The Spokane Business Association has been trying for months to bring some urgency to the region’s homelessness problem. Gavin Cooley, its director of strategic initiatives, has been inviting local leaders to join him for 5 a.m. walks through the downtown area to get a first-hand look.
This week, the organization hosted a dinner that featured the former mayor of Boise. David Bieter, a Democrat, talked about his city’s approach to homelessness. Bieter says Boise has had success by using a combination of measures, including increasing services and making outdoor camping a ticketable offense. He came to our studios this week.
This interview lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
David Bieter: We had a kind of crash course and homelessness policy three weeks, literally, three weeks, after I was first sworn in a homeless facility of about 150 people. It failed. It was owned by the city and run by a nonprofit and the nonprofit said if you don't cut us a big check, we’re gonna have to push 150 people out in the streets. So we thought it was a bad idea to keep funding a model that that was unsustainable, so we didn't cut the check and consequently had to take it over.
We had no funding and really no expertise. The only upside was the council and the mayor, we were in the foxhole together. Nobody was jabbing at the other. As odd as it sounds it helped us with what it would take us to learn. It could have been years to learn what we learned in just a matter of months.
So that's kind of where it started. We put an RFP out for anybody that wouldn't purchase and run it. We had one bid from the rescue mission there and they've done a really good job with it.
It's one piece of things and that's kind of one of my messages. You have to bring as many folks around the table as you possibly can. We had kind of a barn raising because Idaho gives almost no funds for anything. We don't have state funding of transit. We don't have state funding for housing, zero. Very little for substance abuse treatment and for mental health treatment. There is upside. You just have to get together and will your nonprofit do this? Will your city do this? Will the county do this? And that's what we were able to do.
I've always believed that allowing people to camp on public property is a really bad idea. We pushed against it even while we're trying to figure out these pieces to bring together. I just felt that that's just not the way to go. When people say you're criminalizing homelessness, on the contrary. In my opinion, you're criminalizing the appropriation of public property for private use and that you just can't allow that.
But we were sued and we litigated it. We weren't looking for that kind of publicity, but Martin v. Boise was one of the court cases in homelessness and we were able to keep enforcing the ordinance during the course of the litigation, which was a kind of a pleasant surprise to us.
But, for us, we had a kind of perfect experiment. Unintended one, but our officers for a time mistakenly believed they couldn't cite for camping and, within a matter of four or five weeks, we had a camp that grew to 135 people, right off the core of downtown. And it was an awful situation. There were assaults and drug abuse. We even had a homicide of a homeless man against another.
There was or is a homeless shelter adjacent to where the camp was. It got so the people working in the homeless shelter were afraid to go to work to help the homeless because of the camp. Again, it's a terrible situation, but we were able to clean it up and in the course of that, we learned quite a bit again on how to handle this.
About a third of the people left town. We're not totally sure for where. About a third came in for services and a third went home. They reunited with their families.
I am a kind of consultant to the mayor of Portland, the new mayor of Portland, and they're having some real success with that. They're doing an intense program and try to reunite people with their families and they're got some great stories and some success there.
But we had to keep enforcing, otherwise, another camp would come. We had to be consistent with it and we were able to to go from 400 citations after the camp to six citations for the whole year of 2018.
That allowed us bandwidth to work on the housing piece. We built a detox center and crisis mental health center. We built a 45-unit apartment building for the chronically homeless, the very worst. Some of them had been homeless for decades. We were able to get a veteran's homeless facility, so bit by bit.
It's still a tough, tough issue to get enough resources for treatment and for help, but because we were able to put a coalition together that kept working on things, the hospitals came in because we were able to show them empirically that these frequent fires are costing you and us all this money. If we house them, it's gonna be so much less and then we were able to prove that that's exactly what happened.
You have to use everything you have, but I do believe that part of it is to is to push against camping and against that kind of street level homelessness.
DN: In Spokane, homelessness is seen as maybe the biggest issue. How is it viewed in Boise? Is it still viewed as an issue that is out of control or an issue that has been managed fairly?
DB: Well, I think the latter. I think it's viewed as an issue that's managed fairly. Interestingly, my successor as mayor ran on a platform of repealing the anti-camping orders and then did not repeal it. But it has gotten a bit worse and our legislature, which I was in and have agreed with almost never in my whole life, they actually passed a state law saying if the cities don't enforce camping, the state will sanction the city. One of the state senators owns property close to one of these shelters and just made sure that they were going to keep doing that. I hate the state to preempt cities in any ways. That's often what they do. But in this case, it might have helped or it might help going forward because it has gotten somewhat worse, but I don't think it would be the top six or eight issues that people in Boise would say.
