Out of the Shadows

Eastern students hit the streets in a data-driven approach to homelessness.

Every year, on a single night in January, dozens of volunteers fan out across the nation’s cities and towns to tally the number of people living without shelter. The federally mandated exercise, called the Point-in-Time Count, is part census, part reality check. And for several years now, a team from Eastern has played a key role in making it work locally.

Matt Anderson, an EWU professor of urban and regional planning and co-chair of Spokane’s Continuum of Care Board, heads up the university’s role in the count. His students help staff the effort, and afterward analyze what the numbers reveal. The goal is to give local political leaders, social service agencies and charitable organizations a data-driven picture of who is unhoused in Spokane, and why.

The scale of the problem has shifted dramatically. From 2015 to 2023, Spokane’s count rose from roughly 1,000 to more than 2,300. (It has since retreated to just over 1,800.) Each year between 7,000 and 8,000 people typically cycle through the city’s shelter system.

Anderson and his students say their data routinely challenges popular assumptions. Chief among these is that Spokane’s homeless population has migrated from elsewhere: The most recent count found that about 80 percent were locals, many of them lifelong residents. “You’re likely to draw conclusions that are going to be skewed if you’re only considering the unhoused population in the downtown core,” Anderson said, “because it’s a skewed segment of the population that’s concentrated down there.”

Allison Zimmerman, an Eastern student who participated in the 2024 count, said her experience underscored how much homelessness remains invisible, and how this shapes public attitudes. “The public often overlook those that are ‘hidden,’” she says. That lack of awareness, she adds, makes it easier for people to accept punitive policies. “People feel OK about the criminalization of being homeless,” she said, in part because “they think all homeless people are dangerous.”

The count, by design, captures only a single days’ snapshot and almost certainly undercounts the true population. But, Anderson says, it remains the best tool available.

“We have a long way to go,” he says, “but we’re at least trending in the right direction.”