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The Spokesman-Review
Spokane set to clear another hurdle in opening homeless shelter on Trent
The Wall St Journal
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Spokane set to clear another hurdle in opening homeless shelter on Trent
By Greg Mason
THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
The organization in position to operate Spokane’s newest homeless shelter is pledging to help people beyond providing a place to sleep.
“This will not be a warehouse for people,” said Michael Shaw, founder and CEOof The Guardians Foundation, the city administration’s likely recommended pick to run a new shelter on East Trent Avenue. “We’re going to be actively engaged in getting these folks moved in the direction that they need to go. They’re not going to be warehoused.”
A public hearing on the temporary zoning change allowing homeless shelters and other community services to exist in heavy industrial zones is slated for Monday’s Spokane City Council meeting, a change needed to allow the shelter to operate.
Kyle Roberson straightens up his tent in the heart of Camp Hope, a homeless encampment of over 600 people living along Second Avenue at Ralph Street.
COLIN MULVANY/ THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
The City Council approved the interim zoning change in May. It is scheduled to stay in effect until Nov. 7 unless extended or canceled at a public hearing, according to the city.
The city has earmarked the warehouse, 4320 E. Trent Ave., as a 150- to 250-bed, low-barrier shelter capable of surge capacity and use in emergencies, like heat and smoke. As a low-barrier shelter, East Trent would not require certain qualifications like criminal background checks, sobriety or identification.
The city is hoping to open the shelter around the start of August.
Although the Guardians Foundation is the top choice of city administrators to run the shelter, the pick still must be approved by the City Council.
According to the Guardians’ proposal to operate the shelter, the organization employs a team dedicated to identifying and offering assistance with barriers residents face toward long-term, stable housing.
Shaw acknowledged there could be times when the focus on the long term may need to shift.
“Now, when we go into surges and emergency stuff where we’re over inundated – let’s say it goes up to 300 – yeah, some of that stuff’s going to taper off because we’re more in a crisis mode,” he continued, “but if our number is around 150-200, they’re going to get a lot of attention about how can we get you to where you need to be.”
At their latest meeting last month, council members approved a five-year lease agreement with Lawrence B. Stone Properties 4320, a limited liability corporation run by local developer Larry Stone. Stone declined to comment, deferring to the city as the lessee of the East Trent Avenue facility.
The Guardians Foundation already runs the city’s Cannon Street shelter.
Vying for the contract against Salvation Army Spokane, The Guardians proposal was the highest rated by the review committee that vetted proposals from potential facility operators.
In turn, the city has elected to go with the Salvation Army as the designated provider of services for the facility, such as case management and access to health and job training resources.
Another topic on the agenda for Monday’s meeting would require all future city-funded homeless service provider contracts to include a Good Neighbor Agreement, which are contracts used when homeless services are expanded into a community to help address and solve neighborhood concerns.
Some council members expressed concerns that the Salvation Army has historically not signed Good Neighbor Agreements. Salvation Army Maj. Ken Perrine declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing negotiations with the city. The Cannon Street Shelter can house just under 100 people and is about 3,500 square feet, Shaw said.
“To go from 3,500 square feet to 33,000 square feet is just an absolute game changer,” he said. “You cannot describe the opportunities to do a better job when you’re not limited.”
The Guardians Foundation also was enlisted this past winter by the city to oversee a temporary warming shelter at the Spokane Convention Center. The warming center resulted in a reported tens of thousands of dollars in damage to the convention center in just two weeks.
“We all learned from that experience, and every time we operate these kinds of services, we learn,” Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward said. “I think they have a great track record at Cannon, and what we learned from the Convention Center’s two-week operation, we will apply to the Trent facility with more restrictions about access and what those times are.”
For his part, Shaw has “no idea how that number even happened” in terms of the cost of the damages, saying he’s “still trying to grapple with” how that was determined.
In any case, Shaw said The Guardians Foundation had 48 hours “to fire something up” to run the warming center at the Convention Center. While the agency went in thinking they would service around 100 individuals, Shaw said they hit upwards of 400 users in a matter of days.
