Unpacked: Addressing homelessness in Walla Walla

By Phineas Pope and Susan Shain

Phineas Pope: Walla Walla County has found permanent housing for 74% of the people who exited its homeless services system. That’s data from the last fiscal year, according to the Washington Department of Commerce. And it’s nearly twice the rate of the state as a whole. NWPB’s Susan Shain joins me now from Walla Walla to discuss more. What’s the key to the success in Walla Walla?

Susan Shain: A lot of people credit it to collaboration, and I think a really big shift happened during the pandemic. That’s when Walla Walla County’s Department of Community Health began holding these weekly meetings. And a lot of people kind of credited these weekly meetings with starting a culture shift in Walla Walla County. There’s not a lot of funding for homeless service providers, and people are kind of all competing for funding. But when the pandemic started, the County’s Department of Community Health saw that this was going to be a big challenge for the various shelter providers in the area, and so they began holding these weekly meetings. It was the first time that all the shelter providers had met together and talked through their struggles. Representatives from the city came, there were even representatives from the hospital — all these different groups that were dealing with the same challenge were able to talk through their highs and lows, their different strategies, where they were getting funding — how they could work together to solve this problem.

Pope: I want to talk about Walla Walla’s low-barrier homeless shelter. What are they? How do they compare to other shelters?

Shain: Low barrier basically means that for a person to be staying there, they don’t have to be sober, they don’t have to kind of attend any type of educational or religious programming, they don’t have to have a job. They are able to just show up as they are. They can also bring their pets and live with partners. Walla Walla’s low-barrier shelter houses about 60 people right now, and it’s mostly in these individual huts, which are very kind of simple, bare bones huts. They’re called Conestoga huts, named after the covered wagons. They’re quick to build, insulated and don’t require a ton of materials. They basically just have room for one or two beds. There’s a door, a small porch and window. The big idea is to just get people out of the cold, get people out of the rain, so that all their clothes don’t get wet, and then they’re able to not have to sleep outside. They can feel secure.

Pope: Talk about who you met over the course of your reporting affected by homelessness.

Shain: Matthew Cate was the main person who I worked with for this story. He was really generous with this time, and really generous with talking about everything he’d experienced and everything he was going or hoping to experience as well. Matthew did move into that apartment that I went with him to look at. He’s really just grateful for the opportunity, and is so excited to have his own shower for the first time in over a decade.

Pope: This story was part of NWPB’s solutions reporting. What is that? Why is that important to do?

Shain: Solutions reporting tries to look at the responses to problems rather than just the problem. So rather than just saying, “homelessness is an issue here in Walla Walla,”  it looks at, “How are people trying to solve that problem, and are they succeeding?”

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.