‘It’s not perfect, but it’s better than sleeping under a bush’: Senior couple navigates homelessness in Spokane following eviction

Donna Gerken is readying to celebrate her 81st birthday homeless, along with her 77-year-old husband, Ernie Gerken.

“My bed is a mess,” she said apologetically when a reporter visited the couple in a shelter last week. “But I have two dogs living on it 24/7.”

The Gerkens, along with chihuahuas Tinkerbell and Tootsie, have spent the past five months living from a pair of beds in Morning Star Baptist Church after being evicted from their home. Dozens of people share the space with them, including on a bunk above their pillows.

“You get up and have a cup of coffee, or breakfast, whichever you want. Get all cleaned up and dressed for the day,” Donna said. “Take a nap. Eat lunch. Take a nap.”

“You wouldn’t believe how much she – she spends most of her time asleep,” Ernie interjected.

“What am I supposed to do? I’m not a TV person, so I don’t watch TV,” she said, joking that she doesn’t go anywhere on the bus because she is a “snob.”

“No, I just don’t know how to get around on the bus, to tell you the truth,” she said.

Mornings are “like a madhouse” as the 30-odd occupants clamor for a turn in the shelter’s only shower – a portable stall, featuring a step to get in but no handrails for unsteady users.

“It’s not perfect, but it’s better than sleeping under a bush, let me tell you,” Donna said. “Jewels has always made sure that things are as right as they can be. I really appreciate her.”

The “Jewels” Donna Gerken referred to is Julie Garcia, founder of the nonprofit Jewels Helping Hands.

“This is the new normal for homelessness, is this population of folks. And we don’t have services for this population of folks,” Garcia said. “I mean, there’s no reason they should be in a homeless shelter with people struggling with addiction and just random people coming in every day, but it’s their only option right now.”

The road to homelessness

Of course, the Gerkens never intended to become homeless.

They do not drink or do drugs, outside of Donna’s cigarettes. Ernie stopped smoking around four years ago when he wound up in the hospital, unable to breathe.

Overall, they consider themselves to be “normal people.”

People have no right to judge others, Donna said.

“Unless they walk a mile in my shoes, then they can’t,” she said.

The Gerkens moved into their previous house near the corner of Mansfield and Northwest Boulevard in 2020, not long after getting married.

“We got it about the time that COVID was going on and couldn’t find any place,” Donna said. “So it was available and we needed a place to live, you know, so we took it. And it was a big mistake.”

Donna was born and raised in Spokane. In her younger years, she moved to Alaska with a husband, had two sons and thought she “had the world by the tail.” Fifteen years later, her husband was arrested on 17 counts of child molestation.

“I went home and packed up the kids and we left,” she said. “And in the divorce, I was supposed to get 50% of the house and 50% of his accounts payable. Our house went on the market for $1.4 million; I never got a dime. Out of his accounts payable, I got $2,400.”

She moved to Post Falls to be with her sister. After remarrying, Donna was the breadwinner of her family as a property manager at Goodale and Barbieri before taking an early retirement to care for her seizure-prone mother. She divorced again when her then-husband said that her children were “stealing his inheritance” from her sick mother.

She met Ernie around 2017 online, and the two married in 2019.

Ernie was in the Army from 1968 to 1971, then rejoined from 1974 to 1983. He later worked as a fruit farm forklift driver, but “like a dummy,” did not set up a 401K because his pay was low. He said he was fired rather than laid off one winter, resetting his seniority in the company, and was unable to find a business to hire him at age 60.

The Gerkens now rely on a total monthly income of $3,400 in social security. They could afford the $750 per month rent for the house in 2020, but over the next couple years, rent nearly doubled, rising to $1,395 at the beginning of 2025.

That’s to say nothing of the condition of the house, though. The Gerkens said it was a disaster from the minute they moved in.

“There was cupboard doors that were missing. There was a fireplace, and it had a hearth, but the hearth cover was off and it went right down to the ground,” Donna said. “It was a highway for the mice. They put a wooden board over the top of it, but that didn’t stop them.”

Leaks from the ceiling, raw sewage overflow from a drain near the bathroom window and a furnace broken for two weeks in the middle of winter were just a few of the issues the Gerkens allege occurred during their time in the house.

Erin Hut, spokeswoman for the City of Spokane, said that code enforcement has received “multiple code enforcement complaints” for the location. The house is currently boarded up, though it was not the city’s doing.

The management company leasing the house to the Gerkens did not respond to requests for comment by The Spokesman-Review.

