The Night of the Unsheltered Homeless

[Music] for 12 weeks from the 1st of december 2020 to the end of february 2021 this building part of city church spokane was a low barrier homeless shelter providing warmth safety and stability to 35 low barrier guests every night during that time 212 different people spent at least one night in the shelter during the difficult winter months during that time two shelter guests found permanent housing six guests found transitional homes four guests got jobs six guests went into drug and alcohol treatment eight people were reunited with their families and the shelter provided 32 bus tickets for guests wanting to go home to family in other communities by any metric this temporary privately operated low barrier shelter filled with people often mislabeled as shelter resistant was an incredible success and an example of how we as a community can work together to offer practical solutions that build the shalom the peace and well-being of those experiencing homelessness how we as a compassionate community can successfully serve and build the shalom with this challenging homeless population is what this documentary is all about welcome to the night of the unsheltered homeless [Music] let's begin our time together with a story about a key it doesn't look like much just a useless key to a bike lock that's long gone the bike and the lock belong to mr green and that's where i want to begin this story we called him mr green because when outreach workers from jules helping hands first met him on the street he had dyed his hair bright green you can see him in this outreach photo his real name was jeremy jeremy henricks none of us really know just how long jeremy had been homeless but it had been a while this post on jeremy's facebook page sums up jeremy's world the week before thanksgiving of 2020. i need a place to live i'm tired of being homeless i get ssi 700 and some change anybody out there that can help me or get a room for rent i appreciate it that makes my thanksgiving christmas and a happy one i'm tired i just want to leave this world all together it's getting old somebody's out there that would be willing to help me with my own room drug free contrary to popular opinion people like jeremy don't enjoy being homeless and many of them have simply lost hope and have no place to go and nothing to look forward to the homeless in our community can lose many things and survive but hope is not one of them when you lose hope you begin to die somebody i can hand evil into you i first met jeremy or mr green in this parking lot in january of 2021 when julie garcia and i spotted him here surrounded by first responders who've been called because someone saw him sleeping in the doorway of this business i asked julie if we could go back to that parking lot and talk about that day now when we found him here and pulled into the uh the parking lot there were paramedics were here ambulance and it was escalating you could kind of tell it wasn't going to end well yeah and in fact we saw the police drive by later that would have been the next step they were in the area but i noticed the moment you got out of the car and he saw you you calmed down yeah why what happened we have a relationship how important are relationships in working with not just the homeless in general but people like mr green who have issues they don't know who to trust they're imperative there's no other way to reach those folks we can't force them yelling at them being nice to them you have to create trust and that's what jules does is create trust you know you talked to him i loaded his stuff into the car we took him up to the city church shelter that we were running at the time and he maintained there for three months and then went with us to the women's club shelter and he maintained there for about two months why was he able to maintain so well there and not be able to fit into traditional shelters because it's a mutual respect he had a respect for us we had respect for him we've been consistent with him throughout the years when we see him we help him we talk with him we treat him like a human when we were here that day and i drove past and i saw him i knew it was gonna end badly because i know mr green and the girl that he was with in all of the time that i've ever taken care of mr green the day that we took him to city church i've never seen him stay or remain sober and up until the day that he passed he was still sober and the last message that i got from mr green was a message through messenger saying i love you guys see you soon and i never heard from him again in mid-april of 2021 jeremy tested positive for coven during a routine weekly covet test of shelter guests before leaving for the immaculate heart isolation facility jeremy came to me and said here's the key to my bike lock could you keep it safe for me while i'm gone sure i said i'll be glad to jeremy was taken to the immaculate heart isolation facility where he developed a full-blown coven lapsed into a coma and died there was no obituary or public memorial his death didn't make the newspapers or tv news we found out second hand from someone at the isolation facility that's what happens when you're one of the doll one of the insignificant poor the hebrew old testament uses five different hebrew words to describe those we call the poor why five well because poverty has many different expressions including homelessness one of those expressions is found in the word doll the word used to describe the insignificant poor scripture doesn't see people as insignificant but like a brutally honest mirror it simply reflects and records how we treat them amazing how little has changed in three thousand years like the homeless and marginalized of our own day the doll occupy the lowest strata of society they don't have wealth or social standing they don't appear on anyone's social radar except as people to be avoided or swept up in a law enforcement sweep of homeless encampments and told to move on we label them bums or drug addicts to give ourselves emotional permission not to see them not to care and to treat them as if in the greater scheme of things their lives don't matter as if they are in fact insignificant we might not verbalize such feelings but we express them every day by how we treat the homeless and marginalized people like my friend jeremy after all how we see people is the beginning of how we treat people let's end this story where we started it with a bike lock key i keep it on my keychain for several reasons first i keep it to remind me of my friend jeremy second i keep it as a reminder that the lives of our homeless friends matter they may be poor and homeless but they are not insignificant and they don't deserve to be treated that way third i keep it as a reminder of the importance of low barrier shelters and shelter beds operated by service providers who understand trauma-informed care and the need to build the shalom of our community by demonstrating fearless compassion and unconditional love toward the homeless and marginalized of our city toward real people like jeremy finally i keep it as a reminder of the many homeless individuals who like jeremy have died while experiencing homelessness in the shelters and on the streets of our city this film is dedicated to them and to my friend jeremy [Music] as we produced this documentary in mid-2021 several important questions are being tossed around like a political football what should be a human issue has become a hot political issue and even a legal issue let's look at some of the most common questions first question how many people are experiencing homelessness in the shelters and on the streets of our community let's begin by setting a couple of benchmarks when it comes to homelessness and shelter beds every community receiving federal dollars to combat homelessness is required by the department of housing and urban development otherwise known as hud to conduct an annual census of their homeless population it's called the point in time count and is conducted every year during the last 10 days of january according to spokane's 2020 point in time count the last full count before covet 1559 individuals were experiencing homelessness in the shelters and on the streets of our city during the last week of january that year at this point you may be thinking that we're exaggerating the number of people experiencing homelessness in spokane actually our numbers are very conservative as we were producing this documentary i received a copy of a report titled snapshot of homelessness in washington state for july 2020 produced by the washington state department of commerce according to table 4 of that report 5424 individuals were experiencing homelessness in spokane county in july of 2020 six months after the point in time count the report hasn't been updated due to staffing issues but my guess would be that the numbers from that report are larger today than they were in 2020 welcome