom, should be getting us much closer to making substantial improvements, and hopefully sooner than later.

Dennis Culhane is a professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

ReasonsToBeCheerful

(Submitted by Woody Garvin, thanks!)

French Companies Are Inviting Homeless People to Sleep in Their Offices​

Most workplaces sit empty every night. Across France, companies are opening theirs up to people experiencing homelessness.

Michaela Haas

June 15, 2026

For several years, when Pierre-Yves Loaëc left his office in Nantes in the evenings, he passed a woman sleeping rough in the parking lot near Nobilito, the marketing agency he runs. The contrast nagged at him. Outside, she huddled near a parking garage vent for warmth during the winter. “My office had heat, a kitchen, sofas, a shower, toilets, but was sitting empty all night,” he recalls. Yet he never spoke to her, unsure how he could help.

Instead, Loaëc became interested in a broader question: Why were so many offices sitting empty every night while thousands of people lacked a safe place to sleep? The answer became Bureaux du Coeur (“Offices of the Heart”), a nonprofit that turns unused office space into temporary overnight accommodation for people experiencing homelessness.

Today, the initiative works with 400 companies in 40 cities across France, and beyond, in Lisbon, Barcelona and Brussels. Since its founding in 2019, Bureaux du Coeur has helped more than 1,000 people and provided roughly 160,000 nights of shelter. Its ambition is even larger: to expand across Europe as cities grapple with two parallel crises — a persistent rise in homelessness and a glut of underused office space following the shift to remote and hybrid work.

Bureaux de Coeur’s solution remains remarkably simple: When employees go home, offices become homes.

Loaëc did not arrive at the concept alone. He is president of the Nantes chapter of the Centre des Jeunes Dirigeants (CJD), a longstanding French business leaders’ movement founded on the principle that economic activity should serve society. “I always imagined the solution collectively,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t do it alone.”

When he first presented the idea to around 15 fellow business leaders, “many people thought I had lost my mind,” Loaëc says with a laugh. Some immediately listed potential problems — security concerns, insurance issues, liability risks, property damage. Others focused on the practical question that would ultimately define the initiative: How could it actually work?

The group developed a model that companies could realistically adopt. To qualify for Bureaux du Coeur, candidates must meet strict criteria: They must be adults, without children or pets, reside legally in France, use neither alcohol nor drugs, and not suffer from severe physical or mental health issues. Also, every candidate must participate in accompanying measures to help them reintegrate into a job or vocational training.

Naturally, these criteria exclude a large number of those in need. “We can’t accommodate everybody,” Loaëc acknowledges, noting that roughly 350,000 people are homeless in France. That limitation disappointed him at first, but he says participating companies are not equipped to provide medical treatment, addiction support or intensive social care. Their role is to offer space while partner organizations select participants and provide professional support.

Each company takes only one guest at a time. The “guests,” as Loaëc insists on calling them, sleep in meeting rooms, break areas, or spaces that are temporarily converted into bedrooms each evening.

The first host was Loaëc himself. In 2019, he welcomed Elisabeth, a woman fleeing domestic violence who had been sleeping in her car despite holding a job. She stayed in his office for three weeks while securing longer-term housing.

A second guest, known as Booba, stayed during the Covid-19 pandemic, practically alone in the building throughout the country’s first lockdown. At the time, emergency shelters were among the most significant clusters of coronavirus transmission in Nantes. “Knowing he was safe in the agency and away from that risk was important,” Loaëc says.

The breakthrough came in May 2020, when France’s largest regional newspaper, Ouest-France, published a story about the initiative. Companies and social-service organizations from across the country began calling. “The response was completely crazy,” Loaëc remembers.

What had started as a local experiment became a national movement. The initiative now employs 12 staff members and coordinates approximately 270 volunteers nationwide. Funding comes from foundations and private donations.

Participants consistently describe the experience as life-changing. Samy, a Sudanese trainee electrician, struggled to find stable accommodation while pursuing vocational training. “I feel a little bit at home here,” he said during his stay. “I feel a little freer.”

The comments reveal a reality that social workers know well: Homelessness is not only a lack of shelter. “People spend their days wondering where they will sleep, whether they will be safe, where they can shower, charge a phone, store their belongings or simply rest,” Loaëc says. “You can’t keep a job if you don’t have a roof over your head. The mental burden becomes enormous.”

The apparent simplicity of Bureaux du Coeur masks a carefully structured system. Every placement involves three parties: the host company, the guest and a partner social-service organization, which selects the participants.

All parties sign a formal agreement. Guests commit to searching for long-term housing and employment opportunities. Social service partners provide guidance and monitoring. Companies provide accommodation. Once a month, everyone involved meets to review progress.

One of the initiative’s less obvious effects is its ability to challenge assumptions. Loaëc admits he used to carry many common stereotypes. “A homeless person is not necessarily someone who begs, doesn’t wash and drinks a lot of alcohol,” he realized. What surprised him most was the number of working people struggling with housing insecurity. Others are apprentices, students, refugees or people recovering from sudden crises such as domestic violence. Their biggest obstacle is often not unemployment but the lack of a stable place from which to rebuild.

One former guest, Souleymane Diarra, emphasized the emotional significance of being welcomed into a workplace. “Here, people don’t judge me for the hardships I’ve been through,” he said. “People here lift me up. It encourages me to move forward.”

That sense of belonging extends beyond the guests themselves. They are not expected to pack up before the employees arrive every morning. On the contrary, Loaëc hopes they will share a coffee and a conversation.

Alain, a formerly homeless man hosted by Bureaux du Cœur at the company Haxoneo in northern France, describes how depression led to the collapse of his life. He lost his job, home, car, partner and child. During the time he was homeless, he says he was largely ignored or treated with hostility: “For two years, people either shouted at me, ‘Get out of here,’ or a police officer would shine a flashlight into my eyes and say, ‘Do you think that guy is dead?’”

The employees at Haxoneo and Bureaux du Coeur were the first people who actually had conversations with him. What transformed his situation was not only a safe place to sleep but ordinary human interaction, being spoken to as a person and regaining confidence. During his stay he found employment and began preparing for independent housing.

“Having a coffee with him sounds trivial, but for him — who had coffee with him over the last two years?” a Haxoneo employee reflects. “What’s great is that beyond making our offices available, it created this social bond.”

For companies, Loaëc believes Bureaux du Coeur strengthens social cohesion at a time when remote work and flexible schedules have weakened many workplace relationships. “What we promise companies is an experience of community,” he says. Hosting a guest, he argues, often does “much more than bungee jumping and other [traditional corporate] team-building events” to unite employees.

According to an impact study commissioned by the organization, between 85 and 90 percent of participants leave the program with both housing and employment after an average stay of four and a half months.

Loaëc is careful not to claim credit for achievements that belong to partner organizations. Yet housing stability appears to be the missing piece that allows other interventions to succeed. “It’s a transition solution,” Loaëc says. “Our role is simply to put a roof over someone’s head so the rest becomes possible.”

The model is also comparatively inexpensive. According to figures provided by the organization, a place in a traditional emergency shelter costs public authorities roughly €10,000 per year. A place through Bureaux du Coeur costs less than €2,000 because the infrastructure already exists and much of the support network relies on volunteers.