“I’m a bit of a rebel, so I just quit paying,” Donna said. “They could sit there and sing all day long. I will not give them another … penny.”

In Washington, tenants who withhold rent payments in a bid to encourage landlord repairs can legally be evicted.

Barriers to shelter

The Gerkens were evicted for nonpayment in May. They packed all of their belongings into a storage unit and lived out of hotels and motels for two months, costing them around $4,000, Donna said.

Between the two of them, the Gerkens have five children, eight grandchildren and four great -grand children. None of them has the resources to support two more people moving in, though.

“They’re barely taking care of themselves,” Donna said. “I mean, my youngest son, Ryan, he helps where he can, but he’s not a millionaire. He’s barely making it. And Kevin can’t work. So I don’t know what they’re supposed to do.”

The $2,000 per month that a hotel costs is unsustainable for the Gerkens, especially considering that they financially support Donna’s son Kevin, who cannot work due to sickness.

“For three people, that’s not enough money,” she said, eyeing Tinkerbell and Tootsie. “And two critters.”

Tinkerbell is Tootsie’s mother, but the two roughhouse like sisters. Ernie said the chihuahuas “think they’re the boss,” and Donna mouthed behind cupped hands that “they are the boss.”

“They’re my family,” she said, noting she could not part with them.

Pets are not allowed in many homeless shelters around Spokane, but narrowing the options even more for the Gerkens is their marriage and an ever-growing slew of health concerns. Often, Spokane shelters are segregated by gender, and the locations that can accommodate couples are not designed to do so when one or both of the pair suffers from health complications.

Ernie’s oxygen equipment meant he was unable to stay at an overnight-only shelter. Donna ran the risk of losing any bed she did get alongside Ernie when she needed surgery, twice, after the eviction.

The couple called Garcia for help in July and secured their beds at Morning Star.

“So traditionally, if this was a different case, she would have went and had surgery, and then she would have went to the medical respite and stayed there. He can’t go there, nor can he visit her there,” Garcia said. “So she would have just been stuck there by herself, where here they were able to accommodate her needs here and allow him to be her caregiver.”

Being without Donna even for just the few days she has been gone for surgeries was rough, though, Ernie said.

“Especially with these two,” he said of Tinkerbell and Tootsie. “Because it almost takes two people to watch these two.”

A growing issue

Garcia said that the older population is increasingly facing homelessness as rent prices inflate out of proportion with social security funds. While the number of homeless people in Spokane has decreased by over 580 individuals since 2023, the proportion of homeless over age 64 has increased from 4.7% to 5.4%. In January 2025, there were 98 people over age 64 identified as homeless.

“This (social security) amount isn’t sustainable for a house or an apartment any longer for this population,” Garcia said. “So we’re finding elderly folks going into homelessness that have never been homeless before, so they don’t know the rules. They don’t know the navigation.”

An assisted -living facility is out of the question as well, the pair fiercely independent despite their ailments. Many older adults are reluctant to move to specialized care facilities, said Kari Stevens, the community living connections director for Aging and Long Term Care of Eastern Washington.

“They’ve grown up through the depression and through all kinds of issues in our economy and they’ve made it until now. Now, they can’t just hustle and pull their bootstraps up,” she said.

“They are truly in a vulnerable position where they cannot increase the income that’s coming in to them in any way, shape or form … and they’re often too proud or embarrassed to ask for help, and they don’t even know where to start.”

Once an eviction begins, “it gets to be very difficult to stop,” Stevens said. While there are a handful of beds available around Spokane that can support someone with mobility or health issues, they are usually full.

“If they don’t have any support networks of their own, it makes it really difficult to do anything,” she said. “A lot of them end up presenting to our ER departments, which increases our costs significantly citywide as well. It’s cheaper to help them and house them than it is to continue to access emergency services and be on the streets.”

“It happens because of greed. People are greedy for the almighty buck, and they feel like they can exploit, especially people who are on social security,” Donna said of her situation. “You know, we don’t have much resource.”

But things are looking up for the Gerkens. Donna’s son Ryan has been working towards purchasing a house big enough to share with the couple, and they are expecting to move in by January. The house features a second-story deck, on which Donna said she would put a barbecue and a table with an umbrella.

The Aging and Long Term Care group has a hotline for seniors who are under threat of becoming homeless, aimed largely at preventing evictions. But the real solution in Stevens’ eyes lies with the community.

“There isn’t going to be a program or a grant that’s going to cover this issue,” she said. “We’re going to have to band together to do this as a community.”