Funding Glossary

Background — the fuller story. CDBG was born in 1974, when the Housing and Community Development Act rolled seven categorical urban-renewal programs into one flexible block grant — the Nixon-Ford era bet that cities know their own needs better than Washington does. Entitlement cities like Spokane receive an annual formula allocation (driven by poverty, housing age, and overcrowding) and decide locally how to spend it through an annual Action Plan with public hearings. Two structural facts shape its homelessness role: public services (shelter staffing, case management) are capped at 15% of the grant, so most homeless-related CDBG goes to bricks — facility acquisition and rehab for shelters, day centers, and clinics; and every president of both parties has periodically proposed shrinking or eliminating it, so long-term plans shouldn't lean on it. Its virtue is speed and flexibility; its vice is that a dollar stretched across sidewalks, senior centers, and shelters is a dollar perpetually fought over.

Background — the fuller story. Earmarks — formally Congressionally Directed Spending in the Senate and Community Project Funding in the House — let individual members steer specific dollar amounts to named local projects inside annual appropriations bills. Banned in 2011 after scandal, they returned in 2021 with guardrails: public disclosure, nonprofit/governmental recipients only, and caps on each member's requests. For a mid-size region, they function as a capital lottery: a persuasive one-page ask, a supportive member, and good timing can produce a few million for a treatment facility or shelter renovation that no formula program would fund. They are inherently one-time — useful for buildings, dangerous for operating budgets.

Background — the fuller story. The CoC program descends from the Stewart B. McKinney Act of 1987, the first major federal homelessness legislation. In the 1990s HUD began requiring communities to submit a single coordinated 'continuum of care' application rather than dozens of competing ones — the planning concept became the program's name. The HEARTH Act of 2009 consolidated three predecessor programs (Supportive Housing, Shelter Plus Care, SRO) into today's CoC program and hardwired performance measurement: exits to permanent housing, returns to homelessness, length of time homeless. Each region has a governance board, a Collaborative Applicant (here, the City of Spokane), and an HMIS data system. Critically, the annual ~$3B+ national competition is renewal-dominated — existing projects historically renewed almost automatically at 90% protection ('Tier 1'), which stabilized housing but calcified portfolios. The 2026 NOFO shattered that: Tier-1 protection cut to 30%, scoring repointed toward treatment and self-sufficiency. Every CoC-funded project in Spokane — detailed in the NOFO memos on this map — is re-justifying its existence this cycle.

Background — the fuller story. ESG began as the Emergency Shelter Grants program in 1987 — money to keep shelter doors open. The HEARTH Act of 2009 renamed it Emergency Solutions Grants and broadened it toward the then-new consensus that shelter should be a doorway, not a destination: street outreach, homelessness prevention, and rapid rehousing joined shelter operations as eligible uses. It flows by formula to the same jurisdictions as CDBG, requires dollar-for-dollar match, and caps the shelter/outreach share. In practice Spokane's modest allocation quietly underwrites shelter operations — the unglamorous keep-the-lights-on money beneath flashier grants.

Background — the fuller story. HOME, created by the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act of 1990, is the largest federal block grant dedicated solely to producing affordable housing — new construction, rehab, down-payment help, and tenant-based rental assistance, with a 15% set-aside for community housing development organizations. Its homelessness relevance is upstream: units built now are exits available later. HOME-ARP was the 2021 American Rescue Plan's $5B supplement, targeted at 'qualifying populations' (homeless, at risk, fleeing DV) — Spokane's $4.6M allocation went mostly to units plus services and is nearly spent. HOME's chronic weakness is arithmetic: allocations shrank for years while construction costs doubled, so each year's grant buys fewer doors.

