Winter conditions leave unhoused folks with little choice: Marie is currently living out of her car, and is doing anything she can to avoid staying at Trent Resource and Assistance Center (TRAC). But on Tuesday, October 24, when the temperatures dropped, she broke down and took shelter there. She arrived a few hours after dinner was served and said around 15 people were throwing up.
“Dude, you just walk through and like brace yourself, wondering if it’s food poisoning or if it’s norovirus or what,” Marie said, wincing as she recounted how her partner was so nauseated by what they were witnessing, he couldn’t go into work. “It was really bad last year. I don’t want to be there another winter.”
As the night crawled on and temperatures dropped further, Marie said there were over 20 people waiting for beds. Some were turned away because they’d been kicked out of TRAC for prior incidents. Some waited in hopes that any of the shelter residents would leave and give up their claim to a spot. Some gave up and took the bus back to the city if they had a bus pass or left while the lines were still running. Others looked for shelter by the rivers. As temperatures continue to drop and snow sticks to the ground, this will become a familiar scene.
For the people who live on the streets and the people who care for them, this is the scariest time of the year. Each day temperatures drop below 32 degrees becomes a matter of life and death.
That’s why, for service providers in Spokane, the first whisper of winter snow brings not just a flurry of flakes, but activity. The office of Jewels Helping Hands is full of snacks, hand warmers and blankets. Compassionate Addiction Treatment (CAT) is already crunching numbers to figure out how they will afford to pay staff to provide their regular services on top of providing overnight emergency warming shelter on nights when the temperature drops to inhospitable levels. Emails are flying back and forth among members of the Spokane Homeless Coalition, swapping information on open beds, churches that are planning on creating overnight space and upcoming temperature drops.
These are some of the people on the ground saving lives, driving around at midnight to ferry unhoused people from the streets to any location that might have a bed or two available.
Meanwhile, the city hasn’t published or disseminated its 2024 plan for emergency warming, cooling and safe air centers for the coming year, which is required by law, and which was due from the mayor’s office by September 30.
On October 24, during the first snowfall of the season, the city sent out a press release on the warming resources that were activated by officials due to the predicted freezing temperatures.
These resources are determined by the 2023 emergency plan, which is in place until January and includes free transportation to TRAC via Salvation Army vans, overflow capacity at the shelter during extreme weather and a link to the sheltermespokane.org website that is supposed to be updated daily with bed availability at the different shelters around Spokane. The city is also directing people to utilize city libraries as places to warm up during daytime hours.
Service providers say that these emergency measures from officials are inadequate, didn’t work last year and put additional strain on providers working overtime on shoestring budgets to keep people alive.
Picking up the slack
As other employees in the office processed donations, Julie Garcia told RANGE what it was like to do boots-on-the-ground work as part of Jewels Helpings Hands’ Outreach Team during the frigid Spokane winters. She spoke of people losing fingers, toes and limbs to frostbite, of the agony she heard when she’d get people into shelter or a warm space and their extremities would start to defrost.
“Our job on outreach is only to make sure that people don’t die … We just try to minimize the damage done by the lack of services,” Garcia said. “We don’t succeed, just so you know. It’s not a successful endeavor. We help some people, but we have hundreds of people that die every year on our streets because of lack of resources and services.”
According to data collected by CHAS Health, at least 144 people died while experiencing homelessness in 2022 (their data doesn’t break down by season). In 2021, the organization said at least 162 people died.
Hallie Burchinal, executive director of CAT, knows the organization is going to have to open an emergency warming center. Putting up shelter space doesn’t fall within the normal day-to-day purview of CAT, which focuses on zero-barrier counseling, substance abuse and navigational services. According to Burchinal, this amounts to a drain of tens of thousands of dollars on what she characterized as a shoestring budget as well as a significant investment of limited staff time. But it saves lives, so CAT takes a broad approach to their mission and opens all the space it can, within city code, to bring people in from the cold.
“Every winter we’re just drowning in need,” Burchinal said. “We’re not going to let people sit out there and die.”
Both Burchinal and Garcia agree: the city’s lack of communication and collaboration with service providers make winters on the streets deadlier for the people who live on them.
“We know it’s going to be winter every year. And we know Spokane winters are long, miserable and cold,” Garcia said, commenting on the city’s undistributed plan. “We don’t ever come up with a plan ahead of time.”
And so, when the libraries close for the night, when sheltermespokane.org shows no available beds, when TRAC has a waiting list, the burden of keeping people alive falls to people like Burchinal, Garcia and their respective staff. They both spoke about leveraging the community trust they’d built with people living on the streets and their relationships with small churches and nonprofits in town to sleep a few people here, a few people there.
