The Trent Resource and Assistance Center (TRAC), Spokane’s main homeless shelter, is headed into its second cold season — and it still doesn’t have indoor bathrooms, showers or laundry facilities for its residents.
Shelter guests still endure cold showers, unreliable hand-washing stations and portable toilets which are outside because TRAC — which was built as a warehouse — does not have adequate plumbing or facilities for the hundreds of residents it is currently permitted to house.
“Even now, with the porta-potties, half of them are disgusting,” TRAC resident Marie Nixon told RANGE. “[And] the showers, this is the third week they’ve been cold. You know what it’s like taking an ice cold shower? No heat and you’re walking out into the cold. Especially if you have arthritis. Most of the summer we didn’t have hot water in the showers. It was always cold.”
With the coming of fall and winter, former Spokane Health Officer Dr. Bob Lutz is concerned that the unsanitary conditions could fuel the spread of communicable diseases.
“From a public health standpoint, you have a high-risk population that I would argue is put at further risk by the lack of good hygiene and good public health practices,” Lutz said.
Lutz identifies the building’s lack of permanent indoor toilets and sinks as one of the major contributors to the unsanitary and unhealthy conditions.
Last winter the TRAC shelter became a hotbed for communicable diseases in part because of a lack of indoor restroom facilities and poor quarantine protocols. Nearly a year later, not much has changed, and it doesn’t look like anything is going to change before temperatures drop.
TRAC is located on east Trent Avenue, far from the city center. The building’s conversion from a warehouse has been limited, because while half wall partitions were constructed to accommodate semi-separated areas for beds, the building still lacks adequate indoor bathrooms. The heating system has not been upgraded and shelter operators had to bring in portable swamp coolers to deal with the summer heat.
The shelter has a maximum capacity of 350 people, but has fewer beds than that with many shelter guests instead sleeping on mats. As of Friday morning, the shelter was housing 373 people.
“I have concerns for the health of these individuals whose physical and mental health is already challenged,” Lutz said. “And again, we’re not doing well by these individuals, putting them in a warehouse.”
In May of this year, Spokane City Council voted to dedicate $1 million “solely for capital expenditures related to the permanent construction of restroom and shower facilities at TRAC.” In the five months since then, no progress has been made toward beginning this construction.
According to reporting from Emry Dinman at the Spokesman, the council may walk back their commitments to making improvements to TRAC entirely. Faced with a $12 to $24 million budget deficit, council members are hesitant to keep sinking money into a warehouse space that Council President Lori Kinnear says they do not plan to continue renting for more than a year.
As for the future, city council president candidates Betsy Wilkerson and Kim Plese both expressed their desire to move away from TRAC. In Wednesday’s debate, Wilkerson pledged to “find money until there is a better solution” to replace TRAC while Plese suggested reducing costs in the short term by only offering two meals per day to shelter residents instead of three. “People are living on the street. It’s not the Davenport Hotel,” Plese stated, “They have a roof over their head.”
While council members go back and forth on funding and plans for the future, Lutz, who regularly visits TRAC to care for the sick there, attests that the row of outdoor portable toilets shelter residents rely on are often unclean or overflowing. Looking into the porta-potties an hour after they had been cleaned, Lutz said, “You would not know that they had been cleaned. I mean, there’s fecal material on the seat, the toilet bowl. The urinal areas are filled with paper towels.”
For residents of the shelter, these are the conditions they live in every single day.
Marie Nixon has been staying at the shelter for more than a year with her small service dog, Charlie. She recalls two weeks at the end of June where none of the hand-washing stations had water and residents couldn’t wash their hands.
She noted that some residents even buy their own water for drinking because the drinking water at TRAC is dispensed from large Igloo-style water coolers that staff fill with a hose.
Access to functional hand-washing stations is especially important now as Spokane enters the colder seasons and cases of cold, flu, COVID and other illnesses rise. Spokane Regional Health District data shows that COVID cases in Spokane County have gradually risen from 67 confirmed cases in the first week of July to 396 confirmed cases for the week of October 7, 2023.
Compared to other shelters in town, which require masks to be worn inside, Lutz believes TRAC doesn’t do enough to protect shelter guests from the spread of COVID. “We’re seeing, you know, an uptick in cases and outbreaks in many shelters. I know it’s there at TRAC, as I said, just based upon the people I’ve seen,” Lutz said, “And yet they’re not wearing masks.”
TRAC has no signage encouraging wearing masks and those who have tested positive for COVID occupy beds alongside healthy shelter residents because TRAC no longer utilizes its quarantine tents.
“We’ve had so much disease,” Nixon said. “I’m immune compromised and I had four different couples around me that had COVID three weeks ago. Because they won’t have the [separated] COVID tents.”
Last year, as temperatures dropped, the hand-washing stations at TRAC began to malfunction, making it even harder for residents to maintain hygiene and exacerbating illness. Some of those stations were eventually moved inside out of the cold, but created an additional problem: people who had just used the restroom needed to walk back inside, potentially touching doors with dirty hands, providing another vector for disease transmission.
RANGE called and emailed Mayor Nadine Woodward’s Communications Director, Brian Coddington, to see what steps are being taken to avoid similar problems this year. We will update this story if he responds.
In addition to the risk of illness for those with compromised immune systems, TRAC is also not well suited for those with mobility issues or wheelchairs. Shelter residents are faced with obstacles that can make areas inaccessible, like steps leading up to the portable showers. Just getting to the shelter from the outside presents challenges. The process of navigating the uneven, gravely, sometimes non-existent sidewalks surrounding the shelter is tough enough on foot, and even more difficult in a wheelchair.
For Nixon, the shelter’s location, a warehouse tucked away among other industrial buildings nearly four miles from the center of the city, is indicative of the city’s desire to ignore people like her and sweep the issue of homelessness under the rug.
“Trent shelter has been a failure. The mayor has glossed it over as a big success because it holds people like cattle and they’re not seen out here,” Nixon said. “This experiment, even though it’s being glossed over as a way to get the homeless comfort and stuff, it’s not.”
“It’s a holding cell for what they’ve decided is worthless.”
