Homelessness increased across the nation and state this year – but not as quickly as in Spokane

Homelessness is on the rise nationally and across Washington, but the increase is sharper than average in the Spokane area, according to estimates from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Every year, teams of mostly volunteers take to the streets and area homeless shelters to tally the unhoused population during a single night in January. Those point-in-time counts found roughly 653,100 Americans were experiencing homelessness this year, a 12% increase since 2022, the sharpest year-over-year rise and the largest overall homeless population since reporting began in 2007.

More than 28,000 homeless people were tallied in Washington this year, the fourth-largest homeless population in the country behind only Florida, New York and California. Washington came in third in per capita homelessness, topped only by New York and California. For context, Texas, which has nearly four times the population of Washington, reported it had roughly 700 fewer people – 27,377 – experiencing homelessness in the latest point-in-time count.

The state’s homeless population rose nearly 20% since 2007 and roughly 11% since 2022, the sharpest year-over-year increase in at least the past 16 years.

While the rise in homelessness and the conditions driving it are being felt across the United States, some areas have been hit harder than others. Volunteers counted 2,390 homeless people in Spokane County this January, a 36% increase from 2022 – a rate three times higher than the country or state.

These snapshots are also likely a significant undercount. The state Department of Commerce’s Snapshot of Homelessness, which includes those who received some form of public assistance and were categorized as homeless for any period of time during January, estimates Spokane’s homeless population in 2022 was over 14,000, more than eight times larger than when counted in that year’s point-in-time tally.

The statewide average was also likely thrown off because Seattle and King County elected to not perform a point-in-time count this year, and researchers used estimates based on 2022 data.

The forces behind increases in homelessness are varied and complex.

The dramatic rise this year has likely been spurred by a combination of factors including recent changes in the rental housing market and the winding down of pandemic protections and programs focused on preventing evictions, HUD wrote in a news release accompanying the agency’s report.

“It’s clearly related to the housing market, which has been very strong for several years right now,” said D. Patrick Jones, executive director of the Institute of Public Policy and Economic Analysis at Eastern Washington University.

Homelessness fell across the country more or less steadily from the 2007 peak of 647,000 to the 2016 trough of 550,000, but has risen every year since. Spokane’s homeless population has similarly climbed since a 2016 low, when 981 homeless people were counted.

During that same period, the median home resale price in Spokane County has more than doubled from $193,000 in the first quarter of 2016 to $445,000 in the third quarter of this year, according to Spokane Trends, a data site made in partnership with EWU, Providence, the city of Spokane and Spokane International Airport. Incomes have increased too, but not nearly as quickly: median household incomes in the county rose around 30% from 2016 to 2022.

“That degree of price escalation is also spilling into the rental market,” potentially pricing out residents already on the edge of homelessness, Jones said.

The average rent in Spokane County in early 2021 was nearly $1,100; two years later, the average rent has increased to over $1,300. Statewide rents increased during the same period from $1,522 to $1,826.

Homelessness may continue to rise in the year ahead, believes Maurice Smith, a documentary filmmaker who has worked in local homeless services for 18 years. This summer, he also published “A Place To Exist: The True and Untold Story of Camp Hope and Homelessness in Spokane,” a book about the Spokane homeless encampment that closed earlier this year and was once the largest in the state.

“The data sends a signal to me, having followed this for years, that our problem hasn’t peaked yet,” Smith said in a Tuesday interview. “The way we’re addressing it right now won’t work.”

Smith believes something akin to President John F. Kennedy’s moonshot is needed to reverse the trend and is looking to incoming Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown to accomplish that.

“I shared with our incoming mayor that I think her administration should have a vision to end unsheltered homelessness in the next four years,” Smith said, referring to the 955 homeless people estimated to have been living outside of shelters or transitional housing in 2023.

For her part, Brown has more modest expectations of what can be done during her four-year term in office.

“I didn’t make a campaign promise that homelessness would go away, but I said we can do better,” Brown said.

Filling the many key vacancies in the city’s departments overseeing homelessness and housing programs is a first step, Brown said, as is trying to leverage the attention on the issue in Washington, D.C., and Olympia to better fund local programs. She also said she wants to see more focus on prevention to help people on the edge of homelessness stay in their homes, as well as additional emphasis on street medicine teams to perform outreach with those already living on the streets.

“I’m hopeful that we can really ramp up our ability to respond to the immediate crisis, which in a climate like Spokane is literally people shivering outside in the cold,” Brown said. “The second piece where I think we can make a difference is really trying to stave off more families and elderly people from becoming homeless.”

Brown added that the upcoming 2024 point-in-time count, which heavily relies on volunteers, is just a month away, and encouraged residents to sign up to help. While there are reasons to believe the count is incomplete, including the annual report from Commerce, which Brown led until resigning to run for mayor this year, she noted that the tally is useful to demonstrate a community’s need to federal and state funders.