to the river of homelessness that flows through our community it's deeper and wider than you think second question do we have enough shelter beds for the known and counted homeless population the short answer is no we don't the city of spokane keeps a shelter capacity tracking report compiled and maintained by the city's community housing and human services department here it is according to that capacity report spokane city-wide shelter system had a capacity of 805 beds in january of 2020 when the point in time count recorded 1559 people experiencing homelessness that's a shortfall of 754 beds that's enough beds for only 52 percent of the known and counted homeless population think of it this way if every person experiencing homelessness in january of 2020 had shown up at local shelters looking for a bed 48 out of 100 would have been turned away because there were no beds third question what's the shelter bed capacity today in 2021 a june 13 2021 article in the spokesman review stated that preliminary data from the january 2021 point in time count showed that 992 people were counted in city shelters that month the city of spokane used this preliminary data to argue that the city-wide shelter capacity was 992 beds no it isn't the annual point in time count is always divided into two parts sheltered and unsheltered due to coveted restrictions the 2021 count did not include the unsheltered part people not staying in shelters simply were not counted the remaining sheltered portion of the count is always divided between emergency shelter beds and transitional housing historically the emergency shelter portion of the sheltered count is consistently about 79 percent of the total with the transitional housing portion making up the other 21 for 2021 this would mean 783 shelter beds were filled not 992 and the city's own capacity report showed 773 total shelter beds in the city-wide system at that time according to the city's own internal numbers the shelters were full do you see the problem if the shelters were full in january of 2021 where were the unsheltered homeless that did not get counted supposed to go because there were no beds using the unsheltered numbers from the 2020 count this would mean 541 unsheltered individuals with no access to a shelter a bed or the services those shelters might provide getting an accurate count of emergency shelter beds often feels like trying to nail jello to a tree due in no small part to the city's lack of transparency as part of this documentary project our research team directly contacted every shelter in our city and asked them to verify their bed capacity and how many of those beds were low barrier beds this graphic shows the result of our research the city-wide shelter system has never had more than the 805 emergency shelter beds reported in january of 2020. as this graphic shows by mid-2021 as we filmed this documentary that number had fallen to 769 for a net loss of 36 beds for a city with a known and counted homeless population of 1 559 having only 769 shelter beds presents a problem the homeless have nowhere to go fourth question are there open shelter beds every night and why don't the homeless access those beds a new catchphrase recently entered the discussion surrounding those who refuse to stay in local shelters they're referred to as shelter resistant let me be clear shelter resistance is a myth these are people who like my friend jeremy simply cannot maintain in a traditional shelter and the reasons run much deeper than a catch phrase much deeper issues than the number of available beds the reality is that we don't have the right kinds of shelter beds and i do want to push back against this myth urban legend out there that the people who are not in shelters don't want to be sheltered that is just completely untrue and the numbers don't bear that out the shelters that we had last year we had two shelters that were low barrier 24 7 co-ed shelters they were full every night they were totally full and when we closed uh one of those shelters uh this summer which we shouldn't have done but when we did the city did it uh those people went back to living on the streets we knew they liked shelters there are some people that might not want to go to a particular shelter if the rules are too harsh or might be a particular religion or it's really a drug treatment center and they're not either appropriate for drug treatment or they're not ready there are occasions like that but for the most part people who are living in the cold in the heat if you gave them low barrier shelter that worked for their psychological mental health needs they would take us up on it and they do regularly i sat down with dr samuel murray to explore his thoughts on issues of trauma and shelter resistance one of the symptom clusters is avoidance you know that's in the definition of the illness that a person would avoid uh stimuli that would recreate the emotions or the or the physical sensations um uh of the original trauma or the or the stacked traumas on top of each other and so uh you know if i if i think about people who um grew up in poverty um in uh homes where there was people coming and going all the time where there might have been someone selling or using drugs out of the home where there was uh unpredictable violence where a lot of noise coming out of out of the parent's bedroom meant there was a fight right and you go to a shelter environment where a lot of that that's you know shelters can be quiet places shelters can be calm places there's lots of really really good shelters but even in the best of circumstances shelters are dynamic place there's a lot going on and that amount of stimuli for a person who has that past experience to me it makes sense that it would be just it would be avoided it might make it might be for a person an individual person it might feel safer to go sleep unsheltered on a park bench and be at risk of frostbite than to go into a situation where they know they're going to be on edge they're going to be hyper vigilant they're going to be waiting for something bad to happen they're not going to get any rest and they're likely to feel worse for the street homeless the issues keeping them out of shelters involve such things as deep personal trauma including trauma experienced in shelters mental health like jeremy medical respite issues substance abuse concerns about personal safety especially among homeless women i've personally spoken with women who have recounted their experiences of being sexually exploited by shelter staff there's more but hopefully we get the point by the way these are some of the same issues which prevent the homeless and marginalized from accessing city-sponsored cooling and warming centers the popular myth of shelter resistance exposes the glaring lack of the right kinds of shelter beds but there's more i have a background in clinical psychology education and training and one of the things i learned really early on from one of my mentors was this rule that everyone's behavior makes sense once you get all the information even things that seem inexplicable to us on the surface can be explained once you know everything that's factoring into that behavior it could be something as dramatic as they live in a different reality because they have uh delusions or hallucinations of schizophrenia for instance you might see someone running down the street yelling in terror with nothing behind them which makes no sense to you but when you learn more about that person they may have they might actually see a bear chasing them and so it actually makes perfect sense for them and when you understand that someone has trauma in their history or an addiction or mental illness or poverty or any number of factors um that make sense to them when you get to know it then you can start solving the problem so are you a vet absolutely have you guys seen actually i died in the navy and they brought me back to life what you're seeing in this video is a homeless veteran with severe ptsd and mental health issues whom i filmed and interviewed with his permission under a bridge one winter's evening in january of 2021 a police suite may move him out from under the bridge as it did the following week but there are no shelter beds for him that will meet his mental health needs a hundred empty shelter beds in a dozen traditional shelters won't address his challenges where is he supposed to go and there are many more like him in the subterranean river of homelessness that flows through our city where are they supposed to go when traditional barrier shelters simply won't work one of the answers to this question is the availability of low barrier shelters where the shelter resistant can rebuild lost trust find safety stability and a path forward and that brings us to our next question what is a low barrier shelter and why does it matter and do they even work recently federal courts have increasingly ruled in favor of the homeless based on the lack