EWU Assisting in Efforts to Alleviate Homelessness

Eastern’s Matthew Anderson and his students are on a data-driven mission to change the way we think about housing and homelessness in our region.

Drawing on information they have gathered via their role in Spokane’s federally mandated Point-in-Time Count — an annual tally of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness on a single day in January — Anderson’s EWU team is helping to provide political leaders, social services professionals and charitable organizations with numbers and analysis that brings the nature of the crisis into sharper focus. (Use this link to check out the 2025 Point-in-Time Count – Homelessness in Spokane: The Broader Context.)

Anderson, an EWU professor of urban and regional planning in Eastern’s Department of Political Science and Public Policy, said the count is a crucial for understanding the scale, scope and, to some extent, the causes of homelessness. Pulling it off every year is a major undertaking.

“It’s a huge community effort requiring hundreds of volunteers. It’s just not something that can be done by city staff alone,” Anderson said. EWU students play a prominent role among those volunteers, helping to coordinate, staff and analyze data from the count.

Allison “AJ” Zimmerman was one of those students. A recent EWU graduate who participated in the Point-in-Time Count in 2024, she said that, among other lessons learned during the experience, was that data analysis from the count is crucial to creating a more accurate representation of the regional unhoused population.

“The public often overlook those that are ‘hidden,’” Zimmerman said, emphasizing how common it is to ignore our unhoused neighbors. This absence of attention, in turn, affects the way that the homeless are perceived and policies are implemented. “People feel ok about the criminalization of being homeless,” she said, in part because “they think all homeless people are dangerous.”

In recent years, anywhere from seven to 8,000 unhoused people have resorted to the shelter system in the city of Spokane, said Anderson, who is currently a co-chair of the Continuum of Care Board — a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funded initiative that allocates federal funding to local shelters and transitional housing projects and supports solutions to homelessness.

“What we do is what the city usually doesn’t have the capacity to do — a deeper contextual analysis of why the numbers have gone up,” Anderson said. “Why did homelessness worsen so quickly in Spokane? What are the various factors that are converging to create this problem? And why have the numbers declined these past two years?”

In 2025, Point-in-Time Count volunteers reach around 2,000 people residing within and outside of the shelters. He and his student crew also provide the unsheltered people they survey with bus passes, warm meals and blankets.

“It’s never going to be a perfect count,” Anderson said. “We’re always going to miss people. But if we do it year after year, [then] we can really get a sense of what the limitations are. We can get a better sense of change over time.”

“We have a long way to go, but we’re at least trending in the right direction,” Anderson said. Spokane experienced a major increase in homelessness from 2015-2023. “The total number of people counted went from around 1,000 to over 2,300.” That number, he said, has since come back down to 1,806.

Anderson and his team say the data they collect during the count typically goes a long way toward dispelling the many myths and misconceptions commonly associated with homelessness and the unhoused communities in Spokane.

There are often no outward signs of those without reliable shelter, Anderson said. “They don’t [always] look disheveled. You would never guess that they’re homeless. Which is why this year’s report is primarily focused on debunking myths.”

Such myths, he says, include the idea that all homeless people are on drugs or mentally ill. Or that “it’s their fault and they ‘did this’ to themselves.” Anderson said the majority of people in shelters or on the streets are there due to a convergence of factors.

People with physical disabilities and survivors of domestic violence, for example, are at a higher risk of becoming homeless. Divorce is another factor. Often, he says, having a sufficient network of friends and family is the only thing preventing vulnerable populations from becoming homeless.

Possibly the biggest myth surrounding Spokane’s unhoused population, Anderson said, is that they “all come here from somewhere else.”

Last year’s Point-in-Time Count, however, revealed that a solid majority—around 80%—of unhoused people were in fact locals. Many said they had lived their whole lives in the Lilac City.

“You’re likely to draw conclusions that are going to be skewed if you’re only considering the unhoused population in the downtown core, because it’s a skewed segment of the population that’s concentrated down there,” Anderson said. “But the number of people that are counted outside of the downtown core is actually greater than that cluster … only 35% of unsheltered respondents were counted in the downtown core.”

So how can we as a community debunk and destigmatize these myths around housing and homelessness? Although there isn’t one clear-cut answer, said Anderson, one of the easiest things you can do is avoid drawing broad conclusions based on occasional encounters. Our own personal experience with the homeless, he cautions, is most likely drawn from a very small sample size, and thus not representative of the bigger picture.

Another way is to get involved with this year’s Point-in-Time Count. To volunteer, use this online registration link. Mandatory trainings are available on Jan. 20 and Jan. 22.

**Story written by Rachel Weinberg.