Things can go wrong. One guest became isolated and stopped receiving adequate support, eventually leaving the accommodation in poor condition. Another drove away with a company vehicle. Yet such incidents remain rare. Among more than 1,000 guests, Loaëc estimates only four or five placements have resulted in serious problems. The common factor in those cases, he says, is that host companies ignored established guidelines.

Insurance companies have adapted to support the model. Firms such as AXA have modified commercial policies to allow businesses to host people overnight in office buildings, removing what was initially a significant obstacle.

The guests usually stay for a maximum of three to six months, but Loaëc’s company just accommodated a guest for 18 months, until the young man could enroll in a job training. “I’m the boss, I can break the rules,” Loaëc says with a laugh.

Despite its rapid growth, Loaëc insists there is nothing revolutionary about the concept. He sees it as reviving an older tradition of hospitality that modern society has forgotten. For centuries, farms, workshops and family businesses routinely provided temporary shelter to workers, travelers and people in need.

Modern offices simply became detached from that tradition.

The woman who first inspired the project still sleeps outside. Loaëc still sees her sometimes.

But the question she forced him to confront has now produced a network that has sheltered more than a thousand people and provided hundreds of thousands of nights of safety.

Every evening, across France, office lights switch off and employees head home. And in hundreds of buildings, someone else arrives carrying a key.

The Center Square

King County Regional Homeless Authority restructure gets mostly positive reviews

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to significantly restructure the troubled King County Regional Homeless Authority drew praise from some of the agency’s most ardent critics, but not everyone was pleased.

Seattle Councilmember Maritza Rivera and King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski — both of whom have pushed for the agency’s dissolution — called Wednesday’s decision a “step in the right direction.”

The retuning of the agency comes after a critical outside forensic audit in April found that the regional agency had lost track of how it spent $8 million of its more than $200 million budget.

It also found more than $6 million in administrative overspending and more than $1 million in interest payments the agency was making.

The authority reshuffling will return the administration of homeless services to both the city and the county. It comes as King County’s homeless population continues to rise while other urban centers across the U.S. are seeing declines in the unhoused.

King County saw an overall 9% increase in the unhoused population in 2026, compared with two years earlier, according to the homeless authority’s own count.

Rivera and Dembowski said that returning the administration of homeless services to the city and county is a good aspect of the plan put out by Zahilay and Wilson.

“We stand ready to support their efforts and will work to ensure no interruption in services for our unhoused neighbors in need,” they said in their joint statement.

Business leaders also expressed support for the plan.

“Homelessness is a regional crisis that requires urgency and a coordinated regional response, and the growing challenges in downtown Seattle and across King County make it clear that a reset is needed,” said Downtown Seattle Association CEO Jon Scholes in a statement released by the county.

“We support an approach that is focused on delivering better outcomes for our unsheltered neighbors while strengthening accountability, transparency, and coordination among our public partners. Most importantly, this effort must restore public confidence that our local governments can work together to produce meaningful, measurable results.”

But Seattle City Councilman Bob Kettle has doubts.

Kettle, chairman of the council’s Public Safety Committee, called the new plan “a disappointment” in a statement.

“The plan to shave away the agency’s responsibilities is coming ahead of schedule, and without consulting members of the council,” he said, “which risks imploding the homelessness authority without a strong plan for its replacement.”

Zahilay and Wilson, at a Wednesday press conference, stressed that the county and city would still be taking a regional approach to addressing homelessness and coordinating their efforts.

The reshuffle leaves $67 million in federal funding that will still be administered by the Authority. The city of Seattle will retain control of about $118 million, and King County will retain around $40 million.

Wilson said at the press conference that the changes are about taking “political responsibility” for the region’s response to homelessness.

“The steps we’re taking today will let the agency focus on rebuilding public trust, making a strong application for federal funding and helping our city and region deliver better outcomes for people experiencing homelessness,” Wilson said.

Four legislators, who are members of the homeless authority’s board, applauded Wednesday’s decision, but said they would be watching carefully.

Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Seattle City Councilmember Dionne Foster, King County Councilmember Steffanie Fain, and King County Councilmember Jorge L. Barón, said they are committed to ensuring that any transition of City and County contracts is well-coordinated and contiguous.

“Throughout this transition, the priority should be to minimize disruption for service providers, whose work is essential for the individuals and families who depend on the homelessness response system,” they said in a joint statement.

The authority transformation will begin in January 2027.

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The Latest on our Housing and Homelessness Efforts

From shelter operations to affordable housing development, the City of Spokane’s Housing and Human Services Department is consistently working to weave together a variety of funding sources and navigate challenging authorizing environments to ensure resources are used to their best ability.

Earlier this month, the department gave an update to the City Council on a variety of initiatives they have been working on.

Continuum of Care Notice of Funding Opportunity

As the regional Continuum of Care administrator, the City of Spokane creates and facilitates local Notice of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) based on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) notice and requirements. This competitive application process distributes housing and homelessness funding based on eligibility requirements, priorities, and scoring criteria set by HUD.

The City has always been in compliance with HUD’s guidelines and will continue to do so, but based on their new priorities, the City of Spokane is anticipating an initial impact of:

• Approximately 50% reduction in funding for permanent housing

• Consolidation of coordinated entry systems

• A reduction in youth and young adult-focused projects

• A potential $3 million loss locally

These funding and policy changes would impact contracts that begin in August 2027. However, a coalition of nonprofits and municipalities has challenged HUD’s decisions, arguing that they violate federal statute. The City is keeping a close eye on the constantly changing authorizing environment and work is already underway to navigate how we will continue to fund needed housing, treatment, and other human services in our community.

2026 Point-in-Time Count

The federally required Point-in-Time (PIT) Count is an annual snapshot estimate of the local unhoused population. For the third year in a row, Spokane County saw a decrease in the number of people experiencing homelessness. This year, 1,738 people were surveyed across Spokane County, Spokane, Spokane Valley, and Airway Heights. This is a decrease from the 1,806 people counted in 2025.

The number of people experiencing sheltered homelessness decreased from 1,189 in 2025 to 1,095 in 2026. During the night of the count, 643 unsheltered individuals were counted, with 183 beds within the shelter system unoccupied that night.

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Stabbed. Frostbitten. Overdosed. Sheltered. Sober. Saved.

In 2023, I interviewed three unhoused men at the Spokane library. Over the next three years, all of them escaped homelessness

By Daniel Walters

It’s March 2023. A homeless Spokane man named Seamus “Shame Dog” Galligan overdoses on fentanyl on a street in southern California. After getting out of jail for stealing from a local deli, he boarded a Greyhound bus, heading back to San Diego to be with his father. But after missing his connection in Anaheim, he finds a hit of fentanyl. A month of detoxing in jail has weakened his tolerance. So he makes the miscalculation that killed so many of his friends. He inhales a bit too much, holds his breath a tad too long. His dad waits for him to call to come pick him up. First hours, then days.

It’s April 2023. A homeless Spokane man named Jeremy Root is stabbed multiple times. His attackers are just kids. Nobody’s over eighteen, but all of them have knives. He’s far from the first homeless victim of violent juveniles. It’s one more hazard of living on the streets of Spokane, one more way to die. The knives come for him on the Monroe Street Bridge, where there’s little room to run. Maybe he’s stabbed five times, maybe as many as 17. The sun has set — he doesn’t want to just pass out right there, where no one would find him. So he staggers back across the bridge toward the downtown library, toward where other homeless people are gathered, the trail of his blood dripping behind him.

