1/30/2023
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KXLY
RangeMedia
(ed. note - the items were excerpted from a longer post)
The Wall St. Journal
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KXLY
SPOKANE, Wash. — Snow covered the ground earlier Saturday morning, and while most of the snow has melted, those cold temperatures are here to stay for the weekend.
For unhoused people stuck outside, these cold temperatures can be dangerous, and even deadly.
That's why people running Camp Hope are implementing extra measures for people living there.
At Camp Hope, staff put up a warming tent and heaters to ensure people can stay warm through the weekend.
Just outside the walls of Camp Hope, there are piles of propane tanks being used to warm up the camp.
"We're just trying to do what we can for them," Jared Fullen, who runs the Camp Hope access tent, said.
With temperatures dropping dangerously low this weekend, Fullen and others that live and work at Camp Hope are adding extra measures to keep people warm.
"Just mainly getting a lot of propane for the weekend," Fullen said. "We haven't had our warming tent open much cause it's been pretty warm. But we opened up our warming tent last night, and we're running it pretty much from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., just for campers that don't have any heat or a heater of that sort and don't have the means to get any heat."
The access tent has a propane heater that anyone staying at the camp can come in and use during those hours.
Fullen said the strong winds in particular are having an impact on the camp. He said many of the tents were shaking due to the strong frigid wind.
"It goes right through most of the tents because, like, like everyone knows they're pretty thin," Fullen said. "But like myself, I have a tarp on top of over my tent that covers the whole tent, so keeps the wind from flowing through and just making sure we have hand sanitizer and a safe way of burning it."
Because it's the weekend, campers are stepping in and helping each other out.
"There's not a lot of resources on the weekends, but yeah, it's just it's nice that I can help when I'm asked," Fullen said.
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RangeMedia
(ed. note - the following items were excerpted from the longer post)
Valerie Osier
Spokane City Council
Grants: In the consent agenda, the council is poised to accept and distribute a $2.8 million grant from the state Department of Commerce to house people. $2 million of that grant will go to Trent Shelter, $656,625 will go to Housing Navigators for Rapid Re-housing and $150,000 will go to United Way for diversion.
In another consent item, the Community, Housing, and Human Services department is asking the council for permission to accept several million dollars in grant money from Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): a $3.1 million Community Development Block Grant, a $279,815 Emergency Solutions Grant, and a $1.4 million HOME Investment Partnerships Grant
Agenda here
Monday, Jan. 30 at 6 p.m.
Council Chambers in the Lower Level of City Hall.
808 W Spokane Falls Blvd, Spokane, WA 99201
The meeting is also live streamed here.
Board of County Commissioners
Contract: In the consent agenda (what is now being called “Various resolutions, agreements, contracts and grants”), the county commission will enter into a $15.3 million contract with the Washington State Health Care Authority to continue to provide behavioral health crisis services for much of northeastern Washington in 2023. Spokane administers state programs covering Adams, Ferry, Lincoln, Pend Orielle, Spokane and Stevens counties.
This contract covers a broad range of programs including homeless outreach, crisis responder teams that work alongside police to respond to people experiencing mental health crises and behavioral support for people who have been arrested and are awaiting competency evaluations before they stand trial.
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The Wall St. Journal
Law is pushed as a way to connect people with services, but many areas don’t have shelters
By Shannon NajmabadiFollow
| Photographs by Bruce E. Stidham for The Wall Street Journal
Jan. 29, 2023 at 11:00 am ET
BOLIVAR, Mo.—The pastor of the First Christian Church was startled one morning when what he thought was a mound of donated clothes on his church doorstep was in fact Titus Finn, who had curled up there and spent the night.
There are few other options: Bolivar offers no homeless shelter, no psychiatric hospital and no regular public transportation to get to Springfield, the nearest city with resources. Even if Mr. Finn got there, shelter beds are limited, advocates say, and camping isn’t allowed there now.
Missouri since Jan. 1 has banned camping on state-owned land, part of a national push to restrict visible homelessness that has spread to a host of cities, including Portland and Los Angeles.
Advocates for those without housing say the policies amount to criminalizing homelessness and leave people with nowhere to stay in communities that have no shelter beds or designated campsites. But the policies’ supporters associate street camping with trash or increased rates of violence and want to usher those who are unsheltered into treatment programs for behavioral health or addiction issues.
Missouri Republican State Sen. Holly Thompson Rehder, who proposed the measure and said she experienced homelessness growing up, said it was inhumane to let someone sleep on the streets.
“What this bill aims to do is couple short-term housing with mental health services,” she said. “The first step in doing that is getting someone off the street into a shelter.”
The bus takes people without a place to live to a Springfield shelter for the night.
The camping bans come as factors such as inflation and increases in rent threaten to send more people into homelessness, according to the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Street homelessness has increased in Missouri, according to federal data collected on one night each year that is widely considered an undercount. Of 5,883 homeless people counted in 2018, 1,214 were unsheltered. In 2022, 1,601 of 5,992 unhoused individuals weren’t staying in a shelter, safe haven or in transitional housing.
