November 7, 2024 • 19 mins
Helping Save Spokane - Homeless: Why Spokane?
A NonStop Local Exclusive Podcast. NonStop Local KHQ's Sean Owsley sits down with Noah Boelter to talk about Spokane's Homeless Crisis.
A NonStop Local Exclusive Podcast. NonStop Local KHQ's Sean Owsley sits down with Noah Boelter to talk about Spokane's Homeless Crisis.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
They paid for my best sticket. It was like fifty
dollars and it was like two hours to get from
Lewison to Spokane. Well more than two thousand people experiencing
homelessness stayed at one of three Union Gospel missions in
Spokane last year. UGM reports that more than half of
those were from outside Spokane County. The city counters that
(00:22):
why Spokane, We look at the numbers and the reasons.
Hi everyone, I'm Sean Alsley. This is a NonStop local
podcast helping save Spokane. The motto here near nature near
perfect for many who make their home in Spokane. That
slogan rings so true. After all, there are seventy nearby lakes,
(00:42):
us walking and biking trails, and of course a one
hundred acre parks mac Dab in the middle of a
vibrant downtown. Both in that park and now on those
main streets is a community in crisis. With me right
now to talk more about this is NonStop local reporter
Noah Bolter. Noah, thanks for being with us.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Absolutely on such an important topic. Glad to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
You know your your story that you did and you
investigated and conducted some LinkedIn interviews on is the number
one read story and NonStop local dot com and the
title says it all. Where did they come from? A
lot of people want to know, as these streets, you know,
I'll have a number of homeless issues and people dealing
(01:23):
with homelessness. Some of that is mental illness, some people
have been simply priced out of a roof above their head.
And thirdly, you know, there's some drug addiction issues and
a lot of the city leaders say fentanyl would be
one of the reasons. Just what did you find as
you explored this, as you talk to the people that
are immersed with this.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
So in doing this research, there was so much that
we did that just didn't even get to be a
part of the package. We took the most prevalent stuff,
the stuff from the city, the information that we got
from the city their status, and we took those and
we put them next to the stats that we got
from UGA. But it was the personal conversations that we
(02:02):
got where we asked people who are dealing with homelessness
what their backgrounds are that some of the most incredible stories.
But what I'll tell you is the stats that we
got from the city, and we go over this in
the package seventy three percent of the homeless people who
they counted at their point in time count they count
every single year how many homeless people are in the county.
(02:22):
Seventy three percent of the people who are living unsheltered
in the county, they say their last permanent residence was
in Spokane County, whereas twenty seven percent lived elsewhere. Now
that's very different from what we heard from UGM, who
says of the twenty three hundred plus people who stayed
at one of their Spokane County locations over the past year,
(02:45):
fifty eight percent, more than half of them last lived
outside of Spokane County. Now, this is very different, right,
sheltered versus unsheltered living, and these stats are different in
that sense because again, unsheltered, they're living on the streets,
sleeping on a park bench, sleeping on the sidewalk, versus
sheltered at UGM. Specifically, and in the package we go into,
in order to stay at UGM, you have to pass
(03:06):
the breathalyzer, you have to do urine tests once a
month while you're living there. So it's not like you
can just live any type of way. You have to
follow their guidelines in order to stay there. But the
fact that more than half of the people they're telling us,
more than half of the people who have spent the
night there over the past year, are from outside of
(03:27):
Spokane County, that's interesting, and so we ask why. And
one of the people who they introduced us to, her
name's Diana. She didn't want to share her last name,
but her name's Diana. And when we were hearing her story,
she said that she was not even from the state
of Washington. She's from the state of Texas and she
was in Lewiston. She was helping her sister. She ended
up getting some jobs out there. It sounded like it
(03:48):
was a long move that she was helping her sister with,
and so she relocates out there. She gets a couple
of jobs and then she comes down with pneumonia. She
goes to the hospital. During that time, she said, she
loses her jobs and she goes to leave the hospital.
She has nowhere to go. And so what she says
is that the hospital said, hey, you know nearby UGM
(04:09):
Union Gospel Mission, it's the shelter, and spoke in maybe
they can help you, And so they actually paid for
her to get a bus ticket. According to her Diana
tells us they paid for her to get a bus
ticket all the way from Lewis and Idaho to Spoken.
They paid however much that is, she wrote for a
couple hours and then ended up in Spoke. Can so
just hearing that, and the UDM people were saying that
(04:32):
that's not it's not an isolated incident. They say, this
happens off and I ended up reaching out to the hospital.