Background — the fuller story. HUD-VASH pairs a Housing Choice Voucher (HUD) with mandatory VA case management — the 2008 marriage of subsidy and services that became the template for permanent supportive housing at national scale. Over 100,000 vouchers have been allocated nationally, and veteran homelessness has fallen by roughly half since 2010 — the strongest proof in American policy that targeted resources plus accountable case management actually end homelessness for a population. Locally, vouchers flow through SHA with services from Mann-Grandstaff VA. Its constraints are the program's own success formula: it only works when VA staffing keeps pace and landlords accept the voucher.

Background — the fuller story. PATH dates to 1990 amendments to the McKinney Act — a small SAMHSA formula grant with a precise job: pay for outreach and engagement of people with serious mental illness who are homeless and disconnected from care. PATH workers are the ones walking riverbanks and camps building trust before any billable service exists; the program explicitly funds the pre-treatment phase Medicaid won't. Washington routes it through HCA to regional behavioral-health providers. It is chronically tiny relative to its leverage — which is why Spokane County's 0.1% tax expanding local PATH capacity mattered more than its dollar size suggests.

Background — the fuller story. The Runaway and Homeless Youth Act programs (HHS, not HUD) date to 1974 and run on a different theory and a different definition: Basic Centers (short-term shelter and family reunification), Transitional Living Programs (ages 16–22), and Street Outreach. Crucially, RHY counts couch-surfing and unstably-housed youth whom HUD's stricter definition misses — one reason youth homelessness statistics never reconcile across agencies. Locally this stream runs through the youth-provider network (the Crosswalk lineage), and its separateness from the adult system is both protective (kids aren't mixed with adult shelters) and fragmenting (another silo to coordinate).

Background — the fuller story. Created in 1974, the Housing Choice Voucher program is the federal government's main answer to housing affordability: the tenant pays ~30% of income, the voucher pays the rest up to a payment standard tied to fair-market rent. It is the largest single money stream on this entire map — and the least visible, because it flows as thousands of individual rent checks. Three structural problems define its local reality: it is not an entitlement (only about 1 in 4 eligible households nationally ever receives one — Spokane's waitlist once stayed closed for eight years); vouchers expire unused when landlords decline them (local lease-up failure ≈40%); and payment standards chase a rental market they never quite catch. Emergency Housing Vouchers (2021, ARPA) added a homeless-targeted tranche. When this map says the housing lane runs on federal rails, this is the rail.

Background — the fuller story. SSI (created 1972) pays a federal floor income — $967/month maximum in 2025 — to aged, blind, and disabled people with minimal assets; SSDI pays based on work history. In this system they are not background programs: they are the income that makes housing math work, becoming the resident's 30% share in subsidized units and the payment base in adult family homes. The catch is access: applications from people experiencing homelessness historically fail at extraordinary rates — no address, no records, no treating physician. The SOAR model (SAMHSA, 2005) trains case managers to build medical evidence and file complete applications, roughly doubling initial approval rates (about 65% versus 31% unassisted). Every chronic-homelessness exit plan quietly depends on somebody doing SOAR work.

Background — the fuller story. SSVF (first grants 2011) is the VA's prevention and rapid-rehousing arm — short-term, intensive help for very-low-income veteran households that are homeless or about to be: temporary rent, deposits, case management, and connection to VA benefits. Where HUD-VASH is the deep-end tool for chronically homeless veterans, SSVF is the shallow-end tool that keeps the pool from filling. Grants flow to community nonprofits — locally Goodwill — rather than through the VA itself. The veteran system's real lesson for Spokane is architectural: a by-name list, a full toolkit from prevention to PSH, and one accountable system — which is exactly what this map recommends for everyone else.

Background — the fuller story. GPD (1994) pays operators a per-diem rate for transitional housing beds serving homeless veterans, plus capital grants to create them. It built much of the nation's veteran transitional stock, and has been steadily reoriented toward 'bridge housing' — short stays with a named permanent destination — as the field moved away from long transitional stays. The per-diem structure means operators only get paid for occupied beds: sustainable at scale, precarious for small programs.