of adequate shelter beds preventing cities from enforcing municipal no camping or sit in live ordinances when there are insufficient low barrier beds to accommodate the unsheltered homeless i think the martin versus boise decision illustrates really well the limited power of the courts and what their power actually is it was considered a major blow for homelessness rights and people who advocate for the homeless to get a final a court victory that said there's a limit on what the city can do but it's important to recommend remember a few things the um it was rare it was it was got so much attention because it's not often that plaintiffs win cases like that it was vigorously opposed there were a number of dissents that were some of the most strongly worded ascents i've ever read in my career as a lawyer to saying how wrong the court was to do this and so judges aren't of one mind to do what was done in martin to be boise and then it was very limited in scope within itself it held only that it violates the eighth amendment for the police to arrest somebody for being on the streets if there are no homeless shelter beds available but of course that leaves a lot of other options available to the police so when there are homeless beds available they can still arrest people and it only says that you can't criminalize the existence of somebody as a poor person a homeless or unhoused person but it left open the option of police to still arrest people for conduct crimes such as obstructing the sidewalk or other things that aren't based on their existence and so police have been able to get around a lot of the martin versus boise spirit by doing that the power of martin v boise was not in what the court ordered it's how the public responded to the court's decision uh the media gave it a lot of attention um and then people gave a lot of attention as community members speaking up at city council meetings and writing into their politicians and marching and demanding that hey this is a problem if we're arresting people and you know the decision itself made boise change during the litigation it stops it changes policies to say we're not going to enforce the sit and lie law while shelters are full and it's going to admit it in the in the litigation that you know rest should be the last resort and it's prompted boise and other cities around the country to start thinking about investing more in shelters and housing and low barriers to getting the housing the city of spokane has publicly acknowledged that it doesn't have the low barrier day shelter space required by the courts to enforce its own no camping or sit and lie ordinances so yes low barrier shelters matter when it comes to community homeless policy and practice so let's go back to the whole idea of low barrier shelters versus barrier shelters and why low barrier shelters are so important for folks like mr green well how else are you going to get them in off the street we have high barrier shelters and they're great and they work but somebody in mr greene's condition can't meet those barriers whether he wants to or not he's not mentally able his addiction isn't going to get him to maintain long enough and nobody just quits drugs to go into a shelter that's just not the way that it works on a personal note i've been directly involved in operating four low barrier shelters three of them during a pandemic and under less than ideal conditions i'm not an expert but i do play one in documentaries low barrier shelters accept anyone regardless of their condition or level of need and without any requirements for admission or participation these shelters serve this most vulnerable population as a backstop when everything else has failed when traditional shelters aren't an option when everyone else has given up when the struggling homeless have lost hope and have nowhere else to go to restart their journey back to stability low barrier 24 7 shelters can offer not only a safe bed for the night but a place to spend the day access services get food use a restroom take a shower do laundry securely store their belongings and even receive medical care when needed a low barrier shelter can offer stability and a friendly starting point for a new journey out of homelessness as it did for my friend amanda i met amanda when she came to stay at the city church low barrier shelter in late november of 2020. her stay at the city church shelter became the end of a long journey through abuse trauma drugs and homelessness and the beginning of a new journey into a new life i asked amanda to join me back at the city church medicine building where we met so let's talk about the fact that we're back in the old shelter at city church looks a lot different than the last time you and i were here completely oh yeah there's just everything's different the desks no longer there the beds the food the tables your bed was just about where you're standing right up against the wall there let's talk about where were you before you came here um i was in a homeless camp in mead there was a bunch of us and uh it it it was hard out there like i love the people from there i just i could never go back because it's drugs and people living life that i don't like like they steal just to make money just to be able to do things you know and i couldn't even do it like everyone's like well why don't you come with me i couldn't like i couldn't even go scrap with them because it was still stealing from somebody else you know so you wound up there you were fleeing domestic violence yes because you'd been homeless for a while and you'd been using drugs for a while how long had that been going on um the domestic violence was well off and on since well more on than anything um since 2011 actually and then the drugs started in 2018 in june of 18. and then somebody from jules helping hands was doing outreach out there and that's when you heard about the city church shelter is that right yeah um they handed i had it was handed four sandwiches some socks and a bus pass with the address on it and i was told that the shelter it was its first day it was opening day and if i wanted a bed they'd saved me a bed and i said yes and i came that very day like i didn't look back you told me once that you'd only been sober clean for about four days when you got here yeah yeah it was my i was clean for four days my clean date is november 27th officially because i had done drugs the day before but no drugs as of november 27th how did life here in the shelter impact you what what changed you were a very different person than the amanda i met oh yeah back in november what happened people carry um i have never experienced anything like i have ever since jules came into my life i had people that cared and wanted me to succeed and they were doing anything and everything they could possible to give me that that comfort that help that guidance and everything to be able to keep my life and get off the drugs get off the streets and to better my situation and other people kind of stepped up too i i know eventually you went to stay with pastor jason and his family from city church right next door here this is their building and they basically adopted amanda and took you into their family yeah i mean i the night they asked me if i wanted to live with them i just i thought i was going over for dinner they asked jason goes well i want to come over for dinner one night and i said yeah so i'm thinking i'm going over to their house just to eat dinner well after we ate dinner they asked me at the end of it if i wanted to move in because the spirit was telling them i was telling them to have me live with them and so i said yes i cried like a baby but now i have my own room because of them and i have a home i have a safe place and a family and i'm involved in the church and jason and i keep talking about this building and where i came from and how god saved the city church and jules helping hands because if it wasn't for everybody involved i would probably be dead right now something has profoundly changed yes it has uh and it's jewels it's the shelter well let's talk about that the importance of a low barrier shelter which is what this was back in november of 2020 when you came here how important is it for folks like yourself or others and in homeless camps have not been in shelters for a while to have access to a low barrier shelter i mean look what it did for you it is beyond important um some i i always said i would never go to a shelter because of things that have happened growing up and prior at shelters you know but having access to a little barrier shelter is it's vital it literally is an in our survival of homeless as well as drugs any drug addict and homeless because without it you we're afraid to do anything we're afraid to go to a shelter because who knows what's going to happen whether they're going to call the police and we're going to get arrested or if there's going to be a problem you know but having it where you can