17 hours ago
'Send them home': To promote tougher policies, report claims Spokane's homeless aren't from here
Jul. 5—Half of the homeless people in Spokane aren't from here and should be given bus tickets home, more strictly enforced by police and cut off from long-term services, according to a recent report released by the Spokane Business Association, a prominent political advocacy group funded by businessman Larry Stone.
A week after the report's release, the association proposed an amendment to the city's charter, which if approved by voters would reshape the city's homelessness laws and force Spokane to shift funding away from affordable housing, firefighting equipment and other priorities to fund emergency shelters, more visible police patrols and other policies recommended in the report.
Critics in City Hall have dismissed the report as unscientific, unhelpful and politically motivated ahead of the November elections, when several seats currently or recently occupied by progressives are being challenged by candidates more in line with the Spokane Business Association's policy goals.
But the report's author and the organization sponsoring the survey argue the data is concrete proof that Spokane's homelessness policies aren't only not helping people get off the streets, they're attracting people from elsewhere who are drawn to the city by lax law enforcement.
Just over 50% of the roughly 230 homeless people surveyed for the association said they moved to the city after becoming homeless.
This contradicts the federally mandated "point-in-time" counts, annual standardized surveys that try to reach every homeless person living on the streets or in a shelter. The point-in-time counts have their own flaws, as the authors of Spokane County's 2024 report readily acknowledged. But of the 2,021 people surveyed in last year's point-in-time count, roughly 80% said they lived in Spokane County before becoming homeless.
Robert Marbut, President Donald Trump's "homeless czar" from 2019 to 2021 and the consultant contracted to conduct the survey, argues his data is more accurate because he also asked where people were born, went to high school and whether they have family in Spokane.
It is not clear why these additional questions would sway the data by 30 points, but Marbut's recommendations for dealing with this influx are clearer, and consistent with the "Velvet Hammer" approach he has pitched cities across the country for at least a decade: Spokane has to get tougher with the homeless, pressuring them into treatment or departure.
Gavin Cooley, an executive of the Spokane Business Association, argued Marbut's expertise lent the report more authority than it lost from a lack of cited sources, and dismissed as "deeply political" a recent article from Range Media that turned to an expert in homeless research to pick apart the report's methodology and conclusions.
Cooley believes the media and politicians are overly focused on attacking the data and not paying enough attention to the conclusions Marbut reaches with that data.
"You can certainly note the deficiencies as you see them ... but I think it'd be a pity to miss the higher level order of what's being recommended," Cooley said.
Every effort should be made to send people back where they came from, particularly if they've been in Spokane for less than 90 days, according to the report. Those who stay should be cut off from long-term services, which should be reserved only for those with longstanding ties to Spokane. For those who are from Spokane, the report recommends mandatory treatment services in order to receive housing, which city officials claim would violate state and federal law.
Marbut has spoken out for at least a decade against policies he believes are "enabling" the homeless with "goodies," including Housing First policies that have been the national standard since 2013, in which homeless people are given stable housing upfront to enable them to then address addiction, mental health and social reintegration.
Attempts to relocate the homeless en masse are even older. The phrase "Greyhound therapy" has been used to describe the practice since the 1970s and has been criticized by researchers for just as long for redistributing the social costs of homelessness rather than improving them. Many of America's largest cities have, at one point or another, attempted similar policies; between 2011 and 2017, the Guardian tracked over 20,000 homeless people given bus tickets out of and sometimes between 16 U.S. cities.
Proponents, including the Spokane Business Association, argue that such programs reconnect people to families and friends and can lead to a long-term improvement in their situation.
Spokane's homeless service providers have engaged in the practice for years, however.
If a homeless person requests a bus ticket, and a friend or family member declares they can take them in, they will be provided a ticket. Julie Garcia, who runs the homeless services organization Jewels Helping Hands, which manages several of the city's homeless shelters, estimated her organization hands out around 250 tickets a year.
There appears to be little academic research into whether these programs lead to long-term reductions of homelessness or just move it elsewhere. The Guardian reported that, of the thousands being bused from San Francisco through the Homeward Bound program between 2010 and 2015, the city had records of following up with only three people after they reached their destinations.
But the Spokane Business Association report goes further to suggest that the city should cut off people who decline these tickets from long-term homeless services and even emergency shelters after 21 days.
While much of the study copies nearly verbatim a similar report on King County that Marbut was commissioned to write for the Discovery Institute, Marbut claims that Spokane is unusual in one regard: Homeless people aren't coming to Spokane for its quality services, but for its lax enforcement.
"What we got on the street was generally, they treat me nice here, they don't hassle me," Marbut said.
"It wasn't that they came here because of the services — many communities I go to, it's, 'Oh, they have great services' — but here it was, 'They sort of let me be.' "
This picture notably doesn't match what many homeless people on Spokane's streets have told The Spokesman-Review in recent years, who described being pushed from place to place throughout the day by law enforcement, security guards and business owners.
"We literally don't get to sit down like this," said Amber, a 32-year-old homeless woman interviewed under an overpass in August. "We are moving constantly. ... So many people have cracked feet and heels."
Cooley dismissed this type of enforcement as an "occasional blow of the horn," and wants to see tougher laws and stricter enforcement — not because he wants them to go to jail, which he says would be ineffective and expensive — but to force people to change their lives.
Cooley acknowledged that Washington's involuntary treatment laws are not extensive enough to force a homeless person into drug or mental health treatment.
Instead, he argued, the city should use its tougher homelessness laws to offer them a choice: either go to jail, or enter "voluntary" treatment.
Or they could leave, Cooley noted.
"If you find that a great number of people have no connection to Spokane at all, and you suddenly begin to say you cannot use fentanyl in this community unfettered ... how many of those folks will stick around?" Cooley asked.
In an interview, Mayor Lisa Brown dismissed the report as misinformed, arguing many of the report's claims about the city's policies were untrue and some of its recommendations were already standard practice.
"I believe this is really about the political campaigns in November," Brown said, noting Stone's longstanding funding of candidates opposing progressive policies and production of high-dollar videos to encourage tougher homelessness policies.
"I also believe that, with the resources they are apparently able to mobilize, it would be great if, as a show of good faith, they put them into an actual solution, rather than a propaganda campaign against the city and the majority on the city council," Brown added.
But Cooley believes the evidence was clear, regardless of the survey's findings, that what the city is doing is failing to have a significant impact on the city's visible homeless population or its soaring overdose deaths.
"I know Seattle really damn well, and I can't believe the rapid turnaround as it relates to enforcement," Cooley said. "And what I don't know is where those people are ... but I know they've made a visible turn in on-street homelessness."
The report has started to leak into the broader public conversation on Spokane's homelessness policies. Wendy Fishburne, vice president of the East Spokane Business Association, appeared to quote parts of it verbatim Monday before the Spokane City Council voted to reform its homelessness laws.
"Research shows that people do better recovering from addiction when they're surrounded by their families of origin," Fishburne said. "Find out where people actually come from and compassionately send them home ... so that our resources could be used for our folks."
