Kiwanis Helping Fill Housing Need Downtown

Six-foot-four Jim “Tiny” Wegner calls his baseball bat an “eviction notice.”

The pony-tailed night manager of the Collins Apartments at Second and Wall has booted 21 tenants in the last seven months to make the building safer.

“It’s my way or the highway,” explained Wegner, a former homeless man who says he hasn’t had a drink for a year and a half.

While Wegner finishes cleaning the 39-unit complex of drunks and drug addicts, Spokane Kiwanis Charities is completing a dramatic renovation of the sooty brick building that also houses the Hide Out tavern.

The subsidiary of the Kiwanis Club of Downtown Spokane bought the building in 1991 for $380,000 when it was a rotting, water-damaged flop house with leaky plumbing.

With about $500,000 in loans, grants and donations, Kiwanis installed new plumbing, carpeting and linoleum. It also rebuilt and modernized bathrooms, and painted the rooms and halls.

The Collins now offers some of the finest $150- to $275-a-month rooms in downtown.

Jim Caddis, president of the Downtown Spokane Kiwanis, said the goal was to help fill the need for more quality low-income housing.

“We wanted it to be safe,” he said, noting Kiwanis hired new apartment managers like Wegner and is transforming the building’s appearance and personality.

When Wegner arrived last July he said there were muggings in the halls and drunks stumbling around at 5 a.m. trying to find their way out.

Wegner found many of his new sober tenants at treatment centers and other rehabilitation programs.

“I’m like an uncle to these people,” he said. “As long as they’re willing to take baby steps out of the gutter I’m willing to help them.”