It’s January 2024. A homeless Spokane man named Joseph Sampson has almost everything he owns stolen. His backpack, gone. His sleeping bag, gone. It was just another indignity he’d experienced in his dozen years on the Spokane streets. He’d been arrested, harassed and booted from public buildings. He’d felt the bitter cold bite through his gloves until he couldn’t feel his hands anymore. He’d made close friends, then grieved their deaths.

And yet: This is a story about hope.

For all the forces conspiring to trap these men in chronic homelessness — drug addiction, poverty, mental illness, criminal history, bad luck — there were equally powerful forces working to rescue them. There was love: a father’s love for his son; a father’s love for his daughter; friends’ love for each other. There was a network of social services agencies, non-profits, and even police officers, crafting paths out of homelessness. And there was individual willpower, the guts and tenacity to break out.

This is a story of three daring escapes.

It’s May 2026. Jeremy Root, Seamus Galligan and Joseph Sampson are alive. And none of them are homeless.

THE WAY OF THE SHAMEDAWG

Three years ago in February — one month before Galligan would overdose, two months before Root would get stabbed, 11 months before Sampson would have his possessions stolen — I sat down with all three of them together at the downtown Spokane library.

My story’s premise: The Central Library of Spokane had become a microcosm of all that was beautiful and all that was broken about downtown.

Homelessness was particularly relevant — as a candidate, then-mayor Nadine Woodward had flirted with banning homeless people from the library entirely. Instead, the library became a sanctuary for the unhoused, a hub for connecting needy people with social services. But that created all sorts of new tensions and conflicts.

The three people I interviewed weren’t selected by a social services agency or activists or PR folks. They weren’t cherry-picked. They just happened to all be sitting on the first floor when I walked by.

Sampson, member of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe, homeless for a decade, came across as contemplative. He’s an older man who’d become a kind of local leader among the unhoused in downtown Spokane. He’d been an activist, pushing back against efforts to criminalize homelessness.

Seamus “Shamedawg” Galligan, with shaggy facial hair and bundled up in winter clothes, had been homeless for three years. He talked like the kind of stoner philosopher who populates many a dorm lounge, cynical and burnt out, but with a penchant for diving into intellectual theory. Tall, lanky Jeremy Root, had been homeless 15 years — nearly half his life — and was eager to flash his intelligence too. When Galligan referenced a seven-story high shanty town in Hong Kong, Root, as if he were buzzing in on Jeopardy, spat out the location: “Kowloon Walled City.”

The three debated drug policy, reviewed the quality of the library snack bucket and mourned friends who had been stabbed or had overdosed. Normally, of course, these sorts of stories aren’t multipart sagas. You type up the quotes, you publish the story, you say hi if you run into the sources on the street.

But shortly after I published the story, Galligan’s dad, a tech executive from San Diego, sent me an email. He had been looking for his son for weeks. That sparked this story in the Inlander, all about Galligan’s father walking the streets of Spokane searching for his son.

It nearly had a darker ending. After overdosing on the way to San Diego, Seamus woke up in a hospital in Anaheim.

But by the last page of the chapter, Galligan had reunited with his father and was looking to the future. He’d had an epiphany: that if he didn’t change his life to escape homelessness and addiction, he’d never move on from it.

Two years passed, and I didn’t look up how Galligan was doing. Too many victories in stories like these are temporary. Roughly nine out of every 10 opioid addicts relapse. The key to the happy ending in stories like his often is when you decide to stop reading.

Instead, Galligan sent me an email.

“I’ll be two years clean in April,” he wrote in an email last year. “I have a baby daughter now with a wonderful woman.”

The difference between his life in San Diego and what his life had been in Spokane felt staggering to think about.

“I’m somebody’s father now,” he wrote in a text. “I have a beautiful family and a beautiful home. A short two years ago I was a raving crackhead. Lost to the world, wandering the streets, sheltering in dumpsters. Whoda thunk.”

When he was a teenager, Galligan’s dad had been homeless himself. Galligan’s birth was the kick-in-the-ass he needed to get serious about changing his life around.

Galligan’s life followed the same arc. The birth of his daughter was the moment his outlook truly changed.

“It was holding my daughter for the first time,” Galligan said. “It was knowing that I have a legacy in this world: Leaving a better world for my daughter.”

At first, he simply replaced his opioid addiction with alcohol. But then he set a goal that he could pour himself into: Bench pressing 300 pounds. He enrolled in body-builder competitions too.

It made ditching alcohol easy: he didn’t have the time, he couldn’t spare the calories.

He said he’s become a mobile personal trainer for a local community gym in the San Diego area working with people with autism and other neurological challenges.

“I have neurons that need to be mobilized, that need to be stimulated, that need to be doing something,” Galligan said.

There’s so much to love about his life now. He remembers what it felt walking on the streets of San Diego suburbs, reveling in the kind of high that can only come from sobriety.

“I felt so lucid,” Galligan said. “It was still cloudy out, and I realized I could smell the wet asphalt. and the rain, and when it’s raining in La Mesa, it has this particular smell.”

Maybe it’s the way the drizzles blend with the scent of the pink Bougainvillea plants.

“If I was just wasted all the time, I would be missing out on all this shit,” Galligan said.

SAMPSON’S STRENGTH

Joseph Sampson’s path to escaping life on the streets began after the death of Rick Cearns, a homeless man from Oregon.

Cearns was a person, Sampson recalled, who would look out for others. He’d de-escalate fights. When one of their friends was cold sleeping outside the library, Sampson recalled, Cearns was the one who found every blanket he could find and covered him with it in the middle of the night.

The guy didn’t even want to be in Spokane, Sampson said, but he was stuck here on probation.

Three weeks before his death, Cearns posted a photo of the wintery Spokane River right outside the library balcony.

“Rick Cearns is feeling happy at Spokane Public Library,” his Facebook status read. “Got to love the snow.”

Later that month, Cearns asked Sampson — another homeless man killing time at the library — to watch his backpack and sleeping bag at the Library while he looked for a place to take a nap. Sampson was happy to help.

Sampson waited, but Cearns never came back for his stuff.

There was no news coverage, no obituary in the paper, no press release from the police department. The medical examiner’s report said Cearns had been killed from blunt-force trauma to the head, but didn’t conclude whether it was an accident, suicide or homicide. The police case is unsolved.

In the days following Cearns’ death, Sampson overheard people talking about the tragedy at New Leaf Coffee, the coffee shop on the first floor of the library.

An employee of New Leaf asked to see a picture of Cearns, and Sampson showed her the picture on Cearns’ Facebook page: a thirty-something man with a scraggly red goatee and a nest of curly hair. The barista ended up accompanying Sampson to the annual homeless memorial.

New Leaf is more than a coffee shop: It’s a part of Transitions, an organization that provides job training and career services for homeless people. And when Sampson floated ideas that others might have scoffed at — like going to college and training to become a paralegal — the people at New Leaf were eager to figure out how to get him there.

“The one lady there, she really pushed me to get housing and get off the streets,” Sampson said. “I told her how long I was on the streets, and she’s like, ‘that’s too long.’”