“It was a very fluid situation,” he said. “To put anyone in that situation, whether it was The Guardians Foundation or the United States Army, they would still have the same types of issues that we dealt with.”
It’s not accurate to compare what happened there to what the group hopes to achieve with the Trent shelter, he said.
“That was an emergency situation where we were taking anyone in. No matter what their behavior issues were, we’re trying to save lives,” Shaw said. “That was truly a no-barrier shelter, for the most part.”
As proposed, the Trent shelter would serve as a low-barrier shelter with a 1:20 staff-to-guest staffing ratio, not including security staff, according to the Guardian’s plan submitted to the city.
The shelter would serve single adults as well as couples. No minors would be allowed.
Safety requirements “could preclude an individual’s access to the facility,” while the facility will have a zero-tolerance policy regarding violent threats, gross disrespect and alcohol or drug use on the premises.
Intakes would be permitted 24 hours per day, with a designated time set for people to check in and maintain their bed another night. Pets and service animals would be allowed, with Shaw pointing to a “large parking lot” on the property for the pet area and outdoor activities.
“Curfews, we usually go an hour before dusk is when we lock the gates,” he said. “If you decide to leave the shelter after the gates are shut, then you’re probably going to give up your bed for the night.”
Brad Baker, a program manager for The Guardians Foundation who would serve as the Trent facility’s shelter director, added the facility staff would work with anyone leaving after curfew to offer transportation. Accommodations would be made for anyone with situations such as verifiable employment or a medical emergency, he said.
Citing the layout of the Trent Avenue warehouse, The Guardians proposal indicated a need to use portable toilets, a shower trailer and portable washing stations at the start.
“Phase Two is the construction of showers with indoor facilities for toilets and handwashing,” Shaw said. “We don’t have a good handle on Phase Two, but it’s a priority, so we hope to get into Phase Two right away hopefully by fall.”
With security, The Guardians would use parts of the warehouse for storage of residents’ belongings and items construed by staff as weapons. Guests entering the facility would first be scanned by metal detectors.
Shaw said The Guardians requests a presence from the Spokane Police Department with all of their shelters “just to set a tone.” On top of a private security patrol, The Guardians also employs an interior security team as well as an exterior team that’s focused on concerns expressed by the surrounding neighborhood, Shaw said.
“It really is a blank canvas. The world’s our oyster over there,” Shaw said. “There’s no limits on what we can do.
“It’s based on our imagination and best practices to make these people feel welcomed home and cared about and supported so they can hopefully utilize that for wherever they’re headed to get on down the road and figure out what they want to do.” Greg Mason can be reached at (509) 459-5047 or gregm@spokesman. com.
According to Julie Garcia of Jewels Helping Hands, a homeless outreach provider, a recent survey of Camp Hope showed over 600 homeless people live in the crowded conditions of the homeless encampment along Second Avenue at Ralph Street.
COLIN MULVANY/ THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
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A big question right now is what exactly that enforcement would look like and if the police department even has the resources to respond.
SPOKANE, Wash. — If the city council members approve Mayor Woodward's updates to the city's sit and lie ordinances, public camping would be illegal on almost all downtown sidewalks and Spokane police would help enforce those laws.
A big question right now is what exactly that enforcement would look like and if the police department even has the resources to respond to every complaint if the mayor's proposal is approved by city council.
"People are camping in front of you business, laying in front of your business, just creating problems and discontent," Downtown Spokane Partnership Chairman Chris Batten said.
Batten says businesses are on board with Mayor Woodward's proposal.
"The feedback has been positive for sure," Batten said.
Camping would be prohibited at all times under viaducts, near the river and in all areas of the downtown business improvement district.
"I think those businesses closest to the track are the most impacted on a day-to-day basis you know, on either side of the track, of the railroad underpasses, but it's throughout downtown."
The city already has laws on the books prohibiting camping in public spaces, but the Ninth Circuit Court ruled in 2018 that cities cannot cite or arrest homeless campers when there isn't enough shelter space available.
"We think it's the right ordinance at the right time," Batten said. "It certainly meets or exceeds the expectations of Martin v. Boise."