Background — the fuller story. Every region has a workforce development board; Spokane’s (the Spokane Workforce Council) has been unusually entrepreneurial — its Spokane Resource Center was one of the nation’s first HUD EnVision Centers, co-locating workforce, housing, health, and benefits services deliberately. The strategic point for this map: WIOA performance metrics historically discouraged serving the hardest-to-employ (they hurt your numbers), which kept workforce and homelessness systems politely apart. The fix is the same as everywhere else on this map — shared goals, shared data, shared clients, on purpose. A regional homelessness strategy that doesn’t sit the workforce board at the table is leaving one of its five lanes half-staffed.

Background — the fuller story. Washington moved early on the national 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (launched July 2022): E2SHB 1477 (2021) imposed a telecom line tax to fund not just call centers but a crisis-system buildout — designated crisis hubs, mobile rapid-response teams, and eventually a 'someone to call, someone to come, somewhere to go' architecture. The dollars flow to regional BH-ASOs like SCRBH. The statute's ambition outran early implementation (call volumes rose faster than mobile-team coverage), and the enduring gap is the third leg: a call and a team still need a destination bed — which is why this stream's fate is chained to crisis-stabilization capacity like the SRSC and PATH facility.

Background — the fuller story. Washington's therapeutic courts — drug court, mental-health court, community court, veterans court — are county and municipal creations, but a meaningful slice of their staffing has ridden on grants from the state Administrative Office of the Courts, supplemented by the county's 0.1% tax and federal demonstration grants. That funding mosaic is the vulnerability: Spokane's city therapeutic-court awards fell from $738K to $430K after FY24, forcing exactly the retrenchment the evidence argues against — NIJ and GAO reviews consistently find drug courts reduce recidivism, and Spokane Community Court's own WSU evaluation showed the model works here. Courts that depend on grants budget year-to-year for programs whose results compound over decades.

Background — the fuller story. This is the descendant of a system Spokane County once fully controlled. From the 1990s, county-run Regional Support Networks (later Behavioral Health Organizations) held the region's Medicaid mental-health dollars. SB 6312 (2014) set integration in motion, and in 2019 the Spokane region moved to fully integrated managed care: the Medicaid behavioral-health budget — and the power that came with it — transferred to five commercial MCOs. What remained with the county is the BH-ASO: administrator of the crisis system (crisis line, mobile crisis, designated crisis responders, ITA machinery, stabilization) for all six counties of the Spokane Regional Service Area, insured or not, funded by state contracts plus the non-Medicaid 20% slice of state rate-enhancement money. The full analysis — including why MCOs must still buy crisis services from the county, the leverage that remains — is the BH funding-control memo in this map's Funding Map section.

Background — the fuller story. CHG is the spine of Washington's state homelessness funding, and its story explains half the system's plumbing. In 2005 the legislature passed the Homeless Housing and Assistance Act (HB 2163): every county had to write a ten-year homeless plan, and a surcharge on real-estate document recordings would pay for it — homelessness funding deliberately tied to the housing market itself. Over the following years Commerce consolidated a scatter of separate grants (emergency shelter assistance, transitional housing, and others) into one Consolidated Homeless Grant, distributed biennially to county-designated lead grantees — which is why the City of Spokane and Spokane County each run CHG-funded programs. CHG money is operationally flexible (shelter, rapid rehousing, outreach, prevention, HMIS) but performance-managed: grantees report exits to permanent housing and returns to homelessness. Its two chronic weaknesses: recording-fee revenue collapses exactly when high interest rates freeze home sales (need rises as revenue falls), and biennial state budgets make it a perpetual advocacy fight. The companion HEN program (see entry) shares the doc-fee lineage. In Spokane, CHG underwrites the city's scattered-site shelter NOFA (~$3.9M) and flows through the county's blended $13.7M two-year program.

