SPOKANE, Wash. – Downtown stakeholders and businesses are raising concerns about a proposal from Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown’s administration that could bring more transitional housing to the downtown core, contingent on the closure of Catholic Charities‘ House of Charity shelter.
One of the options identified for transitional housing was the Carlyle Hotel building located at Second Ave. and Post St., but that idea has garnered serious opposition from conservatives on the city council and downtown businesses.
The Brown Administration argues that the service model of the proposed project–offering transitional housing with 24-hour access to services for residents and around the clock security, instead of a strictly overnight drop-in shelter–means the impact to the community nearby will be low, but opponents disagree, since the population using the services would be largely the same as those at House of Charity, citing well documented issues around the shelter.
Downtown businesses and say they’re also miffed that the first they heard about Catholic Charities and the city eying the Carlyle Building as a potential site came at Monday’s city council briefing session, and not through direct outreach from city or Catholic Charities staffers.
“I think there’s a fundamental difference between emergency shelter and transitional housing,” Dawn Kinder–the city’s Neighborhood, Housing and Human Services Director who’s tasked with leading the charge on this project–said in a Thursday interview.
It’s worth noting that prior to being appointed to her current role in Brown’s cabinet, Kinder served as Catholic Charities’ Chief Stabilization Officer, and played a big role in getting the Catalyst Project in Spokane’s West Hills Neighborhood up and running in late 2022.
The Catalyst Project, another Catholic Charities housing project designed to help transition residents out of Camp Hope and into more permanent housing, was funded in large part by the Washington State Department of Commerce–an organization headed at the time by Brown.
“The idea for us [in the Brown Administration] in closing House of Charity is to create more Catalyst models, where people have their own spaces to occupy, they’re able to enter and exit throughout the day, they’re able to make their own meals, have their own bathrooms and showers, there’s far more robust resources available on-site,” Kinder said.
Not only is this latest transitional housing proposal similar to the Catalyst project, so is the opposition and the concerns from downtown businesses and stakeholders.
“The problem is that, especially downtown when you have 550 neighbors who have the same problems, it’s too much for any one neighborhood to absorb,” said Spokane City Council Member Jonathan Bingle, who represents District 1 and opposes the proposal. “While it’s the business center and the heart of our downtown, it’s also a neighborhood, and it just becomes too much for one neighborhood to bear the burden of homelessness. We cannot do it.”
Bingle said in an interview Thursday that regardless of whether or not transitional housing is the proposed model instead of an emergency shelter, closing House of Charity and opening another Catholic Charities project elsewhere in downtown doesn’t address the overall issues.
“You can tell me all day long ‘it’s a different model, it’s a different name,’ all that kind of stuff, but if it’s the same population that’s going there, they still have issues,” Bingle said. “They still need help, and just because now they will have a space that’ll be their own, those problems still exist and those problems are still there.”
“The fact that an emergency shelter that closes at a particular time of day and is not open for day services, and does not have the robust all day wrap-around services that a transitional housing project provides makes it extremely different,” Kinder said. “I think the Catalyst project has proved that. There was extreme opposition to that project, and it now is a welcome part of that neighborhood. We hear positive things from neighbors and surrounding businesses.”
The idea to close House of Charity and move it out of Downtown Spokane isn’t a new one. Former mayor Nadine Woodward originally announced her intention to pursue it two years ago, but the project stalled.
Brown campaigned for mayor against Woodward last year on a plan to move the city away from the use of large congregate shelters, like the Trent Resource and Assistance Center (TRAC), and towards a “scattered site” model–a new network of shelters across the city that she claims will more effectively serve Spokane’s homeless population.
The city says they are actively working with Catholic Charities to move House of Charity out of Downtown and sell the site, as well as with Compassionate Addiction Treatment to move from their office near Second Ave. and Division to another location elsewhere in the city, but specific plans–and the funding for them–have yet to be decided by the Brown Administration and the city council.
