Before Spokane Builds Another Youth Shelter

Ed Stevenson
3 hours ago
4 min read

Before Spokane Builds Another Youth Shelter, It Should Explain Why the Last One Failed

For four years, a converted building on East Augusta Avenue, just off Spokane Community College's campus, was the only place in this city built specifically for homeless 18- to 24-year-olds. Volunteers of America's Young Adult Shelter opened in December 2021 with up to 44 beds, funded by a $2.7 million state Department of Commerce grant and $1.3 million in city and county capital money to buy and renovate the site. It was billed, at the time, as proof that Spokane could get homelessness policy right for a population everyone agreed was falling through the cracks: kids aging out of foster care, kids fleeing unstable homes, kids with no one left to couch-surf with.

Now it is closing, and the public explanation offered so far amounts to little more than "funding ran out." That is not good enough. Before this city spends another dollar rebuilding a youth shelter, Spokane residents deserve an honest accounting of how this one actually operated — and the honest answer is that we don't have one, because VOA and its government partners never published it.

Start with who it served and how. The shelter was explicitly a low-barrier facility — VOA's own description calls it a "low-barrier, inclusive environment" open to any 18- to 24-year-old who showed up. In Spokane's own vocabulary, "low barrier" has a specific meaning: unlike sobriety-focused shelters, it means you are not required to be clean to walk in the door. City Council President Breean Beggs made the same point in 2021, holding up the young adult shelter as evidence that a demographic-specific, low-barrier approach works. What nobody in city government has explained publicly is what rules, if any, governed conduct once someone was inside — no published code of conduct, no curfew policy, no consequences framework has ever been made available to the taxpayers funding the place. For a facility serving a population this vulnerable, that is not a minor omission.

Then there is the money. We know the shelter's initial capital and start-up costs. We do not know its annual operating budget in any given year it was open, and neither VOA nor the city has released a per-resident monthly cost — the single number that would let Spokane compare this program to every other tool in its homelessness toolkit and judge whether it was worth what we paid. A shelter is not a black box. Public dollars built this one and public dollars ran it. The absence of a public ledger, four years in, is itself the story.

The outcomes we do have are mixed at best. VOA's own reporting says the shelter served 175 young adults in 2024 and that 113 of them — 64% — exited into stable housing. Framed generously, that is a majority success rate. Framed honestly, it means well over a third of the young adults who came through the doors did not leave with stable housing, and neither VOA nor the city has said what happened to them: back to the street, into another shelter, into an institution, or simply lost to follow-up. A program that cannot or will not answer "what happened to the other 62 people" is not a program taxpayers can evaluate, let alone defend. Now since there has not been any disclosure the numbers of “64% — exited into stable housing” cannot be verified.

None of this happened in isolation. VOA's other Spokane shelter, Hope House, has been threatened with closure or actually shuttered on a nearly annual cycle — 2021, 2022, 2024, and for good in 2025 — each time citing the same funding shortfall. When one organization runs multiple shelters and all of them keep landing in the same funding crisis, at some point the pattern stops looking like bad luck and starts looking like a structural problem with how these contracts are built, monitored, and funded in the first place. Meanwhile, federal rules taking effect this year will slash the share of renewal funding available for permanent supportive housing, and Spokane's own council has weighed delaying local homelessness funding decisions into 2027. The young adult shelter did not close in a vacuum; it closed inside a funding system that has been fraying for years, and that the city and its nonprofit partners have been slow to level with the public about.

None of this is an argument against helping homeless young adults, or against low-barrier shelter as a model. It is an argument that Spokane cannot simply reopen a version of the same shelter, under the same nonprofit, with the same absence of public rules, published costs, and tracked outcomes, and call that a solution. If this community is going to rebuild what it just lost, it owes the next round of young adults — and the taxpayers footing the bill — a program that can say, in plain numbers, what it costs, what it requires of residents, and what actually happens to the people who walk through its doors. The last shelter never could. That is worth fixing before we write the next check.

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Before Spokane Builds Another Youth Shelter

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