come because somebody cares and they don't care about who you are or what you've done they just care about helping you and continuously helping you there is nothing more important than that and that is exactly why i am where i'm at today because the people that care and because because jewels in the low barrier shelter because i had the opportunity to come and not be judged not be ridiculed nothing just have a place to lay my head on a bed every single night for two and a half months i was fed i was clothed i had endless amounts of clothes i didn't even know what to do with it because people care because i had access to the little barrier shelter and i have climbed out of everything because i've had that access and i've had those people and if it wasn't for the low barrier shelter i promise you i would still be on the streets if not dead right now one surefire way to not solve a problem is to underestimate its size and to make your plans accordingly any plan created on such bad data will be smaller than the problem we're trying to solve and will doom us to eventual program failure we do ourselves the homeless and our larger community no favors by underestimating the size of our homeless population and by offering inadequate one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter shelters that don't address the needs that keep people out of shelters that's why accurate numbers matter and why current regional plans to address homelessness are all but guaranteed to fail the plan continues to be smaller than the problem homelessness is much bigger than regional policy makers are willing to acknowledge those of us who attempt to speak truth to power often feel like the little boy in hans christian andersen's the emperor's new clothes not the feedback the emperor wanted during his uh unveiling as for the homeless on the streets and in the parks of our community they aren't going to mystically disappear like some urban homeless version of brigadoon simply because we choose not to accurately count them or provide adequate and appropriate alternatives for them we'll never build the shalom the peace and well-being of our community and the homeless who live here by doubling down on the failed approaches of the past we need a better and a different path forward what if it looks like a mess we could fill a complete documentary with footage and stories of law enforcement sweeps of homeless camps forcing people to move on with nowhere to go and perhaps at some point we will but for now i simply want to humanize the reality of all such sweeps and to ask questions about their effectiveness and even their legality in the previous segment we established that the city of spokane doesn't have either enough shelter beds or the right kinds of shelter beds for those struggling with homelessness in our community if that's true and it is then what's the purpose of law enforcement sweeps and what about the trauma and collateral damage that such sweeps inevitably create unfortunately law enforcement sweeps of homeless encampments like this one have become daily events with personal belongings being tossed into a city garbage truck in the process of this week one individual was injured when his hand was run over by a city garbage truck it's time to ask ourselves is this the best we can do as a city to serve those in need our current policy in spokane of conducting police sweeps with homeless really fits into a very long historical narrative throughout the country of using the police power of the state to try to rid the us of undesirables whoever they might be you know whether it was day laborers or migrant workers the poor uh minorities um whether they be racial or sexual or otherwise we have a long history of trying to solve that problem as we see with force with criminal sanctions with police with jail and judges and punishment and our history is very clear that it just doesn't work to meet the goals that we might have and it's inhumane and never goes to the root of the problem it's just maybe it's the easiest fix that one can reach for we have these police already here and they can use force we can get an immediate by by morning this area will be clear but it doesn't do anything for the long run didn't solve the root causes if you've moved someone from the street for a day where do they go tomorrow and then it just shows um a lack of what's the word i'm looking for empathy and i think the problem solving that we need to say if we really want to solve this problem for our sake if not for the other person's sake who were frustrated with we need to figure out what this what the root cause is let's take a look at a law enforcement sweep of a homeless encampment outside of city gate in downtown spokane in late january of 2021 daytime temperatures were below freezing and all of the shelters in the city were full once the police realized that we were filming they went into full pr mode lecturing about their experience and understanding of homelessness one person in the audience was not impressed gabrielle pizarro had just received a citation for obstructing the sidewalk with a piece of cardboard this wasn't my first encounter with gabby having interviewed her three months earlier in october of 2020 on this same spot for a documentary short piece i was doing called and justice for some i've chosen to feature gabby's experience because it highlights six themes that are common among the homeless who are being swept my name is gabrielle pizarro tell me about your journey into homelessness what got you started why are you on the street right now i lost my son he passed away from sids i had been harassed for 10 years and uh i was an alcoholic as well and kind of lost myself lost me home got a dui and my family didn't know how to cope with it and so i didn't have any support and i just kind of fell out here and uh one winner turned into two and i'm going on two and a half years it's disappointment when you get told you're too overqualified or that there's a list and it's months and months and months long and there's nowhere for you to go when you're getting kicked off of every block you can't sit anywhere you can't carry a backpack you can't use the restroom uh it's just really discouraging and over time you just kind of give up um and i'm not one to give up but i've i've lost hope i guess um with with the hat not having options there was a morning where i was sitting down in a parking lot to fix my pant leg it was snowing to fix my pant leg and tie my shoe and nobody was around me and i had been swarmed by the cops to um to being arrested sitting in the back of the car for i didn't know what but they they cited me for trespassing in the second degree when i was tying my shoe um i i was in handcuffs in the back of a car for about 45 minutes as they were interviewing to other people and that had been arrested as well for other charges i was issued a community court and have eight hours of community service to complete in order to have my ticket dropped but i was cited and arrested for no trespassing for time issue so tell me where you're staying now under the tunnel i'm currently homeless and i have a sleeping bag and a backpack that i take with me to sleep underneath the tunnels um at night when the weather is terrible like it is now um i use cardboard boxes and blankets that i have so this year i've learned how to camp out um in the trees and uh with a hammock and in tent um but constantly having to pick up and move and helping to not lose my belongings currently i am underneath one of the tunnels um at night usually kind of get close with other people with cardboard boxes and the link is to me to share them and keep body heat together and it's rough because you only have so many hours a day that they allow you to sleep without having to worry about getting sighted and or losing your stuff and uh picked up and thrown away and one thing the boise decision did was it made people realize that people were being arrested for being homeless even when the shelters were full i think a lot of people didn't realize that we had shelters that were over full and that their people literally had no place to go and since most community members don't like having a city where people have to camp outside and they thought there's an easy solution that they can go to shelters and they realized oh wait there's actually a situation in where there's more people than we have room for we've got to start investing more in that room and we also have to think about hopefully how we respond when we want someone to not be on the sidewalk should we respond with the police or should we respond with a homeless outreach team that provides resources because i think we all just were forced to confront a problem that we had really worked hard to ignore for a long time in a decision like that its real main power is simply to make us hopefully talk and think about these problems and actually invest some resources in fixing them you're about to