The number of available beds in Missouri shelters hasn’t kept up. There were 3,074 beds for 4,416 single adults counted in 2022, according to federal data analyzed by the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Increases in visible homelessness put political pressure on local and state leaders, said Ann Oliva, chief executive officer of the alliance. “It becomes conflated with drug abuse, crime, mental illness, all of the things that don’t necessarily always correlate with that,” she said.
A growing number of cities have banned camping on public land, but statewide prohibitions are relatively new. They have been largely inspired by the Cicero Institute, a conservative-leaning, Austin-based think tank founded by Joe Lonsdale, who also co-founded the data-analysis company Palantir Technologies.
The approach is meant to push people to get services, said Bryan Sunderland, Cicero’s advocacy director. “If you need a camping ban to help nudge them to the services they need, or to put them in a better situation that is better for the community as a whole, then that’s the approach you should take,” he said.
Missouri is the second state to adopt the institute’s model legislation, following Texas. The measure makes it a misdemeanor to sleep on state-owned land and penalizes cities that fail to enforce the camping ban. It also shifts state and some federal funds away from permanent housing to temporary shelters.
Springfield has a network of shelters to provide beds for homeless people, but many more rural places in Missouri don’t.
Lawsuits have been filed to challenge Missouri’s ban, the language for which was added to an unrelated bill toward the end of the 2022 legislative session.
Tennessee lawmakers separately made some public camping a felony.
Bolivar, set among acres of grassy fields in rural southwest Missouri, is the center of one of the nation’s top beef-producing counties. The city has faced a housing crunch recently as a meatpacking plant and manufacturing facility also brought more jobs to the area.
Travis DeWitt, a case manager with Community Outreach Ministries, a religious nonprofit in Bolivar, said he had worked with people who are “literally living in tents in the woods and working at significant agencies or significant businesses here in town.”
One woman stayed for a time in a white wooden booth, intended to be a bus stop, in the nonprofit’s parking lot. Others crash with friends or camp in a weed-filled storm drain or a trash-strewn house. Mr. Finn is among several who have camped on state-owned land, said Judi Woods, a local advocate for homeless people.
“I don’t have a place for them to go. I don’t have transportation to get them where they need to go,” Mr. DeWitt said. “What do I tell someone like that?”
Law-enforcement officials and advocates in Bolivar try to steer unhoused individuals to Springfield, about 30 miles south, where there is a network of shelters and nonprofits. Those groups, however, say they don’t have enough room, especially as the breakup of camps drives more people into shelters. The city of Springfield doesn’t intend to open a designated campsite for homeless people.
“We don’t promote that,” said Springfield City Manager Jason Gage, citing concern about exposure to cold and hot weather.
Greene County Sheriff Jim Arnott, whose territory includes Springfield but not Bolivar, has since January arrested several people for trespassing on private property and at least one man for camping on state land, typically rights of way or the space under bridges. He said residents have complained to him about trespassers who leave behind trash.
“A lot of these people that are speaking up about people being displaced, well, you know, where do you live?” he said. “If you have a house with a front and a backyard, by all means, have them come stay there.”
Ms. Thompson Rehder said there is a caveat to the law: No one can be cited unless they are offered shelter and refuse it. That would exempt a place such as Bolivar where there is no 24-hour shelter available. She said the law has led to no changes in rural areas in her district.
Cabins for the homeless are available on cold nights in Springfield.
An estimated 84 of 114 counties in Missouri don’t have shelters for homeless individuals or those fleeing domestic violence. About 40% of unsheltered homeless people were in suburban or rural areas on one night in 2022, according to federal data.
Bolivar Police Chief Mark Webb, an advocate for community policing, said he would encourage someone camping to move and try to direct them to help.
Despite the carve-out, opponents say the language of the law is unclear and runs counter to a “housing first” approach that puts the priority on long-term shelter over addressing behavioral health needs and other issues.
One evening in January, Gloria Shelburn, 46, waited to be shuttled to a cold-weather shelter after a volunteer reminded her camping on state-owned land was now punishable with a fine and a jail stay.
“How do you know the difference?” asked Ms. Shelburn, a former certified nursing assistant who has stayed in wooded areas in Springfield and a house with no utilities. “It’s not like it’s posted.”
Additional shelters in Springfield and Bolivar open on nights when temperatures stay below freezing. A campground in Springfield with trailers and small units offers free shelter on those cold-weather nights, as well, though the facilities are unheated.
Bill Nichols, the pastor who found Mr. Finn outside, said he isn’t sure any community has found a fix to homelessness.
“We can identify some of the problems,” he said, “but we haven’t found any good solutions.”
Write to Shannon Najmabadi at shannon.najmabadi@wsj.com