6/25/2022
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KREM
The Center Square
The San Diego Union Tribune
Vista pursues safe parking lot, supportive housing instead of homeless shelter
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KREM
City council will review the shelter's lease agreement during a briefing session on June 27 at 3:30 p.m.
SPOKANE, Wash. — Spokane City Council will be reviewing an updated presentation from the City Administration regarding the lease agreement for the proposed homeless shelter on Trent Ave.
The city council will review the shelter's lease agreement during a briefing session on June 27 at 3:30 p.m. According to the city council, until now, a lease had not been finalized by the administration.
During June 6th's Public Safety & Community Health Committee meeting, the council was presented with draft lease terms. Council says three major changes have been made to the document since that day.
The changes include:
Section 3.03 – Monthly Management Fee reduced to 2.5%
Section 14.05 – Penalty for opting out of the lease early reduced to 8 months’ rent
Exhibit G – Added option for City to purchase building
Under this agreement, the total monthly rental cost would be $26,752.50, including a base rent of $26,100 along with a 2.5% management fee.
According to the city council, the next steps include:
Finalizing service provider agreements, both for daily shelter operations and on-site wrap-around services; and
Constructing necessary tenant improvements to the site.
“The E. Trent facility will have a capacity of 150-250 people depending on how many staff the selected providers have trained and ready to go,” said Council Member Lori Kinnear. “This facility will not be large enough to meet the needs of the nearly 450 people at Camp Hope. While this is one viable solution, the City and our partners will need to identify other locations for alternative homeless solutions.”
“There continue to be many moving parts to providing a safe space to our homeless population,” says Councilmember Betsy Wilkerson. “When we invest in people, it’s not a one-and-done and certainly not inexpensive. We have seen that the homeless population has created a community, and our challenge will be to create more opportunities for community within this population.”
The East Trent shelter is expected to be ready for occupancy around the beginning of August 2022, the council says. Residents interested in tuning into the briefing session on June 27 can do so on city council's website and Facebook page.
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The Center Square
A homeless camp is shown off Division Street in Spokane, one of many areas where people are now living. A large group of business owners have teamed up to drive policy changes in the city and county that will get people off the streets and support economic development.
Photo courtesy of Sheldon Jackson
(The Center Square) - A coalition of 122 businesses in Spokane have decided it is time for "bold action" to address the homelessness crisis in Washington’s second largest city, and they intent to drive change.
“We don’t think it’s dignified or respectful to allow people to live in unsupervised tent cities, street corners or abandoned cars,” said Katy Bruya, co-chair of Hello for Good's steering committee. “Providing safety, security and wraparound services to address any addition or mental health needs is key.”
She said the word “Hello” was chosen for the group’s name because it is both a friendly salutation and the acronym for Helping Empower Lifelong Opportunities (for Good), the official title.
Since Hello formed last year, Bruya said its steering committee has “huddled” every Thursday to identify gaps in area service provisions and strategize about how to fill them.
“We are private industry so we have the ability to work in ways that might not be open to a public agency,” she said.
Hello for Good is advocating for the Spokane City Council to approve a lease agreement at Monday’s meeting that will allow a shelter to be sited at 4320 E. Trent Avenue.
Mayor Nadine Woodward has negotiated an agreement with developer Lawrence Stone to lease a 33,000 square foot vacant warehouse at the site from Aug. 1 through July 31 ,2027, with option for one five-year renewal.
The cost of the lease in 2022 would be $145,770 and, the total for all other years combined is calculated at $1.86 million. The shelter would house up to 250 people, or more during extreme weather events.
Councilors Michael Cathcart and Jonathan Bingle are bringing the proposed lease to the table for consideration during the 3:30 p.m. briefing session on June 27.
Bruya said Hello for Good is also interested in providing funding to fill gaps. One way the group might do that is to offer scholarships for people wanting a career in the mental health field, which is struggling with a workforce shortage.
“We are still meeting with service providers and are not yet ready to announce a big campaign, but that is an example of the type of outreach we might do,” she said. “Our goal is not to take over, to try to solve homelessness overnight. We just want to help drive change where we can.”
The coalition wants to use “compassionate capitalism” to help the homeless. Bruya said accountability is also necessary to bring about true change. She said it is important that local governments choose to fund programs that provide people with resources and tools that help them stabilize their lives and move off the streets.
She said policies that enable people to stay in a state of addiction, mental illness, dependency, and vulnerability to predators will not accomplish that goal.
For example, Bruya said the Washington Legislature’s push to decriminalize drugs in 2021 has contributed to addictions and led to higher crime rates.
“There are a lot of complex issues involved with homelessness and we believe there needs to be more education and awareness to help all of us better understand how to help this population become successful citizens,” she said.
Bruya and other Hello for Good members have spent months researching homelessness to learn why it is a growing societal problem.
The believe that America planted the seeds for modern homelessness when the practice of institutionalizing patients against their will ended in the mid-1960s. The move to shutter psychiatric hospitals followed abuse scandals and the development of new psychotropic medications.
