Spokane's 7-Eleven Isn't the Problem. It's the Symptom

Spokane's 7-Eleven Isn't the Problem. It's the Symptom.

Last month, Spokane officials sent a letter to the owner of the 7-Eleven at Second and Division, informing him that his convenience store had been declared a "chronic nuisance property." The order cites 125 calls for police service in two months — overdoses, drug deals, disorderly conduct, welfare checks — and gives the owner ten days to respond and fifteen to submit a plan to clean the place up, or face civil infractions, a lawsuit, even closure.

It is the third such order against this particular 7-Eleven since 2017. And it raises an obvious question: since when did a convenience store or gas station become responsible for a city's homelessness crisis?

Mayor Lisa Brown's framing didn't help. "This business is making a profit off vulnerable people," she said, "and at a minimum, should use a portion of that profit to secure the property." It's a good line for a press release. It also puts the burden of Spokane's failure to house and treat its most vulnerable residents on a franchise owner selling Slim Jims and lottery tickets.

To be fair to the city, nobody at City Hall is actually claiming that a convenience store caused homelessness. Police Chief Kevin Hall, who has to manage the daily reality of that corner, was more candid than his mayor: "This is an intractable problem that we can't solve," he said. "It shouldn't be a criminal issue, it's a public health issue." That is a very different message than "blame the 7-Eleven" — and it's the one that deserves attention.

So why does a cluster of homeless and addicted people gather outside one particular convenience store, at one particular intersection, year after year? The honest answer has almost nothing to do with 7-Eleven's business model and everything to do with geography. The store sits next door to House of Charity, Spokane's largest men's shelter, at a corner where the city has stacked much of its downtown homeless services into a few blocks. Former Mayor David Condon and Nadine Woodward both said, years apart, that they wanted to disperse those services out of downtown precisely because concentrating them at Second and Division was concentrating the problems that come with them. That plan never happened. The services stayed. So did the crowds outside the 7-Eleven that happens to sit across the street.

Layer onto that a genuine public health emergency — a fentanyl crisis that has flooded cheap, lethal opioids into every West Coast city — and a behavioral health system that former city CFO Gavin Cooley bluntly admitted can't keep up: "Homelessness wasn't a thing like it is now," he said. "Nobody individually is at fault, but as a community, as a system, we're failing." That's not a 7-Eleven problem. That's a housing-cost, addiction-treatment, and psychiatric-bed problem, and no amount of civil infractions against a store clerk will touch it.

None of this means the nuisance order is pointless. Store managers who tolerate open drug dealing on their property because, as one formerly homeless man put it, they're "the most tolerant," are making a choice, and businesses do bear some responsibility for what happens on their own doorstep — Chief Hall calls it "co-responsibility," and he's right that it exists. A safer, better-lit, better-managed storefront can make a real block-level difference, and the city is within its rights to demand one. But two previous nuisance orders, in 2017 and 2024, already tried exactly this approach, and the store is still on a list. If threatening a franchisee worked, it would have worked by now.

What actually seems to be working, according to the city's own numbers, is the less headline-grabbing stuff: overdose calls near that intersection are down 51% since 2024, reported drug offenses down 60%, crimes against people down 26%, thanks largely to new outreach teams the city launched with Catholic Charities and a program called the Downtown 10, which targets frequent offenders with behavioral health treatment rather than jail bookings. Those are real, if incomplete, gains — and they came from investing in services and treatment, not from citing a convenience store.

Chief Hall said something else worth sitting with: "Visible poverty and homelessness scares people." That fear is legitimate, and downtown business owners and residents who live with needles and screaming matches outside their doors deserve a city that takes it seriously. But there's a difference between taking a problem seriously and finding a target simple enough to fit in a headline. A 7-Eleven can be cited, fined, even shuttered, and Spokane's homelessness crisis will still be standing on the sidewalk outside whatever takes its place. The city already knows what the real fix looks like — more shelter beds, more behavioral health capacity, more housing that people who work minimum-wage jobs can actually afford. That's a much harder thing to put a "chronic nuisance" sticker on. It's also the only thing that will actually work.

Sources:

• 7-Eleven on Division Street declared a 'chronic nuisance' by city officials (Spokesman-Review)

• 7-Eleven on Second and Division declared chronic nuisance property by Spokane (KXLY)

• Spokane works to leverage millions to clean up blighted areas, including 2nd and Division (Spokesman-Review, 2024)