Before 2018, police could ticket and arrest people for sitting, lying and camping in areas they aren't allowed to. Even then, Cpl. Nick Briggs says the department's philosophy has never been enforcement first.
"We are always trying to solve the situation," Briggs said. "Even prior to the Martin decision, trying to solve the situation in some other way, connecting people to services, finding people a more suitable place."
Writing tickets or taking people to jail was a last resort. Now, it's not really an option.
"It is much harder now to kind of have that last line of problem solving ability if somebody is willfully refusing to leave and continuing to maintain a potentially dangerous situation," Briggs said.
So, if the mayor's proposal passes in city council and officers have more enforcement tools available, will SPD even have the forces to respond?
"There are areas where we're not always able to provide the level of service that we want to in every category and violent crime will always be our top priority," Briggs said. "Solving violent crime and preventing violent crime. So, yeah if there are areas competing we may not be able to locate all those resources that we want."
The downtown Spokane partnership hired an independent law firm to analyze the Martin v. Boise case. They determined the City could take steps to clear out encampments downtown with a low risk of violating the court ruling. The firm also indicated that the city runs a higher risk of getting sued by businesses of they don't address public camping concerns.
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Posted: July 8, 2022 1:56 PM Updated: July 8, 2022 9:33 PM by Erin Robinson
SPOKANE, Wash. – Spokane housing sales are down, but prices are up.
The Spokane Association of Realtors’ year-to-date report shows an increase in inventory and new listings.
Inventory totals 798 properties, which equates to a little more than a month’s supply. Last year at this time, there were just 284 homes on the market, which is about a 12-day supply.
The report shows closed sales of single-family homes have fallen 8.5 percent compared to this time last year. Meantime, new listings are up about 6.5 percent, but buyers can still expect to pay more.
The average closed price through June 2022 is $458,188 compared to $386,515 through June 2021. The median closed price is up 20.7 percent compared to last year.
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The Wall St Journal
Mortgage rates and home prices are up sharply, pressuring buyers and driving sellers to cut prices
Nicole FriedmanJuly 8, 2022 10:00 am ET
Sales of previously owned homes fell in May for the fourth straight month.
Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Record home prices and higher mortgage rates in May made it the most expensive month since 2006 to buy a home, prompting more buyers to give up and pressuring sellers to cut asking prices.
The National Association of Realtors’ housing-affordability index fell to 102.5 in May, the association said Friday, the lowest level since the index fell to 100.5 in July 2006. It was close to the lowest level since July 1990, when the index stood at 100.2. The affordability index incorporates median existing-home prices, median family incomes and average mortgage rates.
On a national basis, homebuying was relatively affordable in 2020 and last year, thanks to record-low mortgage rates even as strong demand sent home prices skyrocketing. But this year, mortgage rates have moved up sharply and house prices have climbed to new highs nationwide.
“I don’t know that we’ll ever see affordability again like we saw in the last year or two,” said Mark Fleming, chief economist at First American Financial Corp.
The decline in affordability makes it especially difficult for first-time home buyersto enter the market, economists say. Homeownership has long been the key path to wealth-building for the U.S. middle class.
The typical monthly mortgage payment rose to $1,842 in May, NAR said, up from $1,297 in January and $1,220 in May 2021, assuming a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and a 20% down payment.
Mortgage rates have slipped in the past two weeks. But affordability is likely to get worse in the coming months because home-price growth is expected to exceed income growth, said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist.
The housing market has cooled significantly in recent weeks as buyers have stepped back from the market. Sales of previously owned homes slid in May for the fourth straight month. Some buyers can no longer qualify for mortgages, while others are unwilling to pay hundreds of dollars more a month compared with what they budgeted just a few months ago, real-estate agents say.
The sudden drop in demand is expected to lead to slower home-price growth by the end of the year, and some economists are forecasting price declines.
What a Housing-Market Cooldown Could Mean for Inflation and Home Buyers
What a Housing-Market Cooldown Could Mean for Inflation and Home Buyers
Despite forecasts for a cooling housing market in 2022, U.S. home prices are still hitting record highs, even with mortgage rates surging in recent months. WSJ’s Dion Rabouin explains what’s driving demand, evidence of a slowdown on the horizon, and what that could mean for the economy. Photo composite: Ryan Trefes
“We’re in a housing-affordability crisis right now,” said Robert Dietz, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders.