have a brief but meaningful encounter with shell i first met shell and his wife tanya who suffers from ms almost a year earlier while filming a large homeless camp north of spokane where they were quietly living in their camper trailer that's tanya second from the left in this outreach picture but on this day in june of 2021 they were caught up in a sweep of camps along the spokane river he just asked her to use the kind of place he wanted to go and he said yeah i just want to die now so how many times have they moved you here recently all right so how does it make you feel [Music] this sweep of homeless camps along the spokane river took place on the hottest day on record for spokane at the time of the sweep between 11 a.m and noon the temperature was already 100 degrees and it would peak out that afternoon at 109. shell's wife tanya was taken into custody for medical evaluation and their camper truck and only home were impounded and shell now actually homeless thanks to the city of spokane was told he could go to a cooling center really isn't it time to ask ourselves is this the best we can do as a city to serve those in need the playlist of stories from people being swept and forced to move with nowhere to go is longer than anything we can cover in this documentary segment but we do want to meet and hear the stories of a few more real people it's how we humanize the impact of this misguided policy now i've been told more than once that there's more to so-and-so's story that you didn't include this is true but people experiencing hopelessness seldom if ever have the opportunity to tell their story in their own words from their perspective without it being filtered by police courts or even agency case workers in my documentaries i try to allow people the space to tell their own stories and by doing so to participate in their own journey of personal discovery and self-healing meet amy mccain a montana girl who's been homeless off and on in spokane over the past five years i interviewed amy on august the 19th in a homeless camp near ironbridge in spokane would you talk to me about your most recent experience or two of being asked to move on you're currently homeless is that correct yes and can you tell me about any recent experiences you've had where you have been forced to move well there's been several occasions actually in the last five years i have been visiting even friends who were camping and stopped by their camp and was treated as though they didn't even listen to me the cops came in and my friend wasn't there but i got the ticket and uh lost everything um id and purse and makeup and anything to you know that would maybe help me like if i got any numbers gathered up to get a job um they were gone they made me leave my stuff on the sidewalk one time because i had a warrant for that time for being in the camping unlawfully in public property way out by high bridge park let's meet debbie hall i've actually followed debbie through several homeless camps over the past year i recently caught up with debbie outside of liberty park and asked her to tell me about her recent experiences of being forced to move where are you camping right now right now i'm right right above liberty liberty park um on third street and where were you before you came here i was up third street hill across the street from ramada and right behind a costco building but across the street from ramadan and yeah right there and what what happened that you had to move from there down here to where you are right now clean up crew and and the cops came told me it was private uh property and i had to get off there and move and that if i didn't then i would i'd be arrested yeah because it's yeah they say it's trespassing your private property how long ago was that um i was up the hill it was about almost two weeks ago i was over here maybe not even a week and they came and then they came back because i didn't i didn't leave i was packing i didn't leave and they brought to cops i cleaned up through um the day before yesterday and told me i i that if i didn't move then i was gonna be arrested and i i mean i moved this far i've been here a day and a half now since i've been here and but this yeah this is a city so and what has happened to your property in these two moves now it's dwindled to almost nothing i mean between what they take and uh what i can grab i i've lost um a lot of stuff i mean i've lost my bedding i've lost clothes i've lost blankets i've lost tarps you know uh food stuff you know food stuff that we eat you know they don't care they just they take it off and um yeah i mean i mean i've lost i've lost important papers that i actually needed to get my id which will help me um there was a papers in there that i had for the irs and i i mean they're not going through it and saying hey listen oh maybe should i need this no they're just grabbing it and concerning all garbage and it pretty yeah those are papers i need now i have to get back a hold of the irs and have them mail me papers again and that's just to get my id say hello to russell rust and his wife jamie i met them behind a fast food restaurant after they had been sighted and swept from mission park i asked russell to tell their story being cited a very common story in the homeless community yesterday approximately at 11 o'clock me and my wife were asked to leave safeway's premises and so she's seven months pregnant and we walk over to mission park and get there and as soon as we lay down our blankets to rest for a little bit a police officer rolls up comes up and asks us for our name and everything so we give it to him and then we get sighted and ticketed for a safeway cart that was holding our stuff and that was and and then we're kicked out of mission park for six months and i don't think it's fair at all honestly because we didn't do nothing wrong finally meet chancey lee i arrived to film in coeur d'alene park just as the police were finishing up telling chancy that if he didn't move on they would impound his truck and arrest him but i'll let him tell his own story how long have you been here in uh in cortland park about three or four months in and out and are you you're leaning against your truck there are you staying in a shelter in your truck where are you staying living the truck and where were you living before you came down here to coeur d'alene park hoc uh the other one is uh union gospel mission but they won't let you thoroughly stay there either so at this point there's no place for you to stay is that right no you just got they everybody leaves here they'll go make their own spot and then eventually everybody gathers together and that's how it winds up looking like this okay if you were up at hoc in that area why did you leave police it was totally because you can't they don't want you camping they say no camping it's flat there's no other place to go so you came down here and what happened here yesterday or today they just you know they show up they ask you to you know they pull your name and then they just tell you it's time you got to go or you'll be arrested and that's what they told you yeah i said well me they didn't tell my truck and arrest me and i'm in and out down here i hardly even i sleep down here a lot in the streets but i don't sleep in the park and it's nice to have this part because it's got water there's no water in spokane to be had you cannot go into bathrooms like you used to and down around hoc it's really really bad down here because there's no water they will not let you in the building at hoc unless you spend the night it's quarantined off they got big steel gates around them that's a shelter it's really unfortunate i think that there's so many better tools available they are usually less expensive more humane and more long-term the thing is we need to have all of us invested in that this is the other tools that we might need like funding like places to go community support programs treatment housing require political will community well financial commitment all the things that are a little bit harder to do and take more time and attention whereas if you give it to the police that's their problem they'll take care of it don't think about it anymore out of sight out of mind and i think that's where the main disconnect is as someone who's worked among the homeless and marginalized of our city for over 15 years i believe law enforcement sweeps of the homeless offer the most tangible and visible evidence of a failed homeless policy or the absence of any actual policy at all if sweeps were effective in solving urban homelessness the city wouldn't need to do them on a 24 7 basis which is what's happening now but it gets worse such ineffective sweeps offer compelling evidence of an undeclared war against anyone experiencing homelessness on the streets or in the parts of our community homeless individuals are being openly told that there's no place they can legally go and camp in other words their existence