The same month I interviewed him, New Leaf hired Sampson to help serve coffee, taking him on for a six-month job training program. Meanwhile, the team helped their new coworker get everything he needed to get a housing voucher and search for a place to live.

It took more than a year, but by April, 2024, he had a place. Today, he’s living in the Sinto Commons, a four-story affordable housing complex in Spokane that opened near North Central High School.

“There’s a certain percentage of the apartments here in this building that are dedicated to people just getting out of being homeless, like myself,” Sampson said.

His small apartment unit is messy, even chaotic, a flurry of dishes and piles of clothes — he is a single guy, after all.

It is, to say the least, a lot nicer than his last place. And it’s his, his own sanctuary, a place to make his own.

He’s lined the walls near the ceiling with a row of vinyl records. His bike — a Genesis Mountain Bike — leans up against a dresser covered in colorful drawings a friend of his made. Just owning a bicycle is a kind of victory, proof of the kind of security he has now. A bicycle wasn’t something he wanted to own when he was homeless.

“I wanted a bike so bad, but I know how quickly people’s bikes get stolen out there,” Sampson said.

Sinto is permanent supportive housing, the kind that sparks intense opposition in Spokane’s wealthier neighborhoods. But unlike regular housing, he gets a case manager to help him improve his life. It happened to be Oakley Gunderson, his old supervisor at New Leaf. Every 30 days, they review his life and chart out new goals.

One of those goals: Becoming a paralegal. He’s fascinated by the law. He had a reputation on the street of knowing a lot about the legal system, and he wants to have a chance to use that knowledge for good.

Like Galligan, Sampson has a daughter. Because he’s doing better in his life, he gets a chance to see her more often. Sometimes she’ll hang out in his apartment. Other times he’ll hop on his bike and ride downtown and meet up with her.

“It’s hard to imagine she’s 20 years old already,” Sampson said. “It went by really fucking fast.”

So much of his life had been about trying to escape the cold. One winter, he used the little bit of money sent from his tribe to rent a motel room for a week to escape the sub-zero temperatures.

“Maybe I’ll just freeze to death,” Sampson had written on Facebook during one low point in 2022. “That’s what I want anyways.”

It’s warm here, today. It’s safe and it’s quiet. Sometimes too quiet.

“A year in my apartment, and I’m not adjusted to being inside,” he wrote on Facebook.

The indoors had this eerie kind of quiet that made it hard to sleep.

“I was so used to hearing the sounds of the world when I was homeless,” Sampson said

He’d spent a decade listening to the hum of the city as he fell asleep. So at night, he cracks open a window a little bit, just enough to hear the pulse of the cars driving by below.

ROOT CAUSES

Jeremy Root survived the stabbing. For now, he can’t even see the evidence of the wounds, he said.

“I’m sure, down the road as I get older, those scars will reappear,” Root said.

Root is sitting on the porch in front of a sober living house on the lower South Hill, occasionally taking hits from a sour green apple vape pen. I hadn’t been able to reach him for weeks – he was in rehab, it turned out.

“I got sober,” Root said. “I’ve been doing drugs for two decades… Figured it was time to get my shit together, so to speak.”

This housing comes with rules: He has a curfew. He has to attend intensive outpatient behavioral health classes. He has to take drug tests.

Root had assistance from a number of social service agencies — and pressure form the Spokane Police Department — but he’s absolutely clear that getting clean was ultimately his decision.

“The hoops I’m jumping through now, I’m choosing to jump through,” Root said. “I could very easily, you know, give these people the middle finger and go back out onto the street, and go right to my old fucking bullshit.”

For a long time, Root had rejected these sorts of rules. He smoked meth — and used to make a lot of money selling it. Even today, he said, he’d rather go to jail than stay in a shelter.

“It’s the same experience, you know,” Root said. “Forty-two dudes burping and farting in the same fucking room all night.”

Root had been in a “swordfight of sorts” with mental illness all his life. He was in anger management by the time he was 4-years-old, eventually getting diagnosed with type 2 rapid cycling bipolar disorder. (“Weee!” he added.)

Living without housing has a way of exacerbating mental illness.

“On a long enough timeline, the world around will give you a level of PTSD,” Root said.

There can be a rhythm to homelessness that can be tough to escape: the day-to-day’s you’re living in bleeds into week-to-week’s and then year-to-year’s. The rest of the world blurs by in the distance.

“You blink and it’s like 10 years later,” Root said.

All those years curdled into distrust toward society. Try having a dog like Taz — a Tasmanian-striped pitbull — and see him get dragged away to the animal shelter when you get arrested, and then not being able to get him back when you get out because you’re unsheltered.

“You have something you actually give a shit about and it’s stripped from you,” Root said. “People can get very bitter very quickly.”

He’d been stabbed. He’d had frostbite. A brutally cold winter night had eaten at the fingertips and his toes like acid. For months afterward, he felt lightning bolts shoot up his body, his nerves misfiring. He’d been hit by cars – so many, he adopted a rule: go over not under.

But none of that caused him to get clean. The final straw was actually a shift in Spokane’s policing strategy.

“I just constantly was going to jail over this shit — camping charges and, like, trespassing I have from, like, places that I used to be able to just frequent,” Root said. “I got kind of tired of getting caught in the crossfire and all that.”

But this was no accident. This was part of a larger strategy.

When I mention Root’s name, downtown Spokane Police Captain Kurt Reese recognizes it.

“Jeremy’s doing great,” Reese said.

Root was one of what the Spokane Police Department called the “Downtown 10” — the top ten people who cops, firefighters, paramedics and social service agencies were responding to more than any other.

Reese had seen similar programs at hospitals and at the Portland Police Bureau that focused on giving extra help to the people who kept getting arrested or kept ending up in the emergency room. He wanted to do something similar for downtown Spokane.

Last fall, the police department, mental health care organizations, prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges all teamed up to focus on the “Downtown 10” — the people who cops, firefighters, ER docs and mental health workers had been responding to more than any others.

“We didn’t just pick the low-hanging fruit,” Reese said. “We picked some very tough, challenging people.”

The cops arrested those with active warrants and connected them with service providers the moment they landed in jail. A coordinator began to track every single step of their cases.

“We have weekly meetings where we discuss the welfare of each person and how we can try different tactics to try to get them into services or into some kind of supportive housing,” Reese said.

The threat — and reality — of jail was a key part of the strategy. The police department worked with the jail and the prosecutor’s office to hold members of the Downtown 10 until they could and see a judge and be connected with services.

For years, jail restrictions meant there had been few immediate consequences for low-level crimes downtown. One person had been arrested 17 times without having seen a judge, Reese said, while another taunted the police that he’d be out within an hour.

But the Downtown 10 program was part of a strategy to change that.

“After being in jail for a few days, he started wanting to come to the table to talk about how to get into services,” Reese said.

These kinds of “high utilizer” programs were championed in the report recently released by the “Safe and Healthy Task Force,” a coalition of local leaders aiming to figure out the most effective way to spend criminal justice money.

It’s a program that risks drawing fire from both sides of the homeless debate: It suggests using law enforcement and the threat of arrests as a tool to push people to seek help. And it requires a tremendous investment in rehabilitation programs and other support services.

