Of all the things a citizen should reasonably expect from her city, the “quiet enjoyment and protection of her civil rights and liberties” (so phrased by the great English jurist William Blackstone) is certainly foremost.
Linda Biel, a citizen and business owner in the city of Spokane, is being denied that.
Like most citizens of Spokane, when Linda pursues her dreams life in the city gets better. She pays taxes, creates jobs, provides desirable services, improves and expands her business in response to the community, and engages helpfully with her neighbors.
Linda’s dream is good: She loves beauty and wellness, and long-imagined building and operating her own sophisticated downtown spa. She worked hard over many years, studying business and mathematics and earning licenses in cosmetology, hair, and nail care. She gained experience in other salons.
Linda’s hard work brought her dreams to life in 2009, when she leased and renovated a historic downtown building, creating an atmosphere of such unique beauty that her new spa was featured in magazine articles and daily tours were given. During her first three years of operation, Linda received two awards for her success and leadership.
That all began to change in 2013.
That’s the year federal homelessness policy shifted dramatically. Under a new policy called “Housing First,” programs supported by tax dollars were no longer allowed to require that homeless participants receive treatment for mental illness and drug addiction, or participate in life skills classes, job training, or other case management.
Such requirements, long considered keys that unlock prisons of poverty, were reclassified as “barriers to housing.” Homelessness, it was said, was primarily caused by a lack of affordable housing.
The result of these ideas was a massive shift in public spending away from emergency and transitional homeless services (meant to stabilize and equip for long-term success) toward immediate and permanent subsidized housing. Treatment and other services were offered on the side.
At the same time, it became popular to stop or block enforcement of basic health and safety laws that prohibited public drug use, loitering, and camping. These laws were bizarrely reframed as “criminalization of homelessness.”
Unfortunately, because untreated mental illness and drug addiction are significant factors in most homelessness, Housing First failed in its promise to solve the problem. Instead, what it largely accomplished was to move much of the violence and despair of street life inside, out of the rain.
Meanwhile, homelessness, as measured by the numbers, increased steadily after the adoption of Housing First, even in the pre-COVID years and even though public spending has increased dramatically.
Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington (CCEW) was one of the programs that launched its boats into the new funding streams, adopting the Housing First model for its existing Spokane homeless shelter (House of Charity) and then building and opening six new “low barrier” permanent housing “havens” near that shelter in downtown Spokane.
Nearby businesses like Linda Biel’s spa immediately “began experiencing a noticeable increase in criminal activity,” which Biel describes in detail in a recently filed legal petition. Her petition documents hundreds of 911 calls each year from inside and around each of these facilities.
Biel was not quick to sue. First, in 2016, she gave up her original historic downtown building (at the cost of breaking a lease) and changed locations (at the cost of new renovations), only to watch as continued expansion of CCEW’s permanent housing havens surrounded her new business also.
Biel (reasonably) expected that the obvious and intolerable issues would be addressed by her elected city councilmembers, mayor, police department, and the leadership at Catholic Charities, and spent several long years appealing to them to do their duty.
Instead, some of them attacked her.
According to Biel’s lawsuit, one former councilmember publicly supported a boycott against her spa and other businesses whose owners raised concerns about the housing projects. CCEW President and CEO Rob McCann circulated a memo to his organization’s board members calling Biel’s complaints “mentally unstable and offensive” and “filled with hate speech.”
In a recent statement provided to the media site The Center Square, a spokesman for CCEW claims Biel’s legal petition is filled with “misleading, inaccurate and baseless allegations,” and quotes McCann as saying: “The facts and Jesus are on our side.”
With increasing documentation of the actual state of many Housing First facilities, it seems clear the facts are not on McCann’s side. Jesus will speak for himself.
Linda Biel can’t get her damaged dreams back, but hopefully her case will bring needed change. Sadly, Biel is not the only victim of bad policy and dereliction of duty. We’ll never hear from many of the others, though, because they are living (and dying) with untreated mental illness and addiction.
There is good news. Around the nation and in Spokane there are programs successfully and compassionately addressing the root causes of individual homelessness — helping people find permanent healing and transformation. This makes the failure of Housing First all the more grievous, but the story doesn’t have to end there.
Marsha Michaelis is a research fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. She can be reached at mmichaelis@discovery.org.