is illegal outside of a shelter or jail because the city is legally prevented from citing the homeless for violating sit and lying and no camping ordinances due to a lack of sufficient shelter beds law enforcement is increasingly citing the homeless for other things such as third degree possession of stolen property what property a shopping cart they're also being aggressively cited for obstructing pedestrian traffic as we saw with gabby pizarro municipal courts are overwhelmed with the volume of these frivolous citations but it gets worse law enforcement is also aggressively citing bystanders with criminal citations for obstructing traffic if they stop to observe or film a sweep how do i know because this is footage of one such sweep where the observer was criminally cited for stopping to film the sweep if there's an undeclared war against the homeless and those trying to support them this is what it would look like one thing that's very concerning to me is the new trend towards arresting and prosecuting people who are trying to help the homeless we've seen a number of cases where people are there just to either try to fight services and get arrested or giving out water or filming the interaction just witnessing what's going on and for some reason the spokane police department has chosen and the prosecutor's office have chosen to make those into criminal offenses [Music] and one can ask the question of whether there are criminal offenses and whether there's probable cause um and those will be argued out in court but the bigger question is why it's even in going that direction in the first place you know our law enforcement has massive discretion about when and whether to arrest somebody they can see a jaywalker and decide not to recite that person because they've got bigger things to focus on and they could deal with somebody who is in their way in many different ways they could either ignore the person or ask them to move or or whatever um warned them the next time they would be arrested but for some reason there is a decision that's been made at a policy level that we're going to bring the force of the law down on people who aren't even doing anything that would normally consider a crime because we want to make them stop doing that it's a deterrent factor the defenses are not so serious it'll lend someone in prison but it's enough to keep somebody from wanting to help again let's be blunt the city of spokane can order local law enforcement to conduct sweeps of the homeless from bridges parks and camps from now until hell freeze is over and it'll make no difference in the numbers of those experiencing homelessness that we've seen in this documentary sweeps won't change the reality of people experiencing homelessness having no place to go and sweeps won't change the reality of having only 769 beds in the current city-wide shelter system ongoing sweeps will simply perpetuate a cruel exercise an ongoing game of homeless whack-a-mole while providing a sad confirmation of the rubric that we don't want to solve homelessness we just don't want to see it you'd like them to get a job but there's so many steps to getting a job that they couldn't do if they got the job but getting a outfit for um to look nice for the interview how do you apply in the first place if it's only online where do you get child care if you if you need it or things like that and so there's never going to be an easy one-size-fits-all solution because every single case is different what needs to happen is people who will invest the time to figuring out what what explains that situation and what the solution is for that situation it's never going to be in my experience that the person simply needs more motivation if they're motivated by the fact that they're cold and they're hungry and they're sleeping outside and they're not safe and having a police officer come and make their lives worse is not the kick in the pants they needed to finally start taking action they've had all the motivation they need if anything it just takes away what little bit of hope they may have had and motivation and provides one more barrier to have to overcome on top of everything else now there's a citation to deal with and a fine and a jail sentence and their their stuff maybe got taken away and they're even farther behind i don't want to see people sleeping on sidewalks or camping under bridges or in local parks either but i want their absence to be the result of sufficient low barrier shelters and day centers with appropriate beds where they can go to find safety and stability along with sufficient low barrier low income housing they can move into when they're ready but in the tightest housing market in a generation there simply isn't sufficient housing and new affordable housing takes time to build in the interim sufficient low barrier shelters and beds are needed now as transitional places for those who have nowhere else to go it shouldn't be this hard for us as a community to wrap our heads around this simple reality isn't it time to ask ourselves is this the best we can do as a community to serve those in need i believe the answer is no because i believe we can do better as we approach the conclusion of our journey through the night of the unsheltered homeless i'm left with several unanswered questions in our remaining time together i want to address some of those questions and in the hope of jump starting a broader community conversation i want to include some people sharing their perspectives on homelessness and homeless policy in spokane first question what's changed about homelessness in recent years homeless service providers are near unanimous in the opinion that the number of homeless in spokane has noticeably increased but they're also seeing other changes among the homeless i would say the other thing that has changed and i talked to many of the people who've been at this for years and years down here they say the average homeless person who was an alcoholic and he stood on the corner and he could drink his way into being 70 years old that that homeless guy is kind of gone now and what there is is a lot younger a lot angrier a lot more violent anti-authoritarian and a lot more addicted to opioids it's a different population now given the growing and changing nature of homelessness in our city what's been our city's response to homelessness what you and i might call a homeless policy if you were to ask me what our homeless response is i would say i don't think we have a homeless response and that that's the problem i don't think we have a unified system that the kind of thing that you might develop to really go after a problem you were seriously concerned about addressing we we stay stuck in a debate over whether to do anything or whether services actually cause homelessness you know a lot of sort of bad ideas still drive our politics and keep us in lockstep so i think there are individual things that are that are that have been um really successful and done well i think the permanent housing has put people into housing um the the catholic charities havens projects as permanent housing i think those have been good for what they do they're obviously not taking care of the whole problem you know i think catholic charities have done other good things as have many other organizations that have done individual efforts run shelters but i think that we don't have a single system and and there's such a resistance to doing more to doing enough to sort of match the scale of the problem that we're really just trapped you know the irony is we're going through a political campaign right now where the what i think of as the anti-homeless candidates are saying what they said last time and what they said the previous time and what they said the time before that which is we can't keep doing the same thing well we're not really doing the thing we're stuck where we've been for years and years now while that street population has grown if our city's response isn't matching the scale of the problem why don't we as a city do more well i wish i had a clearer answer to why we hadn't but i i think a huge part of it is that people don't think we should do something that if we do something that we are enabling the problem this is a very common thing that i hear from people who tend to just respond to homelessness as an issue of blight and quality of life as an issue that affects them not that affects the people on the street and and i think that that is a that there's a very powerful uh pull to to believe that people should get what they deserve and now cities we're we're grasping with that problem and that challenge and that's where you see a real disconnect where you you hear people whether they're advocates for people who are suffering or they're people who are businesses and neighborhoods uh who are upset that their parks or sidewalks have been taken over they're like come on city do something the city just doesn't have an infrastructure