They didn't say anything about Diana specifically, and of course
it's hard to track down that information without having a
last name. But I actually have the email conversation that
I had with them printed out and they said, Noah, Hi,
I received your inquiry via our website. Given your tight deadline,
(04:53):
I cannot confirm whether this individual was seen or received
a bus ticket without additional details and their consent. However,
patients who are discharged and seek assistance returning home are
sometimes provided with resources, including public transportation support, to ensure
they can make their journey. What's interesting there is that
they say returning home. They sometimes help people who are
(05:14):
seeking assistants returning home, and they're sometimes provided with resources.
But Diana's not from here, so why would they send
Diana to Spokane, if that's actually what happened. I reached
out to them to follow up and they haven't got
back to me, so.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
It's still unclear. I want to dive into some of
the numbers that you had. It sound like there was
a disparity between what city officials told you and what
yougm told you as far as the numbers of people
that are here that are not from here. Can you
clarify that or was there a clarification or is it
a gray area?
Speaker 2 (05:45):
So, and I guess what's unique about this is that
they are different categories, right. Because the city is talking
about unsheltered people living in the streets of downtown. They
say of those people, there's three hundred and twenty three
According to the city, they say, seventy three percent of
the people who are or excuse me, four hundred and
forty three unsheltered people, three hundred and twenty three of
(06:06):
them or seventy three percent are from Spokane County. So
the last place where they had a permanent residence, the
last place where they had an address was in Spokane County.
Seventy three percent. The majority of the people living on
the streets of Spokane, according to the city are from
this area, whereas UGM the majority of people who have
stayed at one of their shelters in the past year,
they're saying the majority are from outside of the county.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
I know there's been a lot of talk about people
being bust into here, like you said, you reached out
that wasn't confirmed, they said, do sometimes the hospital in
Lewiston help people get back to where they're home from.
A lot of the thought and the impetus behind that
is that if they're near maybe a family member, some
type of former friend, that they have a little bit
(06:49):
of a safety net and a structure and they can
hopefully crawl out of the situation they're in, get some shelter,
kind of lift themselves up and get back on track.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Yeah. Well, and what's interesting about Diana She didn't mention
having ever even heard of Spokane before. The hospital in
Lewiston had mentioned it was Saint Joseph's Regional Medical Center
I believe was the name, and she said she didn't
have any connection to Spokan. She hadn't heard of Spokan.
She didn't know what resources were out here. She said
that when she filed for disability out here as soon
as she got here, she said that the services here
(07:20):
and the way that they treated her disability applications, she
said it was a lot more lenient than Texas. She
didn't mention that that if she would have realized that
she could have gotten some of the disability support out here,
she would have came out here a lot longer. She's
chronically homeless. She's been homeless four different times start her life,
and she says it's her decisions that consistently lead to
her being homeless, just this time when she became homeless
(07:41):
the hospital center here, according to her.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
I want to touch back on and expand on your
interview maybe something that wasn't included in your story that
was broadcast. Your interview with Phil Altmeyer. He's well known
in this region. He's worked the gospel mission for decades.
This has been his life and his mission. What did
you learn from him? Just in conversation you talked about
you have to have a urine test. It's all about
(08:05):
keeping them clean. And that has been the complex struggle
on the city leaders and the people that in the
know that I have interviewed over the years, is that
they have to want to be clean. You can't force
somebody to tackle their drug habit or what they're dealing
with that has obviously unraveled the life. Nobody wants that life,
(08:28):
but there are things benchmarks along the way that create
that situation. Just a big picture, What did you take
away from Phil? What was that conversation thing?
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Well, Phil's argument was that the city rewards people who
are doing the wrong things and making the wrong choices.
And he talked a lot about housing first and how
people get access to housing in Spokane. What he was
saying was that not only is his number fifty eight
percent right of how many people are from outside of
the county who have stated a shelter in Spokane County
(08:58):
over the past year, he thinks not number one would
be even higher for un sheltered people, which is where
we found that contrast. And the reason he thinks that,
he says, is because the city offers so many resources
to people who do absolutely nothing. If he said, and
he used these terms, he said, there's a difference between
a homeless person and a bum, and a bum is
someone who's not trying to get out of it, and
(09:19):
a homeless person can be trying to get out of it.
