In The News - 4/2/2025
KXLY
New shelter for homeless women opens at Knox Presbyterian Church in Spokane
A new specialized shelter is opening at Knox Presbyterian Church in Spokane.
"We're willing to sacrifice what we have in order to serve others," said Camille Troxel, an elder with the church.
The city says this shelter will provide much needed space for women experiencing homelessness in the city.
The Knox site, located in the Emerson Garfield neighborhood, is a few blocks away from North Central High School and Garfield Elementary. It was previously a temporary shelter site for three months.
This shelter is one of eight sites in the city's specialized shelter model. It will help up to 30 people at a time.
"We have the space, this is a massive building," Troxel said. "It's not even about making the space. It's about how can we better steward the resources that we have."
Each shelter serves a specific group whether that be families, people with medical needs or people looking for substance use treatment.
For those living near the Knox shelter, some say they will try to be open-minded.
Craig Williams is a long-time neighbor of the church. While at first he wasn't on board with the shelter, he has come around to it once finding out it will be for women.
"If it's been the other homeless, the other shelters, then I may have had a little bit of a problem," he said.
The New York Times
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Permanent Supportive Housing Spotlights Challenges After Homelessness
Two Years in a Place Where Homelessness Ends
Andy Newman and Thea Traff visited the Lenniger Residences 12 times in 2023 and 2024 to talk to residents and workers about life there.
When Justin Mercado arrived at the Lenniger Residences, the shock of having a private place to live was so great that he promptly fell apart.
He grew anxious and agitated, could not calm down. On the streets, imagined threats loomed on all sides. “Leave me alone!” he shouted at panhandlers.
The people who run the Lenniger sent him to the hospital. “I wasn’t used to having a home,” said Mr. Mercado, a husky, earnest 36-year-old. “I had a mental breakdown.”
After two weeks he returned, under the care of a psychiatrist and newly stable.
That was in January 2023. Mr. Mercado has now lived for two years at the Lenniger, where 58 people with histories of chronic homelessness and mental illness reside in permanent supportive housing: subsidized apartments with social services like counseling, psychiatry, recovery groups and financial coaching offered on site.
Some of his neighbors live with schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder or severe depression. One is a woman with bipolar disorder who has two young children and is trying to make her way through school. One battled multiple addictions. Another is a 12-year-old who has grown up witnessing a range of erratic behavior.
They are among 400,000 Americans in supportive housing, about 45,000 of them in New York City. Residents of supportive housing see it as a big step up from the city’s specialized shelters for people with mental illness and addiction — chaotic, often squalid places lacking privacy or supports.
A string of random attacks committed by homeless people in untreated psychosisexposed the failure of New York’s mental health safety net to provide coordinated, ongoing care for the city’s most fragile residents. But for people who can function with some independence, complexes like the Lenniger can provide lasting stability.
The case for supportive housing is straightforward: It keeps people housed.
It does this in part by making it as easy as possible for them to stay. Residents are not required to be employed, or sober, or medicated. Those sorts of rules have been shown to scare homeless people off or lead them to fail out of housing. At the Lenniger, some tenants even treat the heavily subsidized rent, typically 30 percent of their income, as optional.
But the same lenient approach that makes supportive housing successful for people who’ve otherwise struggled to stay housed has made it a target for opponents, who say it enables drug abuse and shiftlessness. Supportive housing is a centerpiece of “Housing First,” once the federal government’s preferred anti-homelessness policy. Project 2025, the policy blueprint President Trump is enactingin big chunks, says the government should “end Housing First.”
Six Things to Know About Permanent Supportive Housing
It has become one of the most common approaches to reducing chronic homelessness for Americans with mental illness and addiction.
For Americans struggling with chronic homelessness and mental illness, there is a common answer: apartments with very low rents in a building that offers social services on site.
Permanent supportive housing, as it is called, started in the late 1970s in New York City after two factors caused homelessness to spiral: the mass deinstitutionalization that emptied psychiatric hospitals without providing former patients with adequate support, and the elimination of cheap “single-room occupancy” apartments. About 400,000 Americans, including more than 40,000 in New York City, now live in supportive housing.
It is a cornerstone of Housing First, long the federal government’s favored anti-homelessness policy.
We spent more than a year talking to residents and workers at a supportive housing complex in the Bronx, called the Lenniger, which is home to about 60 formerly homeless people with mental illness, many of whom have had substance abuse problems, to learn what life is like inside these buildings.
Here are six takeaways.
Permanent supportive housing tries to meet a formerly homeless person’s needs under one roof.
People in buildings like the Lenniger have their own apartments and are assigned to a caseworker or a social worker who is based on site.
These workers offer counseling, financial coaching, help navigating bureaucracies and applying for benefits like disability income, and connections to medical providers and substance abuse programs. The subsidized rent that tenants pay is typically 30 percent of their income, which is often in the form of disability payments.
The Supportive Housing Network of New York says that permanent supportive housing “serves people who could not maintain housing stability without services and who could not access adequate services without stable housing.”
Permanent supportive housing keeps people housed.
Research has found that people who move into permanent supportive housing tend not to fall back into homelessness. At the Lenniger, over the last four years, more than 95 percent of tenants have either remained in their apartments or moved to other stable housing. About half the current tenants have lived at the Lenniger since it opened in 2011.
It works by making it as easy as possible for people to stay.
There is no sobriety requirement in supportive housing, no requirement that people with mental illness take medications, and no work requirement. Those kinds of rules have been shown to scare some people off and cause others to fail out of housing. At the Lenniger, residents are supposed to talk with their caseworkers twice a month, but there is no penalty for not doing so. Many residents fall behind on the rent, but the owner of the complex said it had not evicted anyone in years.
Its permissiveness has stirred political backlash.
Many conservatives argue that the Housing First approach — offering people low-cost housing without requiring them to accept services or to work — enables drug use and other social woes. Vice President-elect JD Vance is a noted critic. In 2023, while a senator, he said, “If we don’t treat the root cause of homelessness, we end up creating cycles of despair.” Some lawmakers want to shift federal funding to programs with treatment mandates, a more common approach before the spread of Housing First.