Background — the fuller story. Corrections money becomes homelessness money at the release door. DOC's community-side spending includes work-release and reentry centers (Brownstone and Eleanor Chase in Spokane, ~55 beds), community supervision, graduated reentry (expanded 2018 and 2021, letting people finish sentences at home with monitoring), and contracts with community providers like Revive for approved housing. DOC also runs a modest housing-voucher program for releasees with nowhere approved to go — short-term rent support that is often the only thing between prison and a tent. The deadly statistic anchoring this stream: Washington data show a 129-fold overdose-death risk in the first two weeks after release. Every dollar here is warm-handoff infrastructure, and the SHTF's B4 recommendation is largely about this door.

Background — the fuller story. FCS grew out of Washington's first big Medicaid 1115 waiver — the Medicaid Transformation Project (2017), a five-year, ~$1.5B agreement with CMS that let the state test paying for things Medicaid never covered. Its boldest bet: that housing instability and unemployment are health conditions. FCS created two statewide benefits — Community Support Services (supportive-housing services) and Supported Employment (IPS-model job support) — delivered through an unusual single third-party administrator (Wellpoint/Amerigroup) rather than the five MCOs, so providers bill one entity statewide. MTP 2.0 (2023–2028) renewed and expanded the experiment toward 'health-related social needs,' including time-limited rent assistance for narrow groups as it phases in. California's CalAIM and a dozen other states' waivers copied the architecture. The evidence base (housing-retention and reduced-utilization studies) keeps growing. For Spokane the practical meaning: every housing navigator, tenancy-support worker, and IPS employment specialist billing FCS is drawing on renewable health-care financing rather than a grant that dies in two years — the closest thing to a permanent funding rail this system owns.

Background — the fuller story. HEN emerged from the 2011 recession-era restructuring of Washington's Disability Lifeline: cash grants for unemployable adults became the ABD program, and a new Housing & Essential Needs program provided rent and essentials vouchers for adults with temporary incapacities — people too disabled to work but not (yet) federally disabled. DSHS determines eligibility; Commerce funds local administrators who pay landlords directly and distribute hygiene and cleaning essentials. HEN occupies the exact gap where homelessness is born: the months or years between losing work capacity and winning an SSI award. As pure prevention per dollar, few streams outperform it — and few are less known to the public.

Background — the fuller story. Created in 1986–87, the Housing Trust Fund is Washington's capital bank for affordable housing: biennial capital-budget appropriations (recent biennia exceeding $400M statewide) awarded competitively to nonprofit and housing-authority developers, usually stacked with federal LIHTC equity, bonds, and local funds. Awards carry 40–50 year affordability covenants. Nearly every affordable or supportive building on this map — CHC's portfolio, Hope House's building, SHV properties — has HTF in its capital stack. Its structural gap is the one this map flags repeatedly: HTF builds buildings, but operating subsidies and services must be hunted elsewhere, and supportive-housing projects that win capital without securing services money open fragile.

Background — the fuller story. Medicaid (1965) became the dominant payer in this system through two Washington decisions: ACA expansion in 2014 (Apple Health now covers most low-income adults, including nearly everyone experiencing homelessness) and full behavioral-health integration in 2019 (five MCOs hold capitated contracts covering physical and behavioral care; the county BH-ASO retains the crisis carve-out). Medicaid pays for MAT, outpatient and inpatient treatment, detox medical costs, and — via the FCS waiver — supportive-housing and employment services. Two federal quirks shape everything: the IMD exclusion (Medicaid historically couldn't pay for care in large residential 'institutions for mental diseases,' constraining big treatment facilities — waivers now soften this), and churn (eligibility redeterminations knock people off coverage exactly when address instability makes paperwork impossible, breaking treatment mid-course). This map's ledger deliberately shows Medicaid as a layer rather than a line: the biggest money, the least locally steerable.