And so he said, is that there's so many bums
here and it's okay to be a bum and spokene
and essentially that the city resources housing versus rewarding that
by giving people access to housing. But as soon as
people start coming up clean on their drug tests, as
soon as people start going through those recovery processes, those
(09:39):
resources are not made available to them. And so essentially
he's saying the city is rewarding the bad behavior, and
so it's never going to get better.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
And what does the city say about his comments? Did
you have we're able to get any response from any
of the city leaders on that, because that is a
distinction that he has made, and I think that's an
important thing to ursue. I don't know if you reached out,
I don't know where you are in the process.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
And that when we started going towards the housing first
side of things, management was telling me, hey, focus on
getting the numbers. So we did kind of stay away
from that when it came to getting back to the city,
and honestly, it was the communication with the city was
pretty rough throughout this whole thing. As you know, throughout
this month we're doing several specials with it, so we
had to streamline our communication. I reached out to the
city on Monday of the week before this was due.
(10:26):
They didn't even get back to me until Wednesday, and
then they didn't get the stats to me until after
I left the office on Friday. And so, and it's
no indictment on them. They told me, and I believe
them that they had to dig deep to get some
of these numbers. But because of that, they were getting
back to us a little bit slow, and our our
line of communication was not that well. So I was
really with the city. I was just trying to get
them to give me the stats that we needed to
tell the story. And so we didn't actually talk about
(10:47):
housing first.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
I actually know and in communication with city leaders is
there's a discrepancy, a dispute on the actual numbers, the
tangible numbers. I know the point in time count, and
the last one said we had dropped by about roughly
I'm going off the top of my head, about three
hundred people living on the streets comparatively to the previous
(11:08):
time they did the point in time count. But they
say those numbers aren't necessarily accurate. I've heard city spokespeople
say that they say it's hard to truly get a
tangible number of the number of people living on the streets.
You have some other data that you gathered from people,
and I think Diana's story as you talked about it,
every story is different. Why somebody is on the streets,
(11:33):
why somebody is homeless, Each reason and the impetus behind
that is different. What do you think and what did
Phil tell you and Diana tell you about the reasoning
behind it? And you said, Phil has obviously said the
resources they bring them in, what is the answer? I
(11:54):
know you don't have that answer. I don't have it.
City leaders don't have it right now. That's something that
is a continual process that is being worked on. But Phil,
he's known this. What did he tell you well?
Speaker 2 (12:05):
And Sean, that's a great question because one thing that
we got in common from everyone who he asked, where
are these people coming from? Everyone said, it's a variety.
We don't know, and it's because everyone has a different story.
We interviewed four different people on camera for the story.
Three of them were sheltered, three of them were at UGM,
and then one person we found him on the streets
(12:25):
in Spokane and we interviewed him and each of them
had a different story. Each of them had a different reason.
And obviously it's only four people, it's random, it's a
tough sample side, But it's kind of similar to trying
to count how many people are living homeless in downtown
Spokan logistically trying to track everyone down. And then also
with these people, a lot of them have several reasons
(12:46):
why they were homeless.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
No, let me ask you the gentleman that lived on
the street, just what was his story? What did he
tell you? Why was he there?
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Very very interesting. So when we spoke, his name was Nicholas.
So when we spoke with Nicholas, he said he'd been
homeless for twelve years and he had lived in Missoula
the entire time. He said it was a really bad divorce.
He lost everything, became homeless because of that. Well, he
said he knew Spokane existed, but he had never heard
anything about resources available in Spokane. That was a big question.
(13:13):
We were asking everyone what resources? What did you heard
about Spokane? Did you come here because of resources? How
did you get here? All that stuff? He says he
had never heard about resources in Spokan. He was actually
trying to get to Seattle and It was his sister
who bought him a bus ticket, he said, out of
the goodness of her heart, but she couldn't afford to
get him all the way to Seattle. So it was
a pit stop in Spokane. So he had never heard
(13:35):
anything about the resources in Spokane. He had no reason
to be here other than that. And then I asked him, Okay,
are still planning to go to Seattle? Are you planning
on saying in Spokane? And he said, well, then he
leaned on God. He said, God is the reason why
he feels like he has a purpose here now. But
essentially he never thought that anyone was starking. I asked him,
have you heard anybody talking about since you've been here
(13:55):
about resources in Spokane, about go here to get this
free food, free housing, any of it. And he said
he hadn't heard about any good resources in spoken and
that he was simply there is a pit stop on
his way to Seattle.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
So but he decided that he wanted to stay here.