But Mayor Lisa Brown told RANGE that the walls dividing between the two camps on the homelessness issue have began to come down.

“I think we’re at a more nuanced place now,” Brown said. She said more people understand that simply sending people to jail doesn’t solve problems, but also that sometimes “the fact that they’re in the jail is then the time and place where they get connected to the resources”.

Deciding to change rarely happens in an instant. One social service agency, Root said, had been trying to work with him for more than a year before he agreed to take their help.

Some people seem like they’ll never be ready to take that help, Reese said. But then, “all of a sudden they’re ready, and when they’re ready, we have to have that warm handoff to get them into services.”

At the sober house, a grizzled old man with an anarchy tattoo on his neck smoked a cigarette on the porch as I talked to Root.

“To actually go from being on the streets to having a place, even if it’s just a shared living space ... the rules are totally different,” the man said.

Root heartily agreed.

“I just got out of treatment like — shit — less than a week ago, I’m still just getting used to doing the whole fucking ‘not homeless’ thing,” Root said. “We have to learn to no longer be feral. Learning to interact with society on a normal level.”

Root knows how precarious the recovery process can be. He’s seen plenty of relapses in his time. But this isn’t a moment for those kinds of dark thoughts.

The sun is shining so bright today Root has to squint.

“This program I’ve been going through, it’s given me a sense of optimism that I haven’t had in a long time,” Root said. “Like maybe this time things might work out in my favor.”

THOSE LEFT BEHIND

Just recently, Sampson lost two friends to overdoses and another to murder.

When you exit homelessness, it means leaving friends behind. When you have housing and so many of your friends are still on the street, the temptation — the overwhelming sense of human decency — is to give them a spot to crash in your new life.

But that’s typically a lease violation.

“That’s what makes people lose their housing, pretty quick,” Sampson said. “A lot of people I’ve known that have gotten housing, they get their apartment or house and within a year, they’re back on the streets again.”

Sometimes Galligan sits in his car and cries about the people he left behind on the streets of Spokane.

“I think about them all the time, many times per hour every waking hour of my life,” Galligan said. He’s animated by revolutionary sentiment, outraged about the exploitation that pervades society, infuriated by an economic system that so easily discards people as worthless.

“There’s a family less than a mile from me who are homeless with a two-year-old child,” Galligan said. “This is a society that does not care what happens to human beings.”

And yet, there are those who care about the human beings that the system has discarded.

A Spokane police detective told RANGE he hasn’t given up on Rick Cearns, Sampson’s homeless friend who was killed nearly four years ago. There’s one more potential investigative lead he’s still hoping will pan out. He encouraged RANGE readers who know anything to contact Crime Check.

Just like the New Leaf coffee baristas didn’t give up on Sampson, and just like the social service workers didn’t give up on Root, Galligan’s dad didn’t give up on him.

“If I could be what I was in 2022 or 2023,” Galligan wrote in an email, “and a short time later be what I am now, then nobody, no matter how dejected, should be written off.”

That’s the lesson of Sampson’s story and Root’s story too.

At the sober house, Root raised his pink thermos full of coffee, as if he’s giving a toast.

“It’s the feel-good story of the century,” he said.

Galligan in a text message, offered a slightly different take.

“The good news story will be the end of capitalism,” Galligan wrote in a text message, “and I’m trying to write it every day.”

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Sent in by Shari Deberg <sadeberg@comcast.net>

Homelessness is down in California and across the country, says new federal report

The number of people with nowhere to call home decreased both in California and nationwide last year, according to a long-awaited federal report.

The data, showing the first decrease in homelessness in years, provided fuel for activists challenging the Trump administration’s narrative that current homelessness policies are failing and need to be overhauled.

There were 181,934 homeless Californians counted last year – a 2.8% decrease from 2024, according to the new federal report. Overall, the country saw a 3.3% drop in homelessness, marking the first decrease since 2016. Nationwide, an estimated 745,652 people are homeless.

Those numbers come from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which released its annual homelessness report to Congress on Friday after an unexplained five-month delay. As the country’s main barometer for how efforts to combat homelessness are working, the report plays an important role in allocating funding and shaping policies – and is a major political tool.

The Trump administration used the report to promote its policies, including its crackdown on immigration and efforts to direct funding away from permanent housing. Meanwhile, the National Homelessness Law Center was quick to point out that the decrease in homelessness happened while former President Joe Biden was still in office.

“Homelessness is down because President Biden funded things that we know work, like housing and support,” law center spokesperson Jesse Rabinowitz said in a news release. “Sadly, the Trump administration is doing everything they can to backtrack on this progress.”

The federal government downplayed the small one-year decrease in homelessness, instead focusing on the fact that homelessness has increased 27% nationwide since 2013. That’s when the country started following a practice called “housing first,” which moves people into housing right away instead of requiring them first to get sober or meet other conditions.

“The data is clear that the status quo of ‘housing first’ has failed to meaningfully reduce homelessness, resulting in crisis levels of people living on the streets,” said HUD Secretary Scott Turner. “HUD is restoring its programs to advance recovery and self-sufficiency and to ensure that taxpayer-funded benefits serve American families.”

The Trump administration wants to end housing first and instead prioritize housing that requires people to stay sober. The administration also has tried to divert homelessness funds away from permanent housing and into temporary shelters. California is one of 19 states suing the Trump administration over that change.

The federal administration tied the 2025 drop in homelessness to immigration, saying in a news release that it was “attributable to decreases in sanctuary cities.” The full report never mentions sanctuary cities, but it says some communities in New York and Illinois attributed their decreases in homelessness “in part” to changes in federal immigration policy.

Where homelessness declined

California was among the five states that reported the largest decreases in homelessness last year, though there were more significant drops in Illinois (44%), Hawaii (41%), Florida (11%), and New York (8%).

In California, 17 communities reported decreases in the number of people who were “chronically homeless,” meaning they have a disability and have been homeless for a year or longer. Los Angeles County reported 2,394 fewer such people. Officials from communities that saw those declines attributed the trend to opening new housing, placing people in housing more quickly, using a coordinated system to match people with available units and increasing street outreach, according to the report.

The data comes from the federally mandated homeless point-in-time count, which tallies people sleeping in shelters and outside on a given day in January. Volunteers count people they see sleeping on the street, in cars or in other places not meant for habitation. The effort is generally viewed as an undercount, as it’s easy for volunteers to miss people tucked away in hard-to-reach areas.

The federal government requires each community to count the people sleeping on its streets every two years. Counts are conducted by “continuums of care,” which include a county (or multiple counties), cities and local service providers. In California, 14 of the state’s 44 continuums of care did not count last year. HUD used 2024 data for communities in which no 2025 data was available.

Each community is required to submit its point-in-time count data to HUD, which reviews, verifies and analyzes the data before publishing a report. That report typically comes out in December of the year of the count.

How Trump changed point-in-time report

When the federal report finally came out Friday, the Trump administration put its stamp on it in several ways, including by scrubbing all references to gender. The prior report from 2024 broke out homelessness by gender (39% of people counted were women and 60% were men), and included categories such as transgender, gender questioning and non-binary. The 2025 data includes no such breakdown.

And while the previous report referred to “people experiencing homelessness,” the new report instead referred to “homeless persons.”