More sellers have cut asking prices in recent weeks, especially in housing markets that posted some of the sharpest price growth in recent years, including Boise, Idaho; Phoenix; and Austin, Texas, according to real-estate brokerageRedfin Corp.
Nationwide, however, many economists say home prices can keep rising because the inventory of homes for sale generally remains low. The number of active listings in June was down 34% from June 2020 and down 53% from June 2019, according to Realtor.com. News Corp, parent of The Wall Street Journal, operates Realtor.com.
Dalton and Lacy Lyons saw the market slowdown firsthand as they shopped for a home near Denver. They started house hunting in April and made five offers over list price but lost out to other bidders.
Lacy and Dalton Lyons reduced their budget as mortgage rates pushed higher.
Photo: Lyons Family
By the time they found a three-bedroom home with an unfinished basement in Castle Rock, Colo., in June, the market competition had cooled off. The seller accepted their offer at the $555,000 asking price and agreed to pay $2,500 toward their closing costs.
But a less-competitive market didn’t mean a cheaper one. The Lyonses had to reduce their budget as mortgage rates climbed.
“We’re very excited,” Mr. Lyons said. But “what’s really disheartening is if we would have been shopping six months ago, the way rates were, we would have been looking at more like a $700,000 home.”
The average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 5.3% this week, said mortgage-finance company Freddie Mac. That was down sharply from 5.7% the previous week but up from 2.9% a year ago.
Mortgage-interest rates have largely held below 5% since the 2007-09 recession. In recent years, many millennials have aged into their prime homebuying years, and the Covid-19 pandemic has upended where many Americans want to live. Second-home demand has soared during the pandemic, and investors have flocked to the market to buy houses to rent out as rent prices have risen.
ason Roberts started shopping for his first home in Sacramento, Calif., earlier this year and was quoted a 3.75% mortgage rate. He made offers on two homes before deciding to walk away from the home search in April as mortgage rates climbed close to 6%.
“Now you have high prices and high rates,” he said. “I would like to buy, but the market is just prohibitively expensive.”
Some 44% of adults polled by the U.K. recently said they were buying less food, as the cost pain spreads beyond less-developed nations
By July 8, 2022 5:30 am ET
LONDON—Rampant food inflation is roiling the world’s least-developed nations. It is also hitting poor people in rich countries.
Matsentralen Norge, a food-bank operator in oil-rich Norway, says it is distributing 30% more food compared with the same period in 2021, a year that in itself saw sharply higher demand because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Food-bank usage is on the rise in the U.S., too, while grocery stores report customers there are trading down, buying more store-brand food and avoiding more expensive meat and fish.
In Britain, the pain has been especially stark. The U.K.’s overall inflation rate hit 9.1% in May, compared with the same month a year ago, the fastest rise in prices for a member of the Group of Seven, the club of rich economies. Food prices rose 8.5% in May.
Food prices in the U.K. rose 8.5% in May.
“We’re seeing real food poverty for the first time in a generation,” John Allan, chairman of Tesco PLC, Britain’s biggest grocery chain, recently told the British Broadcasting Corp.
A steep fall in the value of the British pound following the country’s vote to exit from the European Union had already made some imported food more expensivein the past few years. Making the more recent price increases especially hard to bear is the fact that Britain has enjoyed a long period of relatively low food prices. A handful of national supermarket chains compete against each other fiercely.
Last month, the average price of cheddar cheese, a U.K. staple, was up by 59% from last June, according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, a trade body. Milk was up 27% in April over last year, according to government data.
Those sorts of prices are now unaffordable for many. Some 44% of adults polled by the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics in May said they were buying less food because of the higher prices. Food banks are seeing a third more traffic since the start of the pandemic, according to the Trussell Trust, a food-bank provider.
The Food Foundation, a food and nutrition lobby group, found food poverty, or food insecurity, had affected 15.5% of Britons in the six months to April, up from 7.6% pre-Covid. It describes food poverty as the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food.