It sounded like at least temporarily, and so he's not
connected with any of the resources. I know you in
your story it was you know, there are a lot
of resources here. People come here it's a destination if
you're struggling with getting a roof over your head. He
hadn't even heard of the resources. It was just kind
of circumstance and not making all the way to Seattle
(14:28):
on that bus.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Trip well, and not even just that. When we talk
about why he wanted to stay, it wasn't because of resources.
Even still, and he'd been here for I think he
said about a month at that point, he said he
was only staying because of divine intervention, because of his
interaction with God.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
What was the future for him? Did he say what
he was going to do?
Speaker 2 (14:48):
No, he just said he had some purpose here and
he felt like he needed to stay here. He didn't
know if he at some point would end up in
Seattle or how long he would stay. He just said
it wasn't about the resources. And that's what I thought
was interesting.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Bottom line for Noah. As you went into this, you
were assigned this story, you talked it through with our managers,
You talked about content, the way you should do the interview,
who you should talk to. That's kind of the standard
reporting process from a start, from inception until broadcast. What
did you learn along the way, What stood out to you,
you know, off of the page, off of the numbers.
(15:21):
Just your takeaway from reaching out talking to people that
are struggling, not by the day, by the minute, talking
to Phil Altmeyer, who is immersed in this process, what
was your big picture takeaway?
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Honestly, it was on a human level. I think the
big thing you think about because you walk through the
streets of spoken and you might see some people living homeless,
maybe they're doing drugs on the sidewalk, whatever they may
be doing, and you just you might feel very far
away from them in terms of lifestyle. You might feel
like you could never fall down that rabbit hole. But
then you speak with some of these people and their
(15:56):
stories are just it's incredible how they got there. Some people, okay,
go through a bad divorce. Some people, you know, they
got kicked out of the house. I spoke with one
man who is homeless in Spokane. He's never lived in Spokane.
He was from Detroit, and then he went to WSU
and Pullman, and then yet he met some friends down there.
He ended up dropping out of school and coming out
here to Spokane to work. He was going to stay
(16:17):
with his friend and his friend's girlfriend, and when he
got out here. They ended up kicking him out. It
turned into like a house drama situation, and he lost
his place to stay. And so for the past month
he had been staying at a UGM men's shelter in
Spokane because of the fact that he just his friends
had bailed out on him. And your heart breaks for
(16:39):
that kind of scenario, Like, imagine if that's you or
me in those shoes, what are we going to do?
What if we didn't have the resources that we needed
to find a place to stay. This could happen to anybody.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
But you've just outlined three completely different stories from three
completely different people. Yep, from three completely different backgrounds. There
is the complexity in a nutshell, that's what city leader
said told me. I've covered this extensively for two decades
now running, and it's the complexity of it. How did
they end up there, what is their situation? How do
(17:08):
we connect them to resources, How do we get them
into at least temporary housing. When they're in the temporary housing,
how do they grab onto that opportunity and really pull
themselves up Because it's hard work. That's what I've been
told by city leaders, from people that have experienced homeless.
I've talked to people that have come out of homelessness
and now have their own home, not just renting, but
(17:30):
purchasing a home. Each story is different, but I think
for me, the bottom line takeaway, and I'm not sure
how you feel about this, is it's the complexity, but
the compassion needs to stay there, and I think that
those two elements of this need to be at the forefront.
This is going to be a long term battle to
(17:51):
help solve this, improve this, help people that are dealing
with homelessness. And that's why you see so much emotion
from the people that are involved with Bill Altmeyer, the
city leaders, the City Council, the Downtown business owners, the
Downtown Spokane Partnership, the Greatert Spokane Incorporated. This is the,
I feel, the issue of our time right now. It's
(18:13):
the toughest issue to solve. There's no panacea, there's no elixir,
there's no magic solution, and it's conversation, communication, everybody working together,
which is hopefully where we're gonna go.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Well, it takes unconditional love. You have to love them
regardless of their situation, regardless of their past, because it's
not about their past. It's about trying to help them
get out of their situation. It's about trying to support
them just after whatever their goals and their dreams are.
And of course you can only help someone so much,
right they have to want it for themselves and we've
talked about that. But it's the fact that we have
(18:47):
to have unconditional love and love our neighbors no matter what.