we've got a fire and police and we've got garbage pickup and water delivery we've got all those services figured out and we know how to pay for them we don't know how to pay for homeless services or even housing yet i think to do it right we do need to spend more i'm always happy to see when we get grant funding money from the feds because that eliminates the political obstacle for people at city hall you're spending money that comes from the feds and you're david condon or nadine woodward it's a much more easy thing to get done than if you're asking them to support spending city money so i'm always grateful to see that it would be wrong to suggest that all of the city of spokane's efforts to address regional homelessness aren't working some things are working well the city in the time that i've been on council which is a little over five years has now started to have shelters for some people and so i would say that it's working for some people we've evolved away from temporary cold weather shelters sometimes just a space on a gym floor to actually 24 7 low barrier shelters even co-ed shelters even shelters with you can bring your animal who's your companion so you don't have to choose between your companion and getting out of the weather so we are doing that now it's just that the scale is so small compared to the need and so so we are we are doing some good things and and we're now starting to think about regional partnerships that have just begun i mean the regional partnerships we're getting some money from the county for some things but really all the services are in the city of spokane and homelessness is a county-wide problem we are breaking new ground the challenge is in order to make a real difference you have to scale it up but we are i mean you just look back a few years ago we did not have a year-round canon street shelter we didn't have that that is now year round even with an administration that was against low barrier shelter that is now a year round we're just about to open the way out bridge shelter housing with wraparound services and where people can stay for 90 days not just night by night with services getting them into housing we have a new hope house that massively increased the number of women that are served again with wraparound services and great rehousing it's full every night even though we just totally expanded it which we'll tell you we've increased the family family promise is now bigger we have a new young adult shelter that's going online crosswalk is going to be expanded so we are doing more things there are more innovative things the challenges it feels like compared to that problem a drop in the bucket the point that i would like to make is that what we're moving towards is homelessness being a public health issue and us having to address it just like the fire department if someone calls 9-1-1 with a medical emergency they respond they don't say you know what we only have so much money in our fire budget this year so we're going to only go to every third call they respond and what local governments are realizing is that we're going to have to treat homelessness that way and the reason is not just for the homeless person who's at risk of dying or having health negative outcomes and then going to the hospital and costing the hospital a lot of money but the entire community pays a price when people are homeless but when it comes to spokane's homeless response we also have to ask what's not working i would i would say that things that are not working right now is the idea that you could collect 200 people into a shelter and it's going to be okay because we're housing and feeding them and the behaviors will be fine well that that's not true if the if the population is angry or younger more anti-authoritarian and more drug addicted right so now smaller pockets of 20 to 30 maybe is a better strategy than trying to get 250 of them at one location all crammed together in one neighborhood in one location the other thing is and this has just sort of always been spokane's reoccurring problem which i've never fully understood it always feels like every time the end of october rolls around all the powers that be suddenly gets surprised that it's cold outside and people are on the streets we always know it's going to be cold and we always know this is going to be the problem and it always has felt like to me the last 30 days from mid-october to mid-november we're scrambling trying to meet that need when we always know that need's coming every year it hasn't changed it always is and then we stretch it out from whether it lasts till march or last until april so just simply saving lives and putting people in shelters where they won't be dying in our alleys and in our streets seems to be this reoccurring surprise problem every year it's time for us as a community to take a step back and to ask ourselves what is the proper role of law enforcement and the courts in addressing homelessness a lot of downtown property owners seem to see the proper role of the police as to do what they ask them to do i've engaged with some of them who have reached out to me to say i mentioned earlier if i peed on the wall in coeur d'alene i'd be in jail or let me tell you what i saw on my doorstep today there was a drug addict out there openly using heroin and he had junk around him and when one of my employees asked him to move he was rude to her and so that's frustrating i get that that's frustrating but the person who thinks the police are going to fix that now maybe the police could move that guy he's on private property he might be trespassing unless he's sitting on the sidewalk maybe he's on the you know there are things that the police could do but there's very little really that the police could do to achieve what he wants to achieve which is to make that person not be there even if we could put people take people to jail for that we have an overcrowded jail right now that we're going into debt dealing with all these misdemeanor crimes that are mostly people going in and out in and out in and out and even if we were putting people in jail for graffiti for trespassing for drug possession they wouldn't be in there forever and they come out with their ability to get out of homelessness if they're interested in that damaged worse than before now they've got to go to court to get back and forth the court now they're going to have financial obligations that they probably can't pay their ability to get a job is hampered all of that the idea that the police are a solution is a fantasy but it is a it is a deeply held one but mostly my mostly my concern with the police with looking to the police to deal with homelessness is that it won't work it will continue the suffering of people it will continue to throw our resources down a hole it will not do anything to help people get off the streets it will just move them to another street if at the end of the day we don't have any place for them to go and that's the baseline we don't have any place for uh them to go and some are hard to help but not all of them not all of those several thousand people want to sleep under the viaduct and we're not giving them anywhere to go is this us does our city's current response to homelessness truly reflect who we are and who we want to be as a community and when do we as a community get to express our views on such things as a lack of adequate shelter beds or mental health resources or ptsd veterans living under bridges or the homeless having nowhere to go to spend the day or access services wow you know what's interesting to me is because i'm a pastor i sit with groups of other church leaders and i'm in a group right now sponsored by whitworth that sits with other pastors discussing how could we unite together and use our resources of people time and money to help a major social problem in the city and they wonder what to do and in the meantime i'm in another meeting where the mayor is speaking actually in our church for a different event that was a a women's panel event and she's saying you know who's not showing up to them to deal with these problems it's the it's the faith community where's the faith community i would love to talk to the faith community she said and uh meanwhile the business community is having a hard time talking to the front line workers and what's interesting when i talk to everybody we all agree what the answer is we all agree that the answer is not people living in destitution and poverty and filth and stuff on our streets in the cold leaving needles and human waste we all don't want that we think what we want is people living in safe clean shelters managed and decent homes getting their life back together and becoming a contributing member of society and not staying an addict i don't care whether you're left or right i don't care if your business man or your social worker we all agree that that's the goal what we can't seem to do is sit down with each other and talk about