At a Monday city council briefing session discussing funding this latest push through the city’s remaining American Rescue Plan dollars, Kinder told council members that city and Catholic Charities staff have looked at several options for a new transitional housing location that Catholic Charities would open with the city’s help, with the help contingent on the closure of House of Charity.
One of those was the Carlyle Building, which, notably, is already being operated as an affordable housing project by Pioneer Human Services, another nonprofit organization with several similar housing projects across Spokane and the Seattle metropolitan area.
David Nail has owned Instant Sign Factory, located across the street from the Carlyle Building, for more than 30 years. He says they haven’t had too many issues with the current transitional housing project located there.
“We know what it can be like, and this was a nice improvement,” Nail said Thursday. “But to see it change potentially, we’ve also seen the effects of House of Charity. I know their cause is good, but perhaps maybe not the best plan where they’ve been located. I’ve known businesses that have gone out of business.”
Nail’s main concern at this point is that he hasn’t had direct conversations with anyone from Catholic Charities of the city about them even exploring the Carlyle site as an option for their latest transitional housing project.
“We do lots of outreach when there’s a confirmed project,” Kinder said. “In a lot of ways, what we see–and what I think we have an agreement from with providers–is that the providers who are planning to go into a neighborhood and provide services are the ones responsible for a lot of that engagement and conversation. The city’s a convener and facilitator of that and we want the neighborhood feedback.”
Kinder emphasized that the Carlyle location, or any location, has been chosen by the city and Catholic Charities for this new project.
“We’re talking about multiple locations being looked at and future plans, and not about decided upon projects at this point,” Kinder added.
“My response is, if you are even considering something like this, it’s best to get the trial balloon out,” Nail said. “It’s best to contact all of the city leaders and everyone who would be affected, and at least–before you spend a lot of time and energy and money–you better find out if it’s going to fly.”
Nail said he’d be more open to the Catholic Charities project being located in the Carlyle Building if the city had a concrete plan and initiated conversations with him and other nearby business owners, but for now he’s against the idea.
Other downtown businesses–including the Downtown Spokane Partnership–have been communicating and organizing their opposition to the Carlyle proposal, or any proposal that would include creating more shelters or transitional housing downtown.
In an email forwarded to NonStop Local by Downtown Spokane Partnership CEO Emilie Cameron, she tells local business owners her organization echoes their extreme concerns about the proposal:
“On behalf of the Downtown Spokane Partnership (DSP), I want to jump in to echo and elevate the extreme concerns we share. There should be absolutely no possibility, let alone discussion, about any new shelter facilities in the downtown area—especially closer to sensitive uses, hospitality activities, businesses and residents.
The DSP strongly supports closing House of Charity, it’s a broken model that’s directly resulted in the devastation that’s touched nearly every corner of this city now. We were led to believe by the administration’s support for closing the facility that the city was finally going to partner with the businesses, residents and nonprofits that have been begging for help. Instead, we’re disheartened to learn that there have been discussions to support and invest in Catholic Charities creating a new facility at Post & 2nd. It’s disingenuous to suggest that moving current patrons in House of Charity to a new facility will not have impacts. It’s even more misleading to suggest that a “Catalyst 2.0” facility could be successful in downtown. The comparison to the Catalyst facility in West Hills is apples to oranges because it is not surrounded by 550+ units currently managed by Catholic Charities and the negative activity attracted to the centralized nature of them.
The DSP strongly opposes any possibility of investing or supporting Catholic Charities, CAT or any other operator to continue to expand in the most impacted, over concentrated and over congregated neighborhood in the city. Any proposal to fund new facilities must dictate that they be outside of the downtown area.”
The Brown Administration plans to release the results of their audit of the city’s homeless shelter system–a major goal of Brown’s first few months in office–and more details about their conversations with Catholic Charities and Compassionate Addiction Treatment at another city council briefing session on Monday morning.