I think. That's one of the biggest takeaways.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Well, you know, conversation is important. Communication is important. That's
what this podcast is about. Some background on what you
learned during your story and Noah, thanks for sharing your
insight and what to learn. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
It was a pleasure, all right.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Shawn Elsey NonStop Local Podcast, Take Care of Everybody Saving
Spokekan Finding Solutions to the Homeless cresis on NonStop Local
exclusive podcast
They paid for my best sticket. It was like fifty
dollars and it was like two hours to get from
Lewison to Spokane. Well more than two thousand people experiencing
homelessness stayed at one of three Union Gospel missions in
Spokane last year. UGM reports that more than half of
those were from outside Spokane County. The city counters that
(00:22):
why Spokane, We look at the numbers and the reasons.
Hi everyone, I'm Sean Alsley. This is a NonStop local
podcast helping save Spokane. The motto here near nature near
perfect for many who make their home in Spokane. That
slogan rings so true. After all, there are seventy nearby lakes,
(00:42):
us walking and biking trails, and of course a one
hundred acre parks mac Dab in the middle of a
vibrant downtown. Both in that park and now on those
main streets is a community in crisis. With me right
now to talk more about this is NonStop local reporter
Noah Bolter. Noah, thanks for being with us.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Absolutely on such an important topic. Glad to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
You know your your story that you did and you
investigated and conducted some LinkedIn interviews on is the number
one read story and NonStop local dot com and the
title says it all. Where did they come from? A
lot of people want to know, as these streets, you know,
I'll have a number of homeless issues and people dealing
(01:23):
with homelessness. Some of that is mental illness, some people
have been simply priced out of a roof above their head.
And thirdly, you know, there's some drug addiction issues and
a lot of the city leaders say fentanyl would be
one of the reasons. Just what did you find as
you explored this, as you talk to the people that
are immersed with this.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
So in doing this research, there was so much that
we did that just didn't even get to be a
part of the package. We took the most prevalent stuff,
the stuff from the city, the information that we got
from the city their status, and we took those and
we put them next to the stats that we got
from UGA. But it was the personal conversations that we
(02:02):
got where we asked people who are dealing with homelessness
what their backgrounds are that some of the most incredible stories.
But what I'll tell you is the stats that we
got from the city, and we go over this in
the package seventy three percent of the homeless people who
they counted at their point in time count they count
every single year how many homeless people are in the county.
(02:22):
Seventy three percent of the people who are living unsheltered
in the county, they say their last permanent residence was
in Spokane County, whereas twenty seven percent lived elsewhere. Now
that's very different from what we heard from UGM, who
says of the twenty three hundred plus people who stayed
at one of their Spokane County locations over the past year,
(02:45):
fifty eight percent, more than half of them last lived
outside of Spokane County. Now, this is very different, right,
sheltered versus unsheltered living, and these stats are different in
that sense because again, unsheltered, they're living on the streets,
sleeping on a park bench, sleeping on the sidewalk, versus
sheltered at UGM. Specifically, and in the package we go into,
in order to stay at UGM, you have to pass
(03:06):
the breathalyzer, you have to do urine tests once a
month while you're living there. So it's not like you
can just live any type of way. You have to
follow their guidelines in order to stay there. But the
fact that more than half of the people they're telling us,
more than half of the people who have spent the
night there over the past year, are from outside of
(03:27):
Spokane County, that's interesting, and so we ask why. And
one of the people who they introduced us to, her
name's Diana. She didn't want to share her last name,
but her name's Diana. And when we were hearing her story,
she said that she was not even from the state
of Washington. She's from the state of Texas and she
was in Lewiston. She was helping her sister. She ended
up getting some jobs out there. It sounded like it
(03:48):
was a long move that she was helping her sister with,
and so she relocates out there. She gets a couple
of jobs and then she comes down with pneumonia. She
goes to the hospital. During that time, she said, she
loses her jobs and she goes to leave the hospital.
She has nowhere to go. And so what she says
is that the hospital said, hey, you know nearby UGM
(04:09):
Union Gospel Mission, it's the shelter, and spoke in maybe
they can help you, And so they actually paid for
her to get a bus ticket. According to her Diana
tells us they paid for her to get a bus
ticket all the way from Lewis and Idaho to Spoken.
They paid however much that is, she wrote for a
couple hours and then ended up in Spoke. Can so
just hearing that, and the UDM people were saying that
(04:32):
that's not it's not an isolated incident. They say, this
happens off and I ended up reaching out to the hospital.
