The Spokesman Review
INVESTING IN SPOKANE
Mayor Lisa Brown pitches tax ask, pledges to move House of Charity during her first address
Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown held her first State of the City address after taking office earlier this year with a speech on Tuesday that highlighted the work of city staff and attempted to persuade the crowd of hundreds, with many business and property owners, to support her proposal to raise property taxes to expand services and avoid deep cuts.
She also held up the historic work done to change zoning within the city and allow for greater residential density – these reforms happened under the administration of her predecessor, former-Mayor Nadine Woodward, though it was to Brown that Gov. Jay Inslee presented an award for the work earlier this year.
Brown also floated projects she hoped to complete before the end of the year, including one Woodward pledged to accomplish during the 2022 State of the City address but couldn’t finish: moving the Catholic Charities-run homeless shelter the House of Charity out of the troubled area near Second Avenue and Division Street.
Almost two years ago, Woodward, who argued that a concentration of homelessness and addiction treatment services in a small area downtown had led to urban blight there, named the “House of Charity 2.0” project among her top priorities. She pledged to move Catholic Charities into a larger space out of downtown, doubling the shelter capacity in the process, and to help find state funding and operational support to do that.
Nothing came of that project, however. No potential sites for the new House of Charity building were disclosed by the city or Catholic Charities, and by the summer of 2023 the nonprofit was criticizing Woodward’s partnership.
On Tuesday, Brown continued Woodward’s initiative to disperse services out of the downtown core, calling to close the current congregant shelter and open a facility modeled after another Catholic Charities project, the Catalyst building in the West Hills Neighborhood.
That converted Quality Inn, which opened December 2022 with significant financial support from the state Department of Commerce, which Brown led at the time, now provides formerly homeless people individual rooms with dedicated mental health and peer support services as they transition into permanent housing.
Unlike her predecessor, Brown is recommending backing the move with over $2.6 million of tax dollars.
“We have heard and been challenged with Second and Division for years,” Wilkerson said. “There are other items that I would have also liked to have funded, but we have prioritized this.”
As with two years ago, the new sites for those moved facilities remain to be identified, wrote city spokeswoman Erin Hut in a Tuesday text.
“At this time no specific plans for that transition have been agreed to or funded,” wrote Catholic Charities Eastern Washington CEO Rob McCann.
McCann believes that this time will be different, he added in a brief interview.
“The biggest single difference this time around, this current administration has proposed a process and a plan to determine a new House of Charity facility that fits into the broader system,” McCann said. “We were interested two years ago, but in hindsight now we see was a political stunt with no real effort behind it.”
“I have every reason to believe that a House of Charity transition can and will happen under this administration,” he said.
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Mobile home parks, also known as trailer parkers, are officially and more accurately called manufactured housing parks. Prefab homes are substantial constructions; once placed in a park, more than 80 percent of them are never moved. In these parks, residents own their homes but pay rent to landlords who own the land and its infrastructure (like water and gas hookups).
Over the last decade, private investors have discovered one very simple thing: owning a manufactured housing park is an incredibly lucrative thing to do. Now, throughout the country, local landlords are making way for out-of-state owners notorious for jacking up rents while letting conditions deteriorate.
But Adrian knew about a nonprofit group called ROC USA that helped manufactured housing residents buy their own parks. So she set about facilitating a sale — to Woodlawn’s own people.