“Homelessness isn’t an identity,” said a full-page ad in the Aug. 25 issue of the Spokane’s Spokesman-Review newspaper. “Tell the City Council to VOTE NO on making their hardship a protected class.” The ad, sponsored by the Washington Business Properties Association, included contact info for the Spokane City Council, which had been set to vote on an ordinance nicknamed the Unhoused Bill of Rights the next day.
The full-pager added a regional diss that invoked Washington’s first city for good measure. It called the proposal, “An idea so bad, Seattle hasn’t done it.”
It’s hard to say for certain, but the Unhoused Bill of Rights is probably dead this year. The measure would have changed anti-discrimination, employment and housing law and injected more identarian politics into the homeless issue.
The Unhoused Bill of Rights was favored by the progressives on the City Council. But it faced furious pushback by business groups such as the WBPA as well as late opposition by Mayor Lisa Brown. Those forces turned what had been seen as a fait accompli into a much dicier proposition.
“People are just dissecting this and making this into things that are not true,” freshman City Council member Lili Navarrete, who authored the ordinance, complained to The Inlander weekly newspaper. “We need to have a solution together.”
Yet the plain text of the legislation was clear enough. It would add “housing status” as a protected status and prohibit discrimination on that basis. It would also make it much more difficult for employers to screen out criminals, with crime problems common within the homeless population.
Read Jeremy Lott’s Free Cities Center series (part one and part two) about Camp Hope.
Watch this Pacific Research Institute webinar about the Grants Pass ruling.
One section stipulated, “No employer shall advertise applicable employment openings in a way that excludes people with arrest or conviction records from applying, such as using advertisements which state ‘no felons,’ ‘no criminal background’ or which otherwise convey similar messages.” Though it technically would have remained possible to do background checks, with lots of lawyering, the ordinance would have made things much tougher on employers who don’t want to hire ex-cons.
Landlords would be affected as well. In a message asking Spokane residents to contact their council members and urge a “no” vote, the group Spokane Realtors issued a fact sheet charging that the legislation: “Prevents the use of criminal backgrounds in applying for rentals”; “Remove[s] all surveillance cameras in both public and private spaces”; and “Make[s] it very difficult to remove tenants who exhibit violent or dangerous behavior.”
Moreover, critics argued this was effectively an end run around the wishes of Spokane voters. “It flies in the face of voters in Spokane who overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1, which banned camping on public lands within 1,000 feet of schools, daycares and other properties,” the WBPA charged.
This impasse is the legacy of Camp Hope in Spokane politics and policy. As covered previously at length by the Free Cities Center, the former tent city on state highway access land was at the time the largest homeless encampment in the state of Washington, with over 400 sheltered there.
The political struggle over Camp Hope helped undermine the mayoralty of Nadine Woodward, giving Democratic Governor Jay Inslee’s former Commerce Department Director Brown a leg up. On Election Day 2023, Woodward lost to Brown, who received more than 51% of votes cast. The progressive supermajority on the officially nonpartisan City Council also remained intact.
In that same election, there was a significant voter backlash with Proposition 1. It ran far ahead of Brown’s majority, carrying more than 74%. To put it more pointedly, the proposed fix for Spokane’s growing urban camping problem proved more popular than any local politicians who might want to run for reelection.
Opponents of Proposition 1 have managed to hang it up in court for the time being on a technicality. However, in the interim the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in. This year’s Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling curtailed the need for municipalities to prove at length that they have adequate shelter before they enforce laws on vagrancy or “urban camping.”
That means that there is now nothing legally stopping the Spokane City Council or City Hall from having the Spokane Police Department clear the majority of homeless out of downtown, for instance, or sweeping other places where encampments pop up. But while the U.S. Supreme Court has flatly rejected a civil rights-based (as opposed to a property-rights based) approach to the problem, the City Council has only grudgingly backed off.
Perhaps the available evidence will persuade them to go in a different direction. For the last few years, Spokane’s City Council has turned up its nose at solutions to the homeless problem that aren’t grounded in current progressive politics. Councilmembers have balked at Camp Hope’s closure. The larger Trent Avenue homeless shelter, established by former Mayor Woodward, made the closure possible, pre-Grants Pass. But there is some indication that those remedies were, in fact, working.
The homeless population in greater Spokane had been creeping up over the past few years, according to the federal Continuum of Care count conducted every January. It climbed from 1,757 in 2022 to 2,390 in 2023, and was expected to keep rising. But this year, something curious happened. The homeless population fell by about 15%, to 2021 people.
Though Brown was in office for this year’s survey, Woodward’s policies were still in the driver’s seat. These policies included building a new large shelter with surge capacity to house the homeless during cold snaps, shutting down Camp Hope, discouraging future large encampments from forming and taking a more law-and-order approach to homelessness in the form of Proposition 1.
In their own ways, the new mayor and City Council have been working to erase this legacy. Brown campaigned against the shelter and has promised to shutter it by October. Small scale urban camping is still tolerated. Progressives on the council have been pushing laws that critics charge would make the city’s homeless even harder to deal with. It could be a sign of sanity that, in delaying that vote indefinitely, they flinched.
Jeremy Lott is a writer based in Washington state.