They didn't say anything about Diana specifically, and of course
it's hard to track down that information without having a
last name. But I actually have the email conversation that
I had with them printed out and they said, Noah, Hi,
I received your inquiry via our website. Given your tight deadline,
(04:53):
I cannot confirm whether this individual was seen or received
a bus ticket without additional details and their consent. However,
patients who are discharged and seek assistance returning home are
sometimes provided with resources, including public transportation support, to ensure
they can make their journey. What's interesting there is that
they say returning home. They sometimes help people who are
(05:14):
seeking assistants returning home, and they're sometimes provided with resources.
But Diana's not from here, so why would they send
Diana to Spokane, if that's actually what happened. I reached
out to them to follow up and they haven't got
back to me, so.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
It's still unclear. I want to dive into some of
the numbers that you had. It sound like there was
a disparity between what city officials told you and what
yougm told you as far as the numbers of people
that are here that are not from here. Can you
clarify that or was there a clarification or is it
a gray area?
Speaker 2 (05:45):
So, and I guess what's unique about this is that
they are different categories, right. Because the city is talking
about unsheltered people living in the streets of downtown. They
say of those people, there's three hundred and twenty three
According to the city, they say, seventy three percent of
the people who are or excuse me, four hundred and
forty three unsheltered people, three hundred and twenty three of
(06:06):
them or seventy three percent are from Spokane County. So
the last place where they had a permanent residence, the
last place where they had an address was in Spokane County.
Seventy three percent. The majority of the people living on
the streets of Spokane, according to the city are from
this area, whereas UGM the majority of people who have
stayed at one of their shelters in the past year,
they're saying the majority are from outside of the county.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
I know there's been a lot of talk about people
being bust into here, like you said, you reached out
that wasn't confirmed, they said, do sometimes the hospital in
Lewiston help people get back to where they're home from.
A lot of the thought and the impetus behind that
is that if they're near maybe a family member, some
type of former friend, that they have a little bit
(06:49):
of a safety net and a structure and they can
hopefully crawl out of the situation they're in, get some shelter,
kind of lift themselves up and get back on track.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Yeah. Well, and what's interesting about Diana She didn't mention
having ever even heard of Spokane before. The hospital in
Lewiston had mentioned it was Saint Joseph's Regional Medical Center
I believe was the name, and she said she didn't
have any connection to Spokan. She hadn't heard of Spokan.
She didn't know what resources were out here. She said
that when she filed for disability out here as soon
as she got here, she said that the services here
(07:20):
and the way that they treated her disability applications, she
said it was a lot more lenient than Texas. She
didn't mention that that if she would have realized that
she could have gotten some of the disability support out here,
she would have came out here a lot longer. She's
chronically homeless. She's been homeless four different times start her life,
and she says it's her decisions that consistently lead to
her being homeless, just this time when she became homeless
(07:41):
the hospital center here, according to her.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
I want to touch back on and expand on your
interview maybe something that wasn't included in your story that
was broadcast. Your interview with Phil Altmeyer. He's well known
in this region. He's worked the gospel mission for decades.
This has been his life and his mission. What did
you learn from him? Just in conversation you talked about
you have to have a urine test. It's all about
(08:05):
keeping them clean. And that has been the complex struggle
on the city leaders and the people that in the
know that I have interviewed over the years, is that
they have to want to be clean. You can't force
somebody to tackle their drug habit or what they're dealing
with that has obviously unraveled the life. Nobody wants that life,
(08:28):
but there are things benchmarks along the way that create
that situation. Just a big picture, What did you take
away from Phil? What was that conversation thing?
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Well, Phil's argument was that the city rewards people who
are doing the wrong things and making the wrong choices.
And he talked a lot about housing first and how
people get access to housing in Spokane. What he was
saying was that not only is his number fifty eight
percent right of how many people are from outside of
the county who have stated a shelter in Spokane County
(08:58):
over the past year, he thinks not number one would
be even higher for un sheltered people, which is where
we found that contrast. And the reason he thinks that,
he says, is because the city offers so many resources
to people who do absolutely nothing. If he said, and
he used these terms, he said, there's a difference between
a homeless person and a bum, and a bum is
someone who's not trying to get out of it, and
(09:19):
a homeless person can be trying to get out of it.