how to achieve that goal because we climb the mountain from different sides is there a better path forward better than the one we've seen and pursued up to this point and how do we build a community vision that's bigger than ourselves and our particular agenda a vision that's at least as big as the problem we're trying to solve i believe there is a better path forward i call it the better path of shalom yeah working together to build shalom and shalom being peace is what the literal translation is but it's actually got multiple meanings of well-being wholeness completeness happiness joy everything works right we're trying to get to shalom and for us who come out of a christian background i would even say jewish background because most of our shalom understanding is old testament is that we would see it as if you look back at when god was building that society how many times the phrase the widow the orphan and the foreigner occur how the old testament uh societies dealt with their widow their foreigner and the orphan the three lowest level most impoverished classes of people in society was how god judged that society whether it was right or whether it was wicked whether it was fair and just or not how did you treat the widow the orphan and the foreigner and i think we're kind of there in modern era sort of looking to that model of if god's judging us by that how should we how should we get to shalom shalom is an ancient hebrew word with several meanings depending on the context including peace welfare healing and restoration in other words shalom describes the way things ought to be not only for our homeless friends but also for our community as a whole unfortunately what we've witnessed on this journey through unsheltered homelessness is widespread evidence of broken shalom if genuine shalom is the way things ought to be then our lack of adequate or appropriate shelter beds or allowing law enforcement to play whack-a-mole with a street homeless represents broken shalom the way things ought not to be genuine shalom is about building right relationships rooted in peace and well-being for everyone involved that enable individuals and communities to thrive and to restore their lives to the way things ought to be the idea of shalom i i of course love i went to wetworth university and i tell people even though whitworth is considered a little bit conservative theological that i was from the sermon on the mount cohort of what were students which was we are here on this earth to make a difference and resolve conflict and demonstrate our creators affection and care for people uh by demonstrating compassion to people and empathy to people it doesn't matter who they are politically economically it's how do we bring people together and that was my cause when i went to whitworth and probably one reason i chose it throughout those years and now it's been you know i graduated in 1985 so it's been a long time and i continue to do that work and i'm attracted to other people who do that work and i really see that's the only way forward is to bring people together and try not to stoke the fires of conflict but find common ground and compassion and empathy at the end of the day we all get what we choose to pursue and we all get to live with what our choices create that's true of us as individuals and it's as true for spokane as a community as it is for every other community across america that's experiencing out-of-control homelessness the present state of homelessness in spokane represents the end product of what we as a community have chosen to pursue and create it's impossible to choose chaos and to get cosmos order as a result if we don't want to see people experiencing homelessness living in parks under bridges and in homeless camps and being swept by law enforcement then we as a community must make better choices people experiencing homelessness live the way they do partly because we as a community have failed to provide them with reasonable adequate and appropriate alternatives if our community homeless policy is broken the fault is ours to heal and restore the broken shalom of our homeless friends as well as for our larger community we need creative innovative and broad-based community solutions for a homeless policy built on a foundation of shalom anything less will doom us to failure into having the same tired worn out discussion for years to come how do i know because i've been doing this for 15 years and very little has changed when compared with the size of the problem and perhaps the reason so little has changed is because most of our solutions to homelessness reflect our understanding of poverty the headwaters of the river of homelessness that flows through our community our community homeless policy is broken because our understanding of poverty is broken so i went to school and i studied development justice got a graduate degree and in the process of doing that i i got a i studied well poverty and homelessness and shalom and where it comes from and the thing that just blew me away is how we misdefine poverty we think of poverty as the absence of material resources it's defined that way functionally in all of our programs and even i mean ask anybody and they'll tell you oh it's not having money it's not having money and stuff you can look at i can't remember there if you go online and search for videos you can find all sorts of videos talking about poverty being the absence of stuff and money to buy stuff but poverty is not primarily about the absence of material resources so the assumption that we've made that it is about the absence of material resources we've replaced the resources but that's a symptom and hasn't solved the problem just like with somebody who's homeless someone experiencing homelessness like you think that the problem is not having a home but not having a home is a symptom of a deeper issue and you have to look past the obvious symptoms to be able to deal with the root causes and a a comprehensive or more robust definition of poverty is the absence of shalom characterized by broken and unjust relationships if poverty and homelessness are about more than material resources provided as transactions then our community solutions to homelessness cannot be a never-ending stream of transactions you need housing we'll give you housing you need food we'll give you food you need clothes we'll provide you with clothes and our list of transactional solutions goes on and on year after year any community solution to homelessness must also be relational yes there are transactional issues to be addressed things such as food clothing housing employment but we must also address relational root issues by affirming the intrinsic worth of the person helping them to rebuild lost community and to restore broken shalom i think if you want to build a community defined by shalom the foundation isn't how you treat people but how you treat people is determined by how you see people and if you recognize everybody has a story and every person has intrinsic value it will change how you engage with them it changes whether you see them as people or not and i know that sounds crass and hard but the bottom line is we we dismiss people which diminishes the value that we have for them and then it justifies how we treat people as our journey through the night of the unsheltered homeless comes to an end i want to challenge our vision moving forward while spokane debates the need for more shelter space mobile loads and fishes a faith-based non-profit in austin texas is developing a 178-acre community for those emerging from chronic homelessness community first village is helping formerly homeless individuals to rebuild community and to restore broken shalom they believe that the single greatest cause of homelessness is the catastrophic loss of family or community founded in 2015 it began as a 27-acre planned community complete with a 100 space rv park 130 micro homes laundry restroom and shower facilities a thriving community center community kitchens job training employment opportunities and much more in april of 2021 mobilos and fishes announced a major expansion to 178 acres making space for an additional 1 400 micro homes along with additional community amenities they hope to be an example for other communities like spokane you'll find more information about this amazing project on our documentary website at myroadleadshome.org you owe it to yourself to take a look and embrace a bigger vision for how we as a community could address chronic homelessness maybe it's time to think about how we can rebuild lost community and restore the broken shalom of those experiencing homelessness why because as we rebuild their community we rebuild our community and as we restore their shalom we restore our own shalom [Music] you

Channel: My Road Leads Home

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Id: _9KvXMc_MFE

Length: 83min 0sec (4980 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021