At the Bounds Green food bank in north London, some people stand in line for hours to get the best products.
In a survey published in May, it found a 57% jump in the proportion of U.K. households cutting back on food or missing meals altogether. The survey found 7.3 million adults in April were living in households that said they had gone without food or couldn’t physically get it in the past month. That compared with 4.7 million adults in January.
“We know the cost of food has real consequences for people across the country,” a U.K. government spokesman said. The government has provided cash payments and tax cuts for the very poorest to ease rises in the cost of living, he said, while introducing longer term measures that will ease food supply chain bottlenecks.
Deshia Shkalla, an unemployed single mother living in a one-bedroom apartment, feeds her infant regular milk rather than formula, eats less meat and plans her food budget down to the penny. She first noticed prices taking off after late February, when Russia invaded Ukraine, one of the world’s largest grain exporters. Her local food bank now often runs out of products.
“We all heard about the war, but we didn’t expect food prices to climb like this,” she said. “It changed everything.”
The war is now rattling through kitchens around the world. The cost of grains soared following Moscow’s invasion, and while they are now well below these highs, their prices are still bolstered by Ukraine’s inability to properly export its harvests.
Higher prices in the U.K. are crimping buying; food store sales volumes are 2.4% below their pre-coronavirus February 2020 levels.
Ukraine produces over half the world’s sunflower oil. In Britain, major grocery stores are putting limits on how many bottles customers can buy at one time.
High energy prices, exacerbated by the war, have added to the cost of transporting and manufacturing food. The pandemic, meanwhile, disrupted the industry’s supply chains.
The price rises have roiled poorer countries, helping trigger unrest that toppled Sri Lanka’s prime minister and protests in the Middle East. The United Nations World Food Program has warned that some 2.46 billion people, or around 30% of the world, face moderate or severe food insecurity, which it defines as lacking regular access to enough safe and nutritious food for normal growth, development and a healthy life.
In poorer countries, food is a larger part of household spending. It is 59% in Nigeria, and 28% in Mexico, according to Trading Economics, an economics and financial indicators tracking site. In the U.K., it is 9.4%.
Food Rises Hit Poor Countries
In low and middle income countries, households spend more on food, making price rises especially painful.
But in rich countries, the smaller a person’s income, the more one spends on food, too. In the U.S., for instance, households in the lowest income quintile spent 27% of their income on food, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Those in the highest income quintile spent 7%.
At Ms. Shkalla’s food bank, housed in a church recreation hall in Bounds Green, a neighborhood in north London, the line snaked out the door and into the street on a recent weekday. Anita Trisanska, waiting in the line, said she buys less fish and meat to make her family income stretch.
“If it wasn’t for the food bank, I don’t know what I’d do,” said Ms. Trisanska, who stays at home with her small child. Her husband works seven days a week in hospitality to make ends meet, she said.
The number of people using the food bank has increased by 80 households, according to the bank. It currently supports several hundred people. Demand is so great that some stand in line from 9 a.m. to get the best products when the bank opens at noon.
The higher prices in the U.K. are crimping buying. Food store sales volumes fell by 1.6% in May and are 2.4% below their pre-coronavirus February 2020 levels, according to the Office of National Statistics.
At the Co-operative Group Ltd., a big food retailer under several brands, customers are switching to cheaper store-brand foods, said Matt Hood, a managing director of its food business. They are also shifting from beef to chicken, which is less expensive. “At this stage, people are being wise with their money and making it stretch further,” he said.
Biniam Abraham, the assistant manager at a South London news agent, a small, independent grocery store akin to a New York City bodega, said prices are going up on average every two weeks. He said he has witnessed some customers asking checkout counter staff to stop scanning when they hit their budget.
Sometimes customers argue with staff, he said, because they are confused by the rapid rises.
“They do their best to squeeze,” he said.
The number of people using the Bounds Green food bank has increased by 80 households.
Write to Sara Ruberg at sara.ruberg@wsj.com and Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com
In Denver, a program to reduce police involvement in nonviolent 911 calls also reduced minor crime.