And so he said, is that there's so many bums
here and it's okay to be a bum and spokene
and essentially that the city resources housing versus rewarding that
by giving people access to housing. But as soon as
people start coming up clean on their drug tests, as
soon as people start going through those recovery processes, those
(09:39):
resources are not made available to them. And so essentially
he's saying the city is rewarding the bad behavior, and
so it's never going to get better.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
And what does the city say about his comments? Did
you have we're able to get any response from any
of the city leaders on that, because that is a
distinction that he has made, and I think that's an
important thing to ursue. I don't know if you reached out,
I don't know where you are in the process.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
And that when we started going towards the housing first
side of things, management was telling me, hey, focus on
getting the numbers. So we did kind of stay away
from that when it came to getting back to the city,
and honestly, it was the communication with the city was
pretty rough throughout this whole thing. As you know, throughout
this month we're doing several specials with it, so we
had to streamline our communication. I reached out to the
city on Monday of the week before this was due.
(10:26):
They didn't even get back to me until Wednesday, and
then they didn't get the stats to me until after
I left the office on Friday. And so, and it's
no indictment on them. They told me, and I believe
them that they had to dig deep to get some
of these numbers. But because of that, they were getting
back to us a little bit slow, and our our
line of communication was not that well. So I was
really with the city. I was just trying to get
them to give me the stats that we needed to
tell the story. And so we didn't actually talk about
(10:47):
housing first.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
I actually know and in communication with city leaders is
there's a discrepancy, a dispute on the actual numbers, the
tangible numbers. I know the point in time count, and
the last one said we had dropped by about roughly
I'm going off the top of my head, about three
hundred people living on the streets comparatively to the previous
(11:08):
time they did the point in time count. But they
say those numbers aren't necessarily accurate. I've heard city spokespeople
say that they say it's hard to truly get a
tangible number of the number of people living on the streets.
You have some other data that you gathered from people,
and I think Diana's story as you talked about it,
every story is different. Why somebody is on the streets,
(11:33):
why somebody is homeless, Each reason and the impetus behind
that is different. What do you think and what did
Phil tell you and Diana tell you about the reasoning
behind it? And you said, Phil has obviously said the
resources they bring them in, what is the answer? I
(11:54):
know you don't have that answer. I don't have it.
City leaders don't have it right now. That's something that
is a continual process that is being worked on. But Phil,
he's known this. What did he tell you well?
Speaker 2 (12:05):
And Sean, that's a great question because one thing that
we got in common from everyone who he asked, where
are these people coming from? Everyone said, it's a variety.
We don't know, and it's because everyone has a different story.
We interviewed four different people on camera for the story.
Three of them were sheltered, three of them were at UGM,
and then one person we found him on the streets
(12:25):
in Spokane and we interviewed him and each of them
had a different story. Each of them had a different reason.
And obviously it's only four people, it's random, it's a
tough sample side, But it's kind of similar to trying
to count how many people are living homeless in downtown
Spokan logistically trying to track everyone down. And then also
with these people, a lot of them have several reasons
(12:46):
why they were homeless.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
No, let me ask you the gentleman that lived on
the street, just what was his story? What did he
tell you? Why was he there?
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Very very interesting. So when we spoke, his name was Nicholas.
So when we spoke with Nicholas, he said he'd been
homeless for twelve years and he had lived in Missoula
the entire time. He said it was a really bad divorce.
He lost everything, became homeless because of that. Well, he
said he knew Spokane existed, but he had never heard
anything about resources available in Spokane. That was a big question.
(13:13):
We were asking everyone what resources? What did you heard
about Spokane? Did you come here because of resources? How
did you get here? All that stuff? He says he
had never heard about resources in Spokan. He was actually
trying to get to Seattle and It was his sister
who bought him a bus ticket, he said, out of
the goodness of her heart, but she couldn't afford to
get him all the way to Seattle. So it was
a pit stop in Spokane. So he had never heard
(13:35):
anything about the resources in Spokane. He had no reason
to be here other than that. And then I asked him, Okay,
are still planning to go to Seattle? Are you planning
on saying in Spokane? And he said, well, then he
leaned on God. He said, God is the reason why
he feels like he has a purpose here now. But
essentially he never thought that anyone was starking. I asked him,
have you heard anybody talking about since you've been here
(13:55):
about resources in Spokane, about go here to get this
free food, free housing, any of it. And he said
he hadn't heard about any good resources in spoken and
that he was simply there is a pit stop on
his way to Seattle.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
So but he decided that he wanted to stay here.
It sounded like at least temporarily, and so he's not
connected with any of the resources. I know you in
your story it was you know, there are a lot
of resources here. People come here it's a destination if
you're struggling with getting a roof over your head. He
hadn't even heard of the resources. It was just kind
of circumstance and not making all the way to Seattle
(14:28):
on that bus.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Trip well, and not even just that. When we talk
about why he wanted to stay, it wasn't because of resources.
