SPOKANE, Wash. — A new proposed transitional housing facility will not be coming to Spokane’s historic Carlyle Hotel.
A spokesperson for Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown confirmed the administration believes the owners of the Carlyle have accepted an offer on the property. While the city isn’t sure who made that offer, they know it wasn’t Catholic Charities.
Some community organizations, local businesses and conservative politicians were agitated when Brown administration official Dawn Kinder shared that Catholic Charities had visited the building as a potential site for a new transitional housing facility.
The administration’s support for the facility, regardless of where it ended up, was conditional on Catholic Charities closing the notoriously disruptive House of Charities shelter downtown.
Many balked at the idea of new services downtown, considering it a violation of Brown’s campaign promise to move some homeless services out of downtown into a more scattered model.
Councilmember Jonathan Bingle suggested the facility was essentially moving House of Charity a few blocks over.
Kinder countered that the transitional housing model proposed by Catholic Charity more closely resembled the Catalyst Project in the West Hills neighborhood, which advocates say has had a lower community impact than many emergency shelters.
“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.
The Carlyle has already been used as both low-income housing and transitional housing by current owner Pioneer Health Services.
Mayor Brown and her staff are also taking other steps to fulfill her promise to move to a scattered model for homelessness services, including by working to and by searching for providers for potential new emergency shelters throughout the city.