As the doors to mental institutions closed, there was nowhere for some former and probable patients to go.
Then the push to convert former flophouses or single-room hotels to market rate rentals, condos and co-ops began.
The situation worsened in the 1980s when economic recession, combined with severe federal cutbacks for low-income housing and poverty assistance programs forced more American families into homelessness.
The federal government reported 515,000 multifamily homes built in the U.S. in 1985 but that number had dropped to 140,000 by 1991.
During those years, well-paid manufacturing jobs moved overseas. An oil crisis drove up fuel prices, which caused another spike in rents.
Once “gentrifiers” discovered the architectural character of historic neighborhoods, construction began on high-end residences, but not multifamily rentals or affordable housing
Bruya is the Chief Human Resources Officer for Washington Trust Bank, which is part of the coalition and committed to helping with positive change.
In her professional role, Bruya said it became clear by last year that something needed to be done to keep employees safe and protect business viability. She said having homeless encampments downtown is driving away customers and making workers feel insecure about walking the streets.
Some cities are using innovation to turn things around and Spokane needs to be one of them, Bruya said.
She said Houston, Texas, enacted programs that have gotten 25,000 people off the streets and into homes through a variety of new programs. The region’s homeless population has been cut by 63% since 2011, according to information provided by officials from that city.
Like Houston, Hello For Good wants homelessness in Spokane to be only “rare and brief.”
To learn more about her group, visit the coalitions website, helloforgood.org.
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The San Diego Union Tribune
Vista pursues safe parking lot, supportive housing instead of homeless shelter
The city abandoned plans to open a shelter earlier this year
VISTA — After receiving no takers to run a proposed homeless shelter in the city, the Vista City Council is changing course and instead will pursue a safe parking lot for people who live in their vehicles.
Sylvia Solis Daniels, Vista’s housing programs manager, said three service providers had inquired about running a shelter, but none submitted a formal response to the city's request for proposals by the time the 60-day window closed at the end of March.
Daniels said the city may pursue a shelter again sometime in the future, but its immediate focus is on creating permanent supportive housing and a safe parking lot. The City Council will discuss requests for proposals for the parking lot at Tuesday night's meeting.
Vista owns 13 sites that could have been used for a shelter. Daniels said some are vacant lots and some have structures, but none have hotels or other types of buildings that could have been easily converted into a shelter, and the applicant would have had to identify a plan to make a site work.
"You’d be packaging a development project and a service project," she said. "In hindsight, it was a heavy lift for any partner."
Funding sources could have been identified for building a shelter, but not for its $2.5 million annual operating costs, she said.
That was one of the deal-breakers for Interfaith Community Services.
"Talking to city staff, they said, 'We know we can't afford to pay for 100 percent of the shelter, but we've talked to the county, and they were hopeful,'" said Greg Anglea, president and CEO of Interfaith. "But all of that was just too nebulous. None of it was clear. And unfortunately, the county does not appear to be making that commitment for operational funding for any additional shelters."
While the county has committed to providing access to its behavioral health services and case management for any new shelter, Anglea said they're not funding additional staff members for those services, and he fears existing staff would be stretched thin at new facilities.
"We believe the county needs to step up and provide additional services for new shelters, not just existing resources," he said. "The existing resources will not be sufficient."
Anglea said Interfaith was very interested in helping Vista open a shelter because he sees a pressing need for more beds to get homeless people off the street in North County.
"Right now in North County, we have 99 beds," he said. "That's pitiful when you have 1,400 homeless people in North County identified in the point-in-time count."
Interfaith did bid to run Oceanside's shelter, which is expected to open later this year, but the Oceanside City Council chose the San Diego Rescue Mission instead. Anglea said Interfaith bid for that shelter because the city had committed $700,000 in operational costs, and that money could help fund behavioral health services at the facility.
Daniels said the two other service providers that expressed interest in operating a Vista shelter were the San Diego Rescue Mission and Operation Hope. Neither submitted formal proposals, but for reasons different than Interfaith's, she said.
Daniels said San Diego Rescue Mission President and CEO Donnie Dee said they were in the process of opening the Oceanside shelter and another in National City, so the timing wasn't right to take on another. Operation Hope, which operates a shelter for women and families, also saw the timing as not right because they have a new executive director, she said. The move would have been a significant transition for Operation Hope, she added, because its shelter has restrictions on who it will take in, and the new shelter would have a low-barrier policy, meaning people are not turned away in most cases.
Daniels said the city is closer to opening a safe parking lot than a shelter, so that will be its next focus. She said the city also may apply for part of a $10 million grant the county is offering to cities to help open shelters, safe parking, safe campgrounds or related programs. Sites for the parking lots already have been identified, she said, and the county is prioritizing cities with near-ready plans in the grant program.
The city also plans to release requests for proposals to create permanent supportive housing this August, she said. Millions of dollars left over from the city's redevelopment agency, which was dissolved by the state in 2012, and Vista is allowed to use the money for permanent supportive housing, Daniels said.