SPOKANE, Wash. – The Spokane City Council is considering extending a pilot program that uses smaller shelters spread across the city instead of large traditional shelters.
The scattered site shelter model spread eight smaller shelters across Spokane into neighborhoods. It stirred up controversy, especially regarding safety, but now eight months in the city says it is seeing promising results.
The city’s Community, Housing, and Human Services (CHHS) Department states that the scattered site model has assisted 1,000 people across eight different shelter locations since the program began.
“Having folks in this space, we can build trusting relationships with the provider,” said Dawn Kinder, director of the Neighborhood, Housing, and Human Services division.
Since launching this approach, CHHS reports it has seen about 41% of people successfully exited homelessness, compared to 7% at emergency shelters.
The contract supporting this program expires in June. “We’re moving towards a three month extension that will get us to September 30th of 2025,” Kinder said.
The extension helps spend remaining contract funds and gets the city through the state budget season.
The contractor for the project Empire Health Foundation says the help from the community has played a role in them staying under budget for the program.
“The strengths of this program has been the way the community has engaged with it and supported the un-housed population,” said Carl Segerstrom with Empire Health Foundation.
Jeff Stevens lives near the Cedar Center, one of the scattered shelter sites. He supports the model, however feels neighborhood agreements are critical.
“If you have a good neighbor agreement, everybody signed off on it, that that’s what will happen. And you have something to hold that shelter operator to,” Stevens said.
The hope for CHHS is to extend this model through September and eventually make it the long-term approach towards homelessness in Spokane.
“The goal would be to maintain those scattered site locations as it is. And at all eight sites. And those state, the city, contracts that we receive would allow us to do that,” Kinder said.
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