While the drop in nationwide homelessness last year is a “relief,” there is trouble on the horizon, according to Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

“So much of the progress reflected in the 2025 (point-in-time) count is due to targeted housing and service resources that were available in 2024 to rehouse people,” she said in a news release, “including the highly successful Emergency Housing Voucher program, and new funds to address rural and unsheltered homelessness. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has largely deprioritized these tools and worked to dismantle the very systems that drove these reductions.”

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Seattle mayor must make decision on homeless agency

The spotlight is on Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who must submit an initial review in just 13 days that will be a key determining factor on the future of the King County Regional Homeless Authority.

The Seattle City Council unanimously voted on a resolution Tuesday afternoon that requires Wilson to report by June 15 on the troubled authority’s corrective action plan.

Then, by Aug. 1, the mayor must decide on the long-term future and the city’s continuation in the KCRHA, including whether to dissolve the commission.

Wilson had said that all options were on the table after a highly critical forensic audit of the authority in April, which found that the group couldn’t account for millions of dollars due to poor financial oversight.

Seattle contributes 60% of the authority’s $200 million budget.

But the mayor has been silent on which way she will go since a May 22 corrective report by the regional authority, which maintains the group is fixing its financial reporting.

“The Mayor is prepared to respond to the deadlines set by City Council, including the initial deadline of June 15 to respond to the corrective action plan,” said Wilson spokeswoman Jonah Spangenthal-Lee in an email to The Center Square on Tuesday.

City Councilwoman Alexis Mercedes Rinik, the sponsor of the resolution setting a deadline for Wilson, said urgent action is needed to determine the future of the King County Regional Homeless Authority.

“The findings of the forensic evaluation are serious and require immediate accountability, and this proposed resolution is a swift but thoughtful measure that starts marching that pathway forward for the agency and addresses these findings,” she said.

Rinik is the chair of the city council’s Human Services, Labor & Economic Development Committee, which had previously passed the resolution last month.

She is also a member of the King County Regional Homeless Authority.

Regardless of Wilson’s decision on the future of the homeless authority, the city council would also have the direct power to disband it.

Councilwoman Maritza Rivera voted on Tuesday to move forward with setting a deadline for Wilson to decide, but she is also sponsoring her own resolution calling for the homeless authority to be disbanded.

“I feel really strongly that the time has come to commit to a different strategy and move away from a regional authority because we can’t keep throwing good money after bad,” she said.

If a decision were made to abolish the authority, it would take a year to disband it under the authority’s bylaws.

It would also mean that Seattle would have to run its own homeless programs, and that Wilson and her administration would be directly responsible for efforts to reduce the homeless problem and their outcomes.

The Metropolitan King County Council also has the power to abolish the authority, as does King County Executive Girmay Zahilay.

But Zahilay has been more measured than Wilson in his comments on the critical audit, making Wilson a key player in the authority’s ultimate fate.

The homeless authority was founded in 2019 and has been the subject of prior audits that have also found financial mismanagement. It has been through five CEOs in just seven years.

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California reports one of largest drops in homelessness in past year, Hud reports

New data suggests success in Gavin Newsom’s crackdown, as Illinois, Hawaii and Florida also report notable decreases

California reported one of the largest decreases in homelessness over the past year, according to a new report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud).

The Golden state recorded a total unhoused population of 181,934 in 2025 – an almost 3% decrease since the year prior, placing it among the five states with the largest decreases from 2024. However, more significant drops were recorded in Illinois (44%), Hawaii (41%), Florida (11%) and New York (8%).

The new data signals at least some success on the part of Gavin Newsom, the California governor who has intensified his crackdown on homelessness over the past year. In May 2025 he announced a new model ordinance for cities and counties to address “persistent” homeless encampments, as well as $3.3bn in voter-approved funding to increase housing and drug treatment programs.

California, along with New York, had the largest population of unsheltered people recorded in 2025. Homelessness has been a key issue in this year’sgubernatorial race, as well as in the Los Angeles mayoral race.

The data also showed that the national homeless population decreased for the first time since 2016, coming down 3% from 2024. The Trump administrationattempted to downplay the small one-year decrease, instead highlighting the fact that homelessness has increased 27% since 2013.

“The data is clear that the status quo of ‘housing first’ has failed to meaningfully reduce homelessness, resulting in crisis levels of people living on the streets,” Scott Turner, the Hud secretary, said in a press release.“HUD is restoring its programs to advance recovery and self-sufficiency and to ensure that taxpayer-funded benefits serve American families.”

As the administration attempted to downplay the drop in homelessness, it also sought to connect the success to its immigration policies, stating that the 2025 decrease was “attributable to decreases in Sanctuary Cities”.

The data comes from the federally mandated homeless point-in-time count, which tallies people sleeping in shelters and outside on a given day. On a single night in January 2025, there were 745,652 homeless persons in the United States.

While anti-homelessness advocates cited the decrease in homelessness as a “relief”, they also pointed out that the Trump administration’s policies may erode the progress that has been made.

“So much of the progress reflected in the 2025 PIT Count is due to targeted housing and service resources that were available in 2024 to rehouse people, including the highly successful Emergency Housing Voucher program, and new funds to address rural and unsheltered homelessness,” Ann Oliva, the CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has largely deprioritized these tools and worked to dismantle the very systems that drove these reductions.” Oliva pointed to the administration’s proposed cuts to permanent housing programs, which the organization found would “force at least 170,000 formerly homeless people back on the streets”.

The government has also mandated treatment for recipients of federal housing vouchers, and penalized jurisdictions that employed harm-reduction strategies such as safe consumption sites. In April 2026, Hud introduced a proposed rule that would require federally funded shelters to house prospective tenants based on their birth sex alone.

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King County Regional Homeless Authority admits failures, shifts blame for funding woes

King County Regional Homeless Authority officials are admitting that its internal failures led the agency to lose track of how it spent millions of dollars in funds, but they also blame the two key funders, the city of Seattle and King County, for some of its funding troubles.

The May 22 response from the Authority comes after a forensic audit last month found that its bookkeeping practices were so disorganized that it couldn’t fully document how $13 million in funds were spent, including $8 million for which there was no record at all.

Forensic auditors also found that the agency overspent its administrative budget by $4 million, commingled restricted funds and relied on casual bookkeeping practices, such as using shared Excel spreadsheets that anyone could edit.

The agency’s negative cash balance recently ballooned to $63 million.

While KCRHA leaders admit to these internal failures in their response report, they argue that they cannot fix the system alone.

The agency relies primarily on the City of Seattle and King County for its $200 million in annual funding.

KCRHA, under the current setup, must pay service providers first and then wait to be reimbursed by the city and county.

Officials blame this waiting period for the massive deficit, claiming it forces them to take out constant loans just to keep operating.

While agency officials promised to overhaul its internal rules and tighten its financial controls, authority leaders insist that a true fix will require the city and county to completely restructure how they distribute money.

“KCRHA accepts responsibility for correcting its internal deficiencies. At the same time, several of the highest-priority issues — including reimbursement timing, fund advances, KCIP exposure, backend funding adjustments, invoice review workflows, and administrative funding structure — cross organizational boundaries,” the report reads.

“Durable resolution will require active partnership by KCRHA, the City of Seattle, and King County. KCRHA owns its internal failures; the region must jointly fix the shared operating model.”