By Thomas S. Dee and Jaymes Pyne July 8, 2022 5:45 pm ET
The police in St. Petersburg, Fla., knew well that Jeffrey Haarsma had mental-health issues. Officers had been to the 55-year-old’s home at least 25 times in the year prior to an emergency call on Aug. 7, 2020. But the lone responding officer shot and killed Haarsma, who was unarmed, as he attacked her during an attempted arrest over a minor offense. While Pinellas County officials later decided the shooting was justified, they also concluded the call should have been handled as a mental-health issue rather than a criminal investigation.
Since that day, there have been nearly 2,000 fatal shootings by police officers in the line of duty. Roughly 1 in 5 involved a police response to someone showing signs of mental illness. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Both the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer responding to a 911 call over an alleged counterfeit bill and the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, have drawn appropriate attention to police behavior. But what about when they are called to deal with nonviolent emergencies? How we design our first-response systems to deal with urgent events involving mental health and substance abuse merits similarly careful scrutiny.
At least a third of the emergency calls to which police respond could instead be safely directed to health-focused emergency responders such as mental-health professionals, paramedics and social workers. Doing so is clearly humane because it provides people in distress with appropriate healthcare rather than an arrest (or worse). Mental-health first responders can reduce the risk of tragic and violent escalation and attenuate the substantial financial costs of shunting mentally ill citizens into the criminal-justice system.
Redesigning first-responder systems to incorporate mental-health expertise should also have the enthusiastic support of a broad political coalition. Surveys of police officers indicate that they feel overwhelmed and frustrated by mental-illness calls, for which they have inadequate training. Similarly, voices for police reform don’t want armed officers responding to nonviolent calls for assistance. The reallocation of existing police resources to fund mental-health first responders will allow police departments to focus on their core mission of law enforcement.
A small but growing number of cities have introduced innovative programs that screen emergency calls by the type of incident or with the guidance of a specially trained dispatcher. The goal is to identify calls where trained healthcare professionals can support police or directly serve as first responders. Boston, Pittsburgh and Seattle have adopted “co-response” models that allow police officers to query mental-health specialists for guidance or to have their in-person collaboration on field calls.
More ambitious but less common “community response” models forgo police involvement altogether on carefully screened calls. The seminal program, which began in Eugene, Ore., more than 30 years ago, has 911 dispatchers direct nonviolent incidents involving behavioral health to a two-person team consisting of a medic and a mental-health crisis specialist. New York City and Washington began piloting similar community response initiatives last year and more recently have expanded the scale of these operations.
We know far too little about the effectiveness of these programs, the relevance of their design details, and how to meet the challenges of implementing these programs well. Nonetheless, our recent study of a community response initiative in Denver suggests their promise is compelling and extraordinary.
In June 2020, Denver piloted a community response program in the city’s central downtown neighborhoods, dispatching a mental-health clinician and a paramedic in an equipped van to nonviolent emergency calls related to mental health, substance abuse and homelessness. These teams responded most frequently to incidents involving trespassing, welfare checks and requests for assistance. Over its first six months, Denver’s community responders handled 748 calls for service, none of which resulted in an arrest.
Our independent analysis found that in the eight police precincts where the pilot was active, Denver’s initiative reduced targeted, lower-level crimes such as disorderly conduct, trespassing and substance abuse by 34%. These reductions also occurred during hours when the community responders were unavailable, a finding consistent with the evidence that people in untreated mental-health crises are likely to offend repeatedly. We also found the program’s corresponding reduction in police involvement didn’t lead to an unintended increase in more serious crimes.
These results illustrate that the direct cost savings of a community response program can be considerable. We estimate that Denver’s community response program cost only $151 per criminal offense avoided. That amount is only a quarter of the estimated cost of processing lower-level offenses through the criminal-justice system.
We’ll never know for sure whether Jeffrey Haarsma would still be alive if his serial engagements with the police had included mental-health supports. But the available evidence on the exceptional promise and simple common sense of community response programs is a strong argument for studying this innovation throughout the country.
Mr. Dee is a professor at Stanford University and the faculty director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, where Mr. Pyne is a research associate.