Can Spokane’s shelter network program help alleviate homelessness?
The new scattered-site model includes a system of smaller shelters, averaging 30 beds, connected to health services and drug treatment.
by Mai Hoang
March 17, 2025
Anneke Calhoun moved to Spokane in May, looking for a way out of the addiction she’s struggled with since she was 15.
“I was just done being sick. My teeth had rotted out,” she said.
While in detox, she stayed at Cedar Center, a 30-bed shelter run by Jewels Helping Hands, a Spokane street outreach organization.
She started volunteering, but heard she could get a job at the shelter if she passed a drug test. That’s what got her to work toward sobriety.
Now she’s a supervisor at the shelter where she once lived.
She credits the shelter and the relationships she developed there for helping her move forward. “They’re still one of my biggest support systems,” she said.
Developing relationships and connections is a crucial part of a scattered-site shelter model pilot that the city of Spokane launched this past fall, in its ongoing efforts to get hundreds of unhoused residents in the city and neighboring areas off the streets and on a path to housing.
At the heart of this model — primarily funded by a $3.8 million grant from the state Department of Commerce — is a network of smaller shelters such as Cedar Center, generally averaging around 30 beds. Under this plan, guests not only receive a bed but are connected to necessary services, including behavioral health services and drug addiction treatment.
One of these shelters also serves as a navigation center, where residents can access services and work with a case manager on an individual plan to move forward on securing housing and addressing various mental and physical health issues.
For Mayor Lisa Brown, in office 14 months, this is a shift from the approach of former Mayor Nadine Woodward, whose efforts focused largely on running the Trent Assistance and Resource Center, or TRAC, which opened in September 2022. The shelter once housed upward of 350 beds and also had services on site. Woodward was also working on a regional homeless authority where homeless services from several municipalities, including the city, Spokane County and neighboring Spokane Valley, would be consolidated into one facility.
Brown was a vocal critic of TRAC during the 2023 mayoral election, in which she ran against and defeated Woodward. Brown has maintained that the facility is not producing the necessary outcomes given its large price tag — nearly $20 million over two years of operation. Brown supported a regional homeless authority but felt an outreach and navigation process needed to be established first.
And this pilot is part of that strategy. Brown and her administration seek seamless intertwining of services, case management and shelter. They believe this will more effectively reduce the number of unhoused residents in the city.
Not surprisingly, closing TRAC was a central part of the plan when they rolled out this new scattered-site model several months ago. The TRAC facility closed in October.
Dawn Kinder, the city’s Neighborhood Housing and Human Services Director, believes operating a network of smaller shelters provides a safer and more trauma-informed environment for unhoused residents seeking services and permanent housing.
“It’s trying to get folks [a] more homey-community feel as opposed to an industrial-warehouse feel,” Kinder said.
The problem and the solution
Spokane’s unhoused population has been a top issue for voters in recent years.
The problem was most visible with Camp Hope, an encampment that housed upward of 600-plus unhoused residents at its peak in Spokane’s East Central neighborhood for nearly 18 months before closing in June 2023, several months after a court ruled that all parties needed to come up with a plan to wind down operations at the site.
Woodward’s administration and state agencies — including the Department of Commerce, which Brown was running at the time — were at constant odds during Camp Hope’s existence. Those conflicts led to lawsuits from the city and county aimed at speeding up the clean-up of the camp and the relocation of its residents.
Camp Hope was a visible indicator of the surge of unhoused people in the city. According to a one-day count from January 2023, just months before Camp Hope closed, 2,390 people were unhoused county-wide, a sizable increase from 1,757 people in 2022.
In January 2024 the count had decreased to 2,021 people. But that number is still well above the figures from 2022, so numerous challenges are still ahead.
It’s certainly something that Doug Trudeau, a business owner and chair of the East Central Neighborhood Council, thinks about frequently. He owned a business near Camp Hope and said he saw the harm done. “A lot of those businesses are closed,” he said. “A lot of goods were stolen.”
He’s been watching proposed state legislation, such as House Bill 1380, which seeks to regulate the enforcement of camping bans, which he believes would impact communities’ abilities to address the issue.
Zeke Smith, president of Empire Health Foundation, said the city’s unhoused population should not be blamed, but acknowledges such a large encampment did impact the community. He said some crime and vandalism was likely committed by those looking to prey on the unhoused population.
Smith’s organization, which focuses on solutions to increase health equity in Eastern Washington, coordinated outreach at Camp Hope under a contract with Commerce, which Brown ran. This time, the organization, under a city partnership, is administering and coordinating the new shelter plan, including working with providers and property owners to open additional shelter sites.