Even still, and he'd been here for I think he
said about a month at that point, he said he
was only staying because of divine intervention, because of his
interaction with God.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
What was the future for him? Did he say what
he was going to do?
Speaker 2 (14:48):
No, he just said he had some purpose here and
he felt like he needed to stay here. He didn't
know if he at some point would end up in
Seattle or how long he would stay. He just said
it wasn't about the resources. And that's what I thought
was interesting.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Bottom line for Noah. As you went into this, you
were assigned this story, you talked it through with our managers,
You talked about content, the way you should do the interview,
who you should talk to. That's kind of the standard
reporting process from a start, from inception until broadcast. What
did you learn along the way, What stood out to you,
you know, off of the page, off of the numbers.
(15:21):
Just your takeaway from reaching out talking to people that
are struggling, not by the day, by the minute, talking
to Phil Altmeyer, who is immersed in this process, what
was your big picture takeaway?
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Honestly, it was on a human level. I think the
big thing you think about because you walk through the
streets of spoken and you might see some people living homeless,
maybe they're doing drugs on the sidewalk, whatever they may
be doing, and you just you might feel very far
away from them in terms of lifestyle. You might feel
like you could never fall down that rabbit hole. But
then you speak with some of these people and their
(15:56):
stories are just it's incredible how they got there. Some people, okay,
go through a bad divorce. Some people, you know, they
got kicked out of the house. I spoke with one
man who is homeless in Spokane. He's never lived in Spokane.
He was from Detroit, and then he went to WSU
and Pullman, and then yet he met some friends down there.
He ended up dropping out of school and coming out
here to Spokane to work. He was going to stay
(16:17):
with his friend and his friend's girlfriend, and when he
got out here. They ended up kicking him out. It
turned into like a house drama situation, and he lost
his place to stay. And so for the past month
he had been staying at a UGM men's shelter in
Spokane because of the fact that he just his friends
had bailed out on him. And your heart breaks for
(16:39):
that kind of scenario, Like, imagine if that's you or
me in those shoes, what are we going to do?
What if we didn't have the resources that we needed
to find a place to stay. This could happen to anybody.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
But you've just outlined three completely different stories from three
completely different people. Yep, from three completely different backgrounds. There
is the complexity in a nutshell, that's what city leader
said told me. I've covered this extensively for two decades
now running, and it's the complexity of it. How did
they end up there, what is their situation? How do
(17:08):
we connect them to resources, How do we get them
into at least temporary housing. When they're in the temporary housing,
how do they grab onto that opportunity and really pull
themselves up Because it's hard work. That's what I've been
told by city leaders, from people that have experienced homeless.
I've talked to people that have come out of homelessness
and now have their own home, not just renting, but
(17:30):
purchasing a home. Each story is different, but I think
for me, the bottom line takeaway, and I'm not sure
how you feel about this, is it's the complexity, but
the compassion needs to stay there, and I think that
those two elements of this need to be at the forefront.
This is going to be a long term battle to
(17:51):
help solve this, improve this, help people that are dealing
with homelessness. And that's why you see so much emotion
from the people that are involved with Bill Altmeyer, the
city leaders, the City Council, the Downtown business owners, the
Downtown Spokane Partnership, the Greatert Spokane Incorporated. This is the,
I feel, the issue of our time right now. It's
(18:13):
the toughest issue to solve. There's no panacea, there's no elixir,
there's no magic solution, and it's conversation, communication, everybody working together,
which is hopefully where we're gonna go.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Well, it takes unconditional love. You have to love them
regardless of their situation, regardless of their past, because it's
not about their past. It's about trying to help them
get out of their situation. It's about trying to support
them just after whatever their goals and their dreams are.
And of course you can only help someone so much,
right they have to want it for themselves and we've
talked about that. But it's the fact that we have
(18:47):
to have unconditional love and love our neighbors no matter what.
I think. That's one of the biggest takeaways.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Well, you know, conversation is important. Communication is important. That's
what this podcast is about. Some background on what you
learned during your story and Noah, thanks for sharing your
insight and what to learn. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
It was a pleasure, all right.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Shawn Elsey NonStop Local Podcast, Take Care of Everybody Saving
Spokekan Finding Solutions to the Homeless cresis on NonStop Local
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