City reports street outreach has closed nearly 100 homeless encampments in 10 days

Spokane’s new homelessness outreach teams, in collaboration with Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington, have closed nearly 100 encampments within the first 10 days of inception, the city announced Thursday.

Four teams were created in September as part of the H.O.M.E. Starts Here Initiative, the city’s new method to expand its homelessness response efforts that places those teams in Spokane’s police precincts. The outreach teams are made up of social workers from Catholic Charities.

The encampment sites were discovered based on reports to Spokane’s code enforcement, or 311, where Spokane residents can call to report an unlawful campsite. Teams visited the sites of reports filed within the last 12 days, or ones known as “active,” according to a press release from the city of Spokane. A majority of the sites did not have people. A majority of people contacted at the sites did accept referrals to housing or behavioral health services, according to the release.

The city is able to track the closure of encampments and movement of the homeless population through an internal system called the “Homeless Management Information System,” or what city staff refer to as HMIS. Providers who work with the city are contractually obligated to report information about the people they serve for data purposes, city spokesperson Erin Hut said, so teams were able to report a majority of the people from this month’s closed encampments were going to a shelter or the “navigation center” that is led by nonprofit Jewels Helping Hands. The navigation center is meant to be a “central facility” that homeless people can start at before they are sent to a shelter or housing service.

City Councilman Jonathan Bingle suggested during a candidate forum Thursday evening that the high number of cleared encampments may have already dispersed before outreach teams arrived due to a “backlog” in report collections. Hut said there is not a backlog, but that people tend to move frequently and there were people who have left the camp by the time teams arrived.

According to data shared with The Spokesman-Review, multiple reports show teams documenting descriptions of camps, the amount of people at the camps and what services they needed. Some addresses show teams writing that they need to check back for services at a later date. In one instance, teams were documented giving a couple with dogs some pet food and bus passes.

Heat maps Hut provided also show some camps were in the abatement phase, others are in an outreach phase. Each camp is also identified as a vehicle camp or a “traditional” camp.

“We are encouraged by the early progress that our outreach teams have made in connecting our most vulnerable neighbors with housing and services,” President of Catholic Charities Housing Ventures Jonathan Mallahan said in the release. “Because of these efforts, there are fewer people who are forced to sleep, eat, and exist outdoors.”

The new outreach method is a supplement portion of the HOME ordinance, which has been criticized as ineffective. City leadership recently sought an emergency solution for the law enforcement component of the ordinance because no citations were being issued under the anti-camping law, Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall said in a City Council Public Safety committee meeting. The ordinance allows for an unspecified notice period and for someone to avoid a citation by leaving.

Early next week, Spokane 311 will be taking reports from the public who see people in need of assistance that will prompt a real-time dispatch of the outreach teams, the press release said.