City to open new homeless respite center at Westminster United Church of Christ

Starting next week, a new downtown respite center will give unhoused people in Spokane a place to recuperate and heal off the street and out of the hospital.

Located at Westminster United Church of Christ, the 30-bed center is operated by the City of Spokane in partnership with the Providence Community Clinic, Jewels Helping Hands and Empire Health Foundation. The medical care at the respite center is intended for homeless people who are not sick enough to be in the hospital but still need care.

“Sometimes people being discharged need more medical care than what is available on the street. This serves as an in-between that can reduce admissions for the hospital,” said Providence spokesperson Alexandra Hyams.

The announcement raised the eyebrows of some conservative activists, who questioned why a new shelter is being placed on the edge of downtown and arguing that City Hall and its partners have again neglected proactive communication with the neighborhood, with most learning of the facility only days before it was set to open.

Service providers involved in the project and progressives on the City Council, meanwhile, celebrated the opening of a facility they say will save lives, reduce the revolving door of homeless patients in emergency rooms and help stabilize people long enough to get them into nursing homes or other permanent housing.

There is no other facility like this in the region, which has meant homeless people with chronic or medium-term health conditions frequently could not get appropriate medical care in other shelters, said Dr. Robert Lippman, a caregiver with Providence Community Clinic and co-chair of the Spokane Homeless Coalition. They would, he added, end up in the hospital when those medical conditions worsened, then would be discharged back on the street to restart the cycle .

“Adding medical respite beds ensures that patients experiencing homelessness, some of the most vulnerable patients we treat, have a safe place to heal,” Providence CEO Susan Stacey said in a statement.

The medical respite facility’s services include discharge follow-up, coordinating care, wellness checks, wound care, behavioral health and case management support. All patients will be referred by Providence Community Clinic and cared for by staff from Jewels Helping Hands who have received training from Providence Community Health Education.

Julie Garcia, founder and head of Jewels Helping Hands, pointed to the case of Jay Carlson, a former outreach worker and friend who had lived at the Camp Hope homeless encampment disbanded in 2023 and died of cancer.

“He died because he didn’t have this kind of care,” Garcia said. “Because if he would have had a space to recuperate, he would have got the cancer services that he needed, and he did not because he had nowhere to do them at, and he died on the floor in my house.

“These are the folks that we want to help. Those are the folks that are dying in our doorways downtown, that have no way of getting anywhere else, that have no control over their situation at all.”

Staff with Jewels Helping Hands, the primary organization running the facility, will be supported when necessary by visiting nurses from Providence, Lippman said. The city will not reimburse for Providence’s additional medical assistance, Lippman added, and whatever costs aren’t covered by insurance will be absorbed by Providence’s Community Health Investment foundation.

The site will not be a shelter that allows walk-ins and will not have an outdoor area where people can congregate. All those referred to the center will undergo a background check to screen out sex offenders, a legal requirement given the proximity to a high school, though violent offenders will not necessarily be screened out.

Guests will be required to sign an agreement to treat the building and neighbors with “respect, dignity and empathy,” and Jewels Helping Hands has drafted a “Good Neighbor” agreement it plans to bring to the Cliff/Cannon Neighborhood Council that pledges to be responsive to neighborhood concerns and to proactively prevent camping, loitering or other issues around the property.

Commercial property owner and conservative organizer Sheldon Jackson sent emails to more than 400 people Friday morning, including other conservative business and property owners, to raise the alarm over the facility’s proximity to Lewis and Clark High School and the lack of outreach with neighbors.

Zeke Smith, president of the Empire Health Foundation, which has been tasked by the city to subcontract with service providers to operate new homeless shelters, acknowledged that outreach has been limited. He argued that a medical respite facility of this kind is unlikely to have spillover effects on the neighborhood but said he worried about concerted opposition to the facility regardless.

“Public outreach on shelters, new sites to house homeless folks, is complicated … neighbors who don’t have any sense of what is really going to happen get up in arms and start to organize against it,” Smith said. “We didn’t want that to happen.”

He added that he had been in contact with the Cliff/Cannon Neighborhood Council, the Downtown Spokane Partnership business association and leadership with Spokane Public Schools, but that he had not yet presented to the full neighborhood council or had a final conversation with school officials.

When asked whether a lack of outreach would degrade public trust, Smith said he “wouldn’t weigh that concern over what we’ve done.”

“We have reached out,” Smith continued. “Those conversations with neighbors won’t, at this point, happen before (the facility) opens, but there’s still plenty of opportunity for them to happen.”

The new center is part of Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown’s scattered-site model to address homelessness. Rather than the large homeless shelters seen under previous administrations, Brown’s plan intends to direct individuals to small dispersed shelters and other services located throughout the city.

The respite center is one of such services toward which unhoused people may be directed through the city’s homeless navigation center.

“By bringing together partners with a variety of resources and expertise, we will now be able to provide streamlined, tailored medical services to meet the unique needs of the individuals we serve,” Brown said in a statement.

City Councilwoman Lili Navarrete said that “specialized facilities” that “serve various individuals with specific needs” is the intention of the scattered-site model.

The new facility will begin seeing patients next week.