Sue Lani Madsen: Beyond rearranging deck chairs for homeless folks

Titanic accurately describes the size of the homelessness problem in all major cities, but a sinking ship is an unusual analogy for highlighting success in managing urban homelessness.

Former Houston Mayor Annise Parker used the tragedy of the Titanic to describe the shift in mindset behind her approach to the challenge.

Parker was in Spokane to speak to community leaders at the Hello for Good Fall Symposium this week. While Houston did some prevention and management on homelessness issues, Parker’s focus Tuesday morning was on the city’s work to make sure the system was operating efficiently and effectively.

Preventing someone from slipping into homelessness is simple, if anything about such a complex situation can be called simple. Building more housing and helping fragile households stay housed are relatively straightforward compared to supporting those floundering and in need of a lifeboat.

When the Titanic hit the iceberg in 1912, there were less than 1,200 seats in lifeboats and just more than 2,200 people on board. A high death toll was inevitable, but the tragedy was the number of seats that went unfilled. Only about 700 people were rescued from lifeboats and the rest of the capacity was wasted.

At a gathering of community partners in Houston, Parker saw agencies and people who cared, all operating separately and failing to converge to make progress. Politics and personalities got in the way of collaboration and coordination. All the outreach, all the shelters, all the transitional housing had their own intake systems. People drowned in the gap between street level contact and progress to permanent housing.

Parker focused Houston’s attention on filling the lifeboats. “People would spend days bouncing around in the system before somebody could find them and re-engage,” said Parker to the Hello for Good audience. The key was the coordinated access system.

It was a system so successful it was used as the template for a proposed Spokane Regional Authority for Homelessness, Housing, Health and Safety in 2023, after a year’s worth of meetings working with leaders across multiple jurisdictions across Spokane County, including then Mayor Nadine Woodward.

But 2023 was a municipal election year, and the proposal melted under a puddle of political pressures faster than an iceberg hitting warm water. The city of Spokane was caught in a power struggle with the Department of Commerce over clearing Camp Hope, as well as the campaign crossfire between the Woodward campaign and now Mayor Lisa Brown, who had been the head of Commerce. It didn’t help that the nonprofit charged with coordinating efforts publicly accused local officials of spreading lies and half truths while at the same time piously calling for putting politics aside.

Parker faced the same kind of turf battle challenges in Houston. Using what she described as her authority as a “benevolent dictatorship,” she was able to identify and focus resources on agencies and organizations with successful outcomes and move the money to where it worked. Changing models was resisted by some, but “maybe if you aren’t the best at it somebody else should do it.”

Parker also pointed out the difference between the chronically homeless and the episodically homeless. Permanent housing solutions will look different depending on what led each individual or family to become houseless. Some people are ready to move into affordable housing and have the skills to manage a household but “a significant portion of this population will need to be supported for the rest of their natural lives,” Parker said.

It will always be a question of managing, not eliminating, homelessness.

Then there’s the street people who may or may not be homeless. “Substance abuse, drinking and doing drugs is a social activity, those are not all homeless people,” said Parker, and that for their own safety the street drug users “want to do it in public so somebody will call the EMTs.” Community-oriented policing means officers familiar with the turf get to know both the troublemakers and the people in trouble.

Gavin Cooley, Spokane’s former CFO and one of the three planners behind the now shelved regional authority model, is CEO of the newly formed Spokane Business Association. The association is focused on interventions that are effective, realistic and affordable to address business and community safety concerns. “Open drug use and commerce cannot coexist, especially when downtown is facing 30% vacancy rates,” said Cooley in an interview on Wednesday. The association has endorsed the 1/10% sales tax increase for public safety on the city of Spokane ballot to go toward more community policing.

A Houston-style regional authority is still likely, with improvements in the 2023 plan to address concerns about governance. “Our second version will be better,” Cooley said. “We need to be working with the same data and the same strategic plan.”

It was arrogance and pride that sunk the unsinkable ship. Everyone involved in tackling this titanic problem will have to set aside their egos and remember it’s amazing what you can get done if you don’t care who gets the credit.

Contact Sue Lani Madsen at rulingpen@gmail.com.