Even when the city makes additional resources available, it can be difficult to connect to the people who need them. Two years ago, when the city opened the convention center to create emergency space during an extreme cold snap, Burchinal and her wife got in their car and found people to take to the center, because the folks living on the street had no idea it was an option.
For the past five years, Jewels Helping Hands has opened warming shelters. Last year, it ran the access tent in Camp Hope, which served as a cooling shelter in the summer, a warming shelter in the winter and a hub for services. This year, Camp Hope is closed, so they don’t have the access tent, and due to a lack of financial support, they won’t be able to offer a warming shelter either.
“We don’t have the capacity for that again this year to continue to bail the city of Spokane out every single year without funding,” Garcia said. “It is unfair for the city and administration to think that our staff works for free.”
Spokane’s plan: Publish the plan?
There’s still no publicly available emergency plan for 2024, and local organization Spokane Community Against Racism (SCAR) has been emailing the city through Attorney Deb Conklin asking the city to publish it by today, Oct. 31, a month after the original deadline.
An email sent to RANGE showed that the city’s director of emergency services had shared a 10-page document with city council members and their staff on September 29, one day before the September 30 cutoff. Councilmembers were not briefed and the plan wasn’t discussed or shared at any public meetings. The unpublished document is brief — four pages of which were devoted to emergency warming shelters — and says the city will “leverage the existing shelter system and associated infrastructure.” It is essentially the same plan as 2023, complete with the same solutions that service providers say aren’t enough.
And while the official infrastructure is the same, this winter will have at least one big hole in the community-wide support net: Camp Hope is gone, and with it, the large tent structure that served as a warming and cooling shelter with safety checks organized by the camp to centralize donations and make sure people didn’t freeze to death.
Council’s newest member, Ryan Oelrich, said because he’d just stepped into his role on council, he wasn’t sure why the plan wasn’t shared publicly.
Comparing the details in the document to the point in time count of Spokane’s homeless population, Oelrich said he doesn’t find the plan adequate.
“We have to wrestle with what we can afford to do, with what we should do,” Oelrich said. “I still worry about how prepared we are, especially given how weather has been.”
We called and emailed city spokesperson Brian Coddington to ask why the plan wasn’t shared publicly and what informed the resources provided by the plan, and received no response. We will update the story if we do.
According to service providers and unhoused folks like Marie using TRAC, the existing shelter system isn’t working. Sheltermespokane, the city’s dashboard showing available beds across Spokane, has been near capacity all last week. The dashboard showed similarly scant availability last year, but Camp Hope’s warming tent and support system took some of the strain off official city infrastructure. Without the warming tent and constant distribution of resources found at the camp, service providers say there will be even more people trying to find emergency shelter, with few beds available. Conditions at TRAC are dangerously unsanitary, and according to residents, become worse when the city pushes the surge capacity from 350 to 400, which it does when the temperatures drop and beds are full. The first surge of the season has already taken place Tuesday, October 24, according to an email from Maurice Smith of Rising River Media.
The plan in its 10-page entirety can be viewed below, but TLDR: the only additional resources it adds when the city drops into crisis-level-temperature-lows are those 50 overflow beds at TRAC.
Turning a crisis into an opportunity
While the current approach to providing winter emergency services looks a lot like a triage, Garcia and Burchinal both imagined a world where the winter was an opportunity instead of a crisis — because, for once a year, instead of being scattered throughout the city limits, the weather drives far more people to whatever warming shelters are available.
“In winter, those folks are forced to come inside,” Garcia said. “And that is an absolutely amazing opportunity to start getting people, one, sober; two, mental health care; three, health care; and four, housing ready — and breaking down some of those barriers.”
On a small scale and without city funding or support, Burchinal is already doing this. She said when CAT opens up a warming shelter, the Street Medicine team will set up in the nonprofit’s parking lot, ready to provide healthcare. Burchinal will bring in Officer Richie Plunkett, one of the city resource officers, to connect those with the highest needs to behavioral health support. With city funding, she knows she could do more.
But for now, with the first snow checked off and more on the way, Burchinal and Garcia are focused on keeping people alive.
“Whether you see them or you don’t, they’re out there,” Garcia said. “And they’re going to die during the winter, every single year, until we provide space for them.”
“For the community, if people want to help, here’s what they can do to help. Look at the folks that are providing outreach and supply their needs. We don’t ask for things we don’t need, because none of us have storage for those things. If there is a place that’s opening their doors, even for a short period of time, support or volunteer there. They need your help. Donate your money, donate your time. Those are the folks that are going to require your help. And advocate to our city to provide humane and safe warming centers for people experiencing homelessness.” — Julie Garcia
The city’s press release also includes warning signs of hypothermia, links and phone numbers for shelters and transportation and library hours.
