Safe night’s sleep for homeless can save more than lives
As the sun cast long shadows through the maple trees near the north picnic shelter at Riverfront Park Tuesday night, a collection of homeless people, street ministry folks and poli-sci majors lingered over hot dogs and memories of Doug Dawson.
Dawson died last week of the burns he suffered after he was set on fire in downtown Spokane. He’d spent the night in his wheelchair outside politician Peter Goldmark’s campaign headquarters. Young political workers were so shaken by the sight of Doug’s charred chair that they skipped sleep to help organize a dinner for the homeless in his honor.
On Tuesday night Dawson’s 60-year-old cousin Mary showed up at the park. A woman with soft blond curls and kind eyes, she said she used to feed Doug chicken-fried steak or a hot beef sandwich when he’d stop by her old cafe on the Sunset Highway. Sometimes he’d wheel himself there from People’s Park.
Mary was about 10 years older than Doug. In her memories, he sounds like one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys. He had dark brown eyes and dimples, and he adored her. “He was one of the cutest little kids you’ve ever seen,” she said.
In earlier days, when he was sober, he’d stay with Mary’s family and play Monopoly with the kids. “People probably thought, ‘Why hasn’t his family helped him?’ ” she said. “A lot of his family has.”
So have local detox centers, nursing homes and hospitals. Doug Dawson went to jail more than once, and sometimes, she said, the court ordered him to treatment. His main love as an adult, especially after he lost his leg in an accident, was alcohol.
In recent years Doug wore his brown hair long and grew a beard tinged with gray.
For a while he showed up at the House of Charity in a Yankees cap.
Some days he seemed like a nice guy; other days he was incontinent and angry.
“I expected Doug to die eventually by being shot or beaten or frozen to death,” Mary said. “I never imagined he’d be burned to death like this.”
His uncle, Larry Lantis, said, “I don’t care who you are or where your place is in life, you don’t deserve to be set on fire.”
Two young men were arrested after a robbery nearby and may be charged with his murder.
They are in their early 20s, just like the campaign workers who cleaned up the picnic shelter with a look of sleep-deprived urgency in their eyes.
“If you’re going to do something inhumane to someone else,” said one of them, a recent political science grad, “you both end up dehumanized by it.”
Eldon Bishop, a 6-foot-8 man on a bicycle with long dark hair streaked with gray, goes by the name of Stretch.
He stood outside the picnic shelter Tuesday night and described what Spokane’s homeless need: a tent city and House of Charity beds open in the summer as well as the winter.
Stretch knows the danger on the streets. He said he was beaten and stabbed there a few years back.
Last winter I read a story in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell that affected my thinking about people like Doug Dawson.
Gladwell wrote about an alcoholic named Murray Barr who died on the streets of Reno, Nev.
Police there estimated that in his 10 years on the streets, Murray racked up medical expenses – including substance-abuse treatment, doctor’s visits and hospital stays – of $1 million.
Had Reno figured out how to simply give him a safe place to stay, with people to check up on him, it might have cost the city around $10,000 a year.
That solution was not just vastly more humane, but also far cheaper.
Spokane recently adopted a 10-year regional plan to reduce homelessness.
It includes housing and supervision for Lost Boys like Doug.
The plan’s drafters were urged to dream. The initial cost: nearly $100 million.
The plan estimates that on any given day in Spokane County, 2,000 people lack homes.
The city counted 528 chronically homeless people in 2004. (That doesn’t count all the temporarily homeless, who often have jobs.)
Doug Dawson’s life amounted to much more than these tidy little numbers.
But here’s the amazing thing: Think for a moment of the price of those detox stays, the nursing home and the hospital visits, the stints in jail, and the final, horrendous days in the burn unit at Harborview in Seattle.
Imagine how much all of that cost the rest of us – not to mention the loss of our collective sense of humanity here.
Now multiply that figure by at least 528.
Picture Spokane’s next crew of Lost Boys, with their dimples and their brown eyes, and suddenly $100 million starts to sound like a bargain.
In the meantime, we could listen to Stretch.
It would cost around $20,000 a month simply to keep the doors of the House of Charity open all summer long.