Requests by The Center Square to interview Authority CEO, Kelly Kinnison, were not acknowledged by the agency spokeswoman Lisa Edge.

Kinnison took office in mid-2024, the fifth CEO since the agency was established in 2019.

In an interview on KUOW’s Soundside program, Kinnison said she realized that after several months on the job, something wasn’t right with the agency’s practices.

Kinnison said accounting practices were inadequate and she reported the fact to city and county officials.

“I was very surprised by what I found at KCHRA,” she said.

Kinnison said the agency has begun implementing reforms, but she has asked King County and Seattle to let her hire an accountant to find $8 million that is missing.

She said the agency currently lacks the accounting sophistication to track its full spending on homeless services.

Kellison said after a couple of months on the job, it became clear something wasn’t right with how the agency monitored its finances.

Kinnison said the homeless agency is worth saving and said she was glad the audit brought the full dimensions of the agency’s problems to light.

But she wasn’t asked, and she did not address the auditor’s findings that she was missing in action during meetings held as the audit progressed.

Kinnison didn’t show up for most of the twice-weekly KCRHA board meetings held concurrently with the audit period, said fraud investigator Mike Nurse in the audit report.

“For a meeting whose purpose was solely to inform executive leadership on issues in progress, it surprised us from an ownership oversight and urgency perspective that she did not participate in these meetings,” Nurse told the authority board.

Both the Seattle City Council and the King County Metropolitan Council have passed resolutions calling on their respective executive leaders, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, to decide by Aug. 1 whether the homeless authority should be dissolved.

Either Zahilay or Wilson could end the regional homeless effort within a year of giving notice.

Neither had indicated which decision they were leaning towards, but dissolving the commission would require both King County and Seattle to run homeless intervention programs on their own.

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Spokane County passes ordinance targeting camping on private property

Spokane County commissioners passed an ordinance Tuesday night aimed at reducing unwanted camping on private properties by giving law enforcement new tools to address what officials say has been a growing problem.

The ordinance categorizes unauthorized camping on private property as a nuisance, establishing enforcement standards where none existed before.

“We’ve dealt with nuisance activities and nefarious activities on properties that we didn’t have the tools necessary to deal with,” said Commissioner Al French.

Under the new rules, law enforcement can issue violations, impose fines, or seek court-ordered cleanups when camping affects the health or safety of nearby residents.

The county built in exceptions for authorized camping. Property owners can still permit camping on their land, but they must be physically present during the activity.

“In that case, the property owner or tenant must be physically present and camping would only occur with permission of that owner or tenant, and then there’s some restrictions on vehicles,” said Nathan Gwinn, deputy prosecuting attorney for Spokane County.

The ordinance comes as residents in areas like Mead have expressed frustration with ongoing camping situations. Art Taylor, who lives next to what he describes as a nuisance property, said he and his neighbors have contacted law enforcement multiple times but are still waiting for action.

“I would want to see more action from the county. I’m pressed to understand why there hasn’t been anything done to them over there,” Taylor said.

The new enforcement tools will allow county officials to respond more effectively to complaints about camping on private property, particularly when the activity creates health hazards or safety concerns for surrounding communities.

The Center Square

Spokane County authorizes charging property owners for removing nuisance encampments

Spokane County now has the authority to recover abatement costs from private property owners if the owners permit encampments that create public health and safety concerns on the estate.​

The county prosecutor’s office proposed the idea in April after it slipped through the cracks last winter, when the Board of County Commissioners overhauled its nuisance code for unincorporated properties.​

Camping on public property is already largely prohibited, but the board didn’t designate the activity as a nuisance on private property until Tuesday, when it passed the prosecutor’s office proposal.

It allows the county to clean and remove encampments at the expense of the property owner, rather than county taxpayers.​

“This has been a topic of concern for, I know, Commissioners [Mary] Brooks, [Josh] Kerns and myself, for many years,” Commissioner Al French, elected to the board in 2010, said before voting on Tuesday.

“We’ve dealt with nuisance activities … that we didn’t have the tools necessary to deal with, and with this ordinance, that gives us the tools to be able to better control those,” French said, offering support.

Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Nathan Gwinn briefed the board on the proposal ahead of Tuesday’s vote.​

He said the county’s approach is now closely aligned with Spokane Valley’s, where city officials approved a measure last year that designated camping on private property as a nuisance if it poses a safety risk.​

The board’s approval follows the Spokane City Council’s passage of a new camping ban last fall, which critics have said is driving homeless individuals to move into the county’s more rural areas.

Tuesday’s agenda materials did not list a fiscal impact for the county, and Gwinn didn’t respond to The Center Square’s voicemail asking about taxpayer savings from camping abatement before publishing.

It’s not immediately clear from public budget materials how much the county spends on addressing camping on private property, since the process and cost recovery are handled by a few departments.

The county’s ordinance is framed as a response to encampments on private property, where individuals leave human waste, garbage and drug paraphernalia or otherwise pose a problem or danger to others.​

“The Board finds that regulation of camping on private property is necessary to protect the [general] public comfort, repose, health, safety, and welfare,” according to the proposal approved on Tuesday.

According to the proposal, it applies to situations where folks are camping on private property without a habitable residence for more than 14 days a year when the owner is not present; it also applies to camping on private property with a habitable residence if the owner is gone, hasn’t given permission, and the activity is taking up multiple off-street parking spaces and blocking access for first responders.

The city of Spokane also has rules that regulate camping on private property if it lasts over two weeks.

The county’s version does not apply to camping on legally operated RV parks and campgrounds, or to religious organizations hosting homeless individuals on their properties in accordance with state laws.

If the county identifies an encampment on private property that could be classified as a nuisance, the relevant officials must provide a 48-hour notice so the owner can address the issue before the county steps in.

If the county abates the property, it can charge the owner responsible with $250 daily fines.

The property owner would also be responsible for any costs associated with the abatement, such as removing junk vehicles, clearing waste and other things necessary to address the issue.

According to the county code, “All such costs and expenses shall constitute a lien against the affected property.”​

“The county is not trying to punish those who engage in camping on private property in a manner that doesn’t have an effect on the health, safety, welfare, comfort or quiet enjoyment of others,” Gwinn said Tuesday before the board’s vote.

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Regional homeless audit findings increase pressure to address drug crisis

As King County and the city of Seattle respond to the recent forensic audit of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority that found $13 million in mismanaged funds and a $45 million deficit, there are growing calls for accountability, transparency and a potential refocus on what many identify as the root of the problem – drug addiction and mental health issues.

As reported by The Center Square earlier this week, the King County Council unanimously ordered a 90-day review of the agency’s operations before potentially moving toward dissolution, which would then potentially return services to direct city and county control.

The county would need to transition over 200 service contracts to avoid interrupting services for vulnerable populations.

A potential transition is further complicated because the regional homelessness authority is tied to contracts and federal funding that support services including shelter and outreach to permanent housing.

Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle, who serves as chair of the Public Safety Committee, told The Center Square the audit findings are “damning in so many ways.”

Kettle said when he first took office in 2024, already seeing issues within the agency, he pushed for governance reform within KCRHA.

“If we didn’t make those governance changes, the city council would have ended KCRHA at that point,” said Kettle.

