Spokane is closing Camp Hope, but for many the trauma of homelessness continues

Camp Hope, a large homelessness encampment in Spokane, swelled to 600 residents last summer. The camp has become a battleground between city, county, and state officials. It’s also brought a lot of attention and scrutiny to Spokane’s homelessness policies.

The camp sits on land owned by the Washington Department of Transportation, who acquired the lot as part of a highway expansion. But local officials want camp residents moved elsewhere, citing concerns with community safety and drug use. For more than a year both groups agreed residents should be moved elsewhere — but just where, and when, has remained an open question.

Soundside spoke with Carl Segerstrom, reporter and co-owner of RANGE Media in Spokane, about why Camp Hope's numbers have dropped.

"There is about 25 or 26 people in the camp as of this morning," Segerstrom said. "And at some point this week, about a dozen of them are going to be going into a sober housing program. So there's some expectation that even by next week, that camp could be in the single digits."

In recent months, officials have instituted a formalized badging system and fencing to track the number of people coming into Camp Hope and which services they were using. Roughly 100 people were also relocated to a converted hotel called The Catalyst.

But even as the battle between state and local officials over Camp Hope begins to simmer, the scrutiny of the region's homelessness policies continues. In a recent story, Segerstrom reported that Spokane city officials were failing to supply quarterly updates on the city's unhoused population as required under a 2021 law.

That leaves the Point in Time (PIT) count as the main body of data for use in guiding regional policy. Each January, roughly 170 volunteers walk the city to physically get a headcount. Segerstrom noted that it takes a lot of resources to get in-depth, accurate demographic data. The city is working on a new system to better keep up with the quarterly demands imposed by the 2021 law.

"There appears to be momentum towards fulfilling that mandate and that law," Segerstrom said. "I think in the bigger picture ... we have more homeless people in Spokane this year than we had last year as of this January, and we know that more homeless people live outside of housing in the summer. Presumably, we won't have a Camp Hope — where will people be this summer? That's the question that's really on my mind."

While data is lacking on the true number of people experiencing homelessness in Spokane, people with family members living unhoused in the city experience the crisis one person at a time.

Ryan Cook is one of those people.

He's a tech executive in San Diego and, in May of 2022, he flew to Spokane to find his son, Seamus Galligan.

Galligan had lost his job and apartment through a struggle with drug addiction and he was living on the street.

Cook walked around Spokane block by block over three days looking for his son. He even checked in at Camp Hope, but Galligan wasn't there.

Daniel Walters, the senior investigative reporter at The Inlander, wrote about Ryan Cook's attempt to find his son. Walters' story begins with a chance encounter between father and son. Galligan was in the back of a police car at the time. He had been arrested for breaking into a deli.

"As the police are taking him to jail, he says he actually sees his dad walking in the streets wearing the T-shirt for his dad's company," Walters said. "He can't really yell out for the guy because his dad's not going to be able to hear him through the police car."

Cook and Galligan were briefly reunited, then fell out of touch. Cook traveled to Spokane again in the winter but didn't have luck in the search for his son. He finally found Galligan through an article written about the Spokane Public Library's policy on homelessness.

"The big lessons that a lot of parents across the economic spectrum learn about this kind of situation is their own powerlessness," Walters said, "even if they have the means, even if they're willing to sacrifice their entire life to try to get their their child resources."

Listen to the full Soundside interview by clicking "play" on the audio above.

You can read Carl Segerstrom's reporting on homelessness in Spokane here, and you can read Daniel Walters story on Ryan Cook's search for his son, Seamus Galligan, here.