The hope is that a system of smaller but spread-out shelter sites would minimize the impact on any given neighborhood, Smith said.
The sites include newly opened shelters — some that opened last winter when there was a weather emergency and others that opened following the pilot’s October launch. Most new shelters are aimed at specific populations, such as women and children or those needing medical respite care. Additional sites are planned in the weeks to come.
Smith believes that while Camp Hope had problems, the outreach work to get people out of the encampment and into housing led to cooperation among service providers that wasn’t there previously.
Smith said a lot of the services and case management offered at Camp Hope are now key components of operations for the scattered-site model.
Revive Counseling Spokane, for example, works to provide behavioral health and transitional housing primarily for those exiting jail and prison. But that could also help those seeking housing and services, which led to Revive working at Camp Hope. The organization now coordinates services at the navigation center, based at the Cannon Street Shelter.
And the coordination of services among several providers is a key part of the model, said Layne Pavey, executive director for Revive Counseling Spokane.
“We [are] able to start working on solutions as a community,” Pavey said.
For example, Revive can start to set up treatment for an unhoused resident at the Cannon Street Shelter while they are waiting for a shelter bed. And they can seek a bed at a different shelter. Previously, they would have just been kicked out if a bed wasn’t currently available at Cannon.
Early hope and optimism
Julie Garcia is the executive director of Jewels Helping Hands, which currently runs three shelters, including a medical respite facility. She said she’s encouraged by what she’s seen so far.
Garcia has long been concerned about the number of available shelter beds, especially for those dealing with chronic health and addiction issues. She hopes this system will help address that problem by getting people through the system to other support systems more quickly.
“We don’t have more resources than before, but the resources are getting to the people who need them,” Garcia said. “I am more hopeful than ever that we will start to move the needle on homelessness.”
Trudeau said he and others in the East Central neighborhood are taking a wait-and-see attitude regarding the scattered-site pilot. He generally believes the operating shelters in the neighborhood are doing a good job.
Still, he is unsure whether the pilot will bring his desired outcomes — getting unhoused people or those dealing with addiction off the street. He is also concerned about poor neighborhoods bearing the brunt of the shelters.
He is encouraged that the city and neighborhood providers have been willing to have conversations and get feedback, and he hopes this will continue.
Smith said that before opening new sites, the city and other providers met with residents and community leaders in the neighborhoods where the planned shelters are located. The response varied greatly, but he says the meetings produced good conversations that enabled service providers and shelter operators to work better with those neighborhoods.
Smith said he would like to have a meeting with the neighborhood council assembly, made up of council leaders, to explain how the process of opening sites is working. He’s anticipating and hoping for questions and concerns from leaders. “The better we can get that [feedback] up front, the more likely it would be successful over time,” he said.
Kinder, the Neighborhood Housing and Human Services director, said the city plans to disclose data about its initial efforts to get people out of the streets and into housing and services, including the scattered-site pilot program.
That data work also includes crafting sharing agreements with Spokane County and the Spokane Regional Health District.
The latest data available is from the last quarter of 2024, so there isn’t a lot of insight yet through data into whether the pilot, launched in October, is working.
However, Pavey of Revive notes that at the navigation center at the Cannon Street Shelter, 32 people in the past three months have been moved out of the shelter and through case management processes, including 24 people who earlier had been at the TRAC facility.
Such data will be key in getting additional funding and support to keep the pilot going. Funding from the Commerce grant is expected to end at the end of June, but Kinder said additional pandemic aid funds could help keep things going for a few additional months. However, it is uncertain whether the city can secure the funds to keep the model going beyond that.
Kinder also hopes that as more data is collected to assess the model’s effectiveness, other municipalities, including Spokane County and neighboring Spokane Valley, will consider participating in the scattered-site shelter model.
Pavey said she hopes there will be ample opportunity to show the model’s success so there’s time to secure additional funding.
“We have to give this model a chance before the funding is cut,” she said. “We’re all working together so well. I don’t want to go backward.”
Back at the Cedar Center, Calhoun, the former shelter resident and now supervisor, has established a good rapport with the shelter’s residents.
As someone who has gone through the process herself, Calhoun can quickly point to resources and services for guests. “If they’re going through an emotional crisis, I can sit and talk and relate with them,” she said.
Calhoun said she’s still processing how quickly things progressed and hasn’t thought much about what she wants to do next other than getting her GED. For now she’s excited to be clean, have a home and have a job she enjoys doing.
“Honestly, I’m happy where I’m at,” she said, “This is my dream job.”
The story was edited to clarify that Empire Health Foundation’s service coverage area is in Eastern Washington, not the entire Pacific Northwest.