Unfortunately, two years later, KCRHA is in no better shape.

“The city is in fiscal distress. The county is in fiscal distress, and so is the state. And that triple combination is not good for us,” said Kettle.

“This is why we need the regional approach, but then we also have to have the oversight piece done. We have to ensure that the operations and the financial pieces are being done right,” he added.

“We’ve definitely been notified now with this audit; we need to make this right. But at the end of the day, if you get rid of it, you’re going to have to replace it, so this contingency planning process needs to ensure that we have a 2.0 or we could fix it,” Kettle said.

The councilmember expressed there is no way Seattle can dissolve its relationship with KCRHA and move on to address the crisis alone.

“That is a mistake because it’s not a Seattle problem,” he said. “It is a regional problem.”

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MEASURING UP

New GSI poll shows improvement in public safety and downtown, while worries over cost of living, like gas and food prices, intensify. Sentiments improved overall within the city, the poll shows.

Voter perceptions about the Spokane area remain mixed at best, according to the fourth biannual survey released by Greater Spokane Incorporated, the region’s de facto chamber of commerce – but they’ve also significantly improved for city of Spokane residents, particularly in the last six months.

Concerns about homelessness, drug use and public safety in particular have significantly improved for city residents since the first survey was released in Oct. 2024, though they remain the most frequently listed issues. Concerns about taxes, affordable housing and the cost of living, meanwhile, have roughly doubled during the same period for city residents.

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Eighteen months ago, nearly 60% of surveyed Spokane voters ranked homelessness as a top concern, while 42% ranked crime/drugs/public safety as their main worry; by April, when the latest survey was conducted, 41% of respondents ranked homelessness and 24% ranked public safety as a major concern.

This shifting sentiment about safety and crime is reflected elsewhere in the survey as well: 55% of city residents surveyed feel their neighborhood is as safe or safer than it was two years ago, compared to 33% during the first survey. Asked whether hiring more police officers should be an immediate priority, 59% of city respondents agreed, compared with 79% during the first survey.

While these trends have mostly pointed in the same direction since the survey began in late 2024, the majority of improvement in city resident sentiment has come in the last six months.

Most notably, right around when GSI published its third survey in October, the Spokane City Council pivoted sharply in its approach to homelessness, criminalizing sleeping and sitting in public. Within weeks, businesses reported a marked improvement in conditions downtown.

The Center Square

Council committee boosts Seattle’s homeless housing plan, sets new guardrails

A Seattle City Council committee on Wednesday approved Mayor Katie Wilson’s plan to expand tiny home villages for the city’s homeless population.

The plan could almost double the 600 beds in 15 tiny home villages while also creating new villages.

The approval by the committee came as legislators put guardrails on Wilson’s plan to build 4,000 new units of housing for the homeless in the next four years.

Some tiny home villages have led to complaints from nearby residents about drug addicts occupying some of the units and an increase in neighborhood crime.

The revised housing plan approved Wednesday will require shelter operators to implement public safety programs to prevent crime and establish community councils made up of local residents to monitor whether the shelter is responsive to community concerns.

“I believe that we have a responsibility to ensure that the rollout of this expansion is well planned and has clear communication with the public,” said Councilmember Dionne Foster.

“I believe that we have a responsibility to ensure that our shelter locations are well-staffed,” she added.

Another part of the plan includes requiring shelters with more than 100 beds to be staffed with two employees 24 hours a day and mandating a 1-to-15 ratio of case managers to residents for residents of facilities with high needs.

“I think there’s board alignment on the desire to see this done right, to meet all of our community,” said Councilman Eddie Lin.

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The City of Spokane seeks funding to create affordable homeownership opportunities in the West Central neighborhood

A rehabilitation project could improve houses in the West Central neighborhood and create opportunities for affordable housing.

The City of Spokane’s Community and Economic Development Division introduced a proposal at Monday’s Urban Experience Committee meeting, asking council to approve funding for affordable housing projects within the West Quadrant Tax Increment Financing (TIF) District.

A TIF district is a key economic development tool designed to support public infrastructure and neighborhood revitalization. The city says these districts work by directing extra property tax revenue generated by new developments, such as Kendall Yards, toward public projects in bordering neighborhoods.

“TIF funding is a creative and forward-thinking tool that allows us to reinvest in our neighborhoods. By directing these funds into permanently affordable housing, we will ensure the benefits of revitalization are shared, creating inclusive communities where people can afford to live for years to come,” Mayor Lisa Brown said.

The proposed resolution would direct $1.2 million in West Quadrant TIF District funding to Habitat for Humanity to rehabilitate and update up to seven permanently affordable housing projects in the West Central neighborhood.

“We’ve seen firsthand how this partnership can transform lives and stabilize blocks in West Central. Working alongside the City of Spokane and the Neighborhood Project Advisory Committee, Habitat has helped turn distressed properties into permanently affordable homeownership opportunities that strengthen neighborhoods and support low-income families. We hope to continue this powerful work,” said Habitat for Humanity CEO Michelle Girardot.

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Wilson announces opening of first new village for the homeless

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said a new community of 75 tiny homes for the homeless should be ready to open in the city’s Interbay neighborhood by early June, the first phase of her plan to create new housing before the World Cup starts.

Wilson said her administration is moving full steam ahead with her homeless housing plan, while acknowledging that it may not be possible to meet her ambitious goal of having all 500 temporary units built by the start of the first game on June 15.

“It’s really being able to rally people together around an ambitious goal,” she said to reporters at a community forum Wednesday night.

Wilson said she was “amazed” by how city employees from various departments have come together to quickly transform the process of building new communities to get people off the streets.

The tiny home villages are designed as a temporary place for the homeless until they receive permanent housing. Opening transitional housing for the homeless has taken the city as long as a year in the past.

Wilson said homelessness is the city’s biggest issue.

“This is a citywide problem, and it’s going to take citywide effort to solve it,” Wilson said at the City Hall meeting.

Wilson, who took office in January, has committed to a plan to shorten the timeline for creating more housing by having the city directly lease land for housing communities rather than relying on community organizations.

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Data Shows Increase in Successful Exits to Stability

Data from the 2025 Longitudinal Systems Analysis (LSA) shows fewer people are entering the homeless system, fewer people are relying on services within the system, and more people are successfully exiting homelessness into stability.

The LSA is an annual report submitted to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It provides a detailed, system-wide view of how people experiencing homelessness interact with services over time. It uses data from the Homeless Management Information System to track patterns related to system entries and exits, length of time people are homeless, their returns to homelessness, and demographics and service utilization.

In 2025, the City of Spokane saw an 11 percent decrease in the number of people accessing City-funded homeless services compared to the year prior. We served 6,430 people in 2025, compared to 7,221 in 2024.

Director of Housing and Human Services Dawn Kinder attributes this to our work to expand homeless and eviction prevention efforts. We’ve focused on investing our resources so that we can connect people to the right support at the right time. This means we’re stabilizing people before they enter the system.

We are also seeing an increase in the number of people exiting into permanent housing.

All in all, the data is encouraging and shows that we are moving in the right direction. We have spent the past two years building out a system founded on proven interventions, mending relationships with our provider community, and improving coordination between our partners, but as always, the work continues.

Dive into the data HERE.

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