In The News - 6/27/2025

RangeMedia

‘It’s Hard to Really Call it a Study’

Taking a hard look at SBA’s much-talked-about study of unhoused people that claimed 50.2% of unhoused people in Spokane moved here after becoming homeless.

If the headlines from earlier this week are to be believed, more than half of unhoused people in Spokane aren’t actually from our city.

Much of the local media ate it up.

“Report: Over 50% of Spokane homeless population moved there after losing housing,” the headline from The Center Square proclaimed.

“Study reveals over half of unhoused moved to Spokane after losing housing,” reads a headline on Fox 28 and KHQ.

KREM had the most nuanced headline: “Leaders clash over study claiming more than 50% of those experiencing homelessness moved to Spokane from elsewhere.”

One big problem? None of these stories actually analyzed the study, its backers or the narrative it’s trying to weave about Spokane, instead choosing to report a sensational statistic that is likely inaccurate — according to a prominent expert on homelessness data.

The survey cited in these stories was commissioned by the Spokane Business Association (SBA) and designed by President Donald Trump’s former homelessness czar Robert Marbut. One of the most obvious issues with the study is a sample size so small it’s hard to make accurate conclusions about the findings. Further, the survey questions themselves seemed designed to create a specific result — that most homeless people in Spokane aren’t from Spokane — by using questions about birthplace and school attendance to break people into two tracks: individuals with “direct connections to Spokane,” and “visitors,” who should be given a bus ticket back to wherever their family is.

Under Marbut’s rubric, which we’ll discuss in greater detail below, a majority of the RANGE team — to almost the same percentages found in the SBA survey of unhoused people — would be put into the “visitors” category.

Preparation for the survey included conducting a “grid search” to estimate the total number of unhoused people on Spokane streets, used to calculate how many people surveyors needed to contact to get representative data. That data was collected by volunteers who drove around the city flagging people who looked homeless. There was no consistent control mechanism for duplicates or filtering out people who may have looked homeless but had shelter or housing.

Large chunks of content in the Spokane study were copied word-for-word from another Marbut did in King County on behalf of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank first known for pushing schoolsto “teach the controversy” meaning teach biblical young Earth creationism alongside accepted science.

“ There’s no methodology. It doesn’t tell us how many people they interviewed. It doesn’t provide any base statistics regarding the people other the median age,” said Dr. Dennis Culhane, a homelessness and housing researcher at the University of Pennsylvania (who served as Director of Research at the National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans from 2009 to 2018. “So it’s hard to really call it a study.”