Background — the fuller story. The Office of Homeless Youth Prevention and Protection was created inside Commerce in 2015 — a legislative acknowledgment that youth homelessness is developmentally different work. OHY funds crisis residential centers, HOPE beds, young-adult shelters and housing, and system-improvement efforts like the Anchor Community Initiative (which set out to end youth homelessness in specific cities using by-name lists). The SHTF's C6 recommendation — a school-centered prevention system for ages 16–25 — would be built substantially on OHY rails. The gap it fights: young people avoid adult shelters for good reasons, and every year of street time before 25 compounds for decades.

Background — the fuller story. The Right-of-Way Safety Initiative (2022–23) was Governor Inslee's answer to encampments on state highway land — roughly $143M statewide to resolve specific camps by actually housing their residents. Spokane's Camp Hope, at its peak the state's largest encampment (600+ people on WSDOT land), became the flagship: ~$24M flowed here, including ~$15M to acquire the Catalyst building for supportive housing plus outreach, shelter, and TRAC operations. The initiative proved two things at once: with enough concentrated money and coordination, a large camp can be closed humanely — and one-time money without system change buys a one-time result. The dollars are gone; the lesson (and the Catalyst building) remain.

Background — the fuller story. The city's own-source shelter spending tells the whole strategy story in miniature: the ARPA-era Trent Resource and Assistance Center (TRAC) mega-shelter absorbed ~$20M in its final two years before closing October 2024; the Brown administration pivoted to smaller scattered-site contracts (~$1M/quarter) under the Coordinated Street Model with the Bridge Center as day-use hub; and inclement-weather surge funding quadrupled from ~$250K to ~$1M after cold-season failures. An October 2025 emergency declaration added a one-time $4.2M package. All of it competes annually against police, fire, and parks inside a structurally strained general fund — the fiscal reason this map argues the city cannot go it alone.

Background — the fuller story. RCW 82.14.460 (2005) lets counties levy a 0.1% sales tax for chemical dependency and mental-health purposes — King County's MIDD is the statewide model. Spokane County's version yields ≈$15.6M/yr (2024 actual; gross estimated $15–22M) and is the county's signature discretionary behavioral-health money: commissioners direct it annually to Mental Health Court and therapeutic courts, PATH outreach expansion, the Initiative for Student Wellness, behavioral-health transitional housing, and (increasingly) the Regional Stabilization Center, with ~$7M steered toward crisis-center expansion. Statutory priorities constrain it loosely; politics constrain it more. Together with opioid-settlement receipts it forms the county's entire freely-steerable BH lever (~$20–25M) — the fulcrum the BH control memo identifies.

Background — the fuller story. The county's homeless program consolidated into a competitive two-year cycle: the 2025 RFP awarded $13.73M across 2025–27 (≈$6.9M/yr) to providers serving the county outside city contracts. The money is itself a blend — state CHG, county document-recording fees, and HESG — which is why this map counts it once, under the CHG row, rather than double-listing its ingredients. Its existence alongside the city's separate CHG program is Exhibit A in the fragmentation story: two governments, two RFP calendars, two provider portfolios, one homeless population.

Background — the fuller story. Washington funds homelessness partly through a surcharge collected every time a deed, mortgage, or other document is recorded — a lineage running from HB 2060 (2002, affordable housing) through HB 2163 (2005, homeless housing) to HB 1277 (2021), which added $100 per document for eviction prevention and housing stability. Counties keep local shares under state-approved plans; Spokane Valley's ≈$640K/yr is its primary dedicated homelessness stream, while city and county shares flow inside their program budgets. The design has a cruel elegance: revenue tracks real-estate churn, so when interest rates freeze the market, recording volumes — and homelessness funding — fall precisely as evictions and need rise.

Background — the fuller story. Spokane voters renewed the EMS property-tax levy in 2023 — $0.50 per $1,000 assessed value, ~$13.1M/yr through 2028 — inside a Fire Department budget near $57M. SFD ran 54,279 responses in 2024 (a record), 47,845 of them EMS, including 1,795 overdose responses. The levy's homelessness relevance is arithmetic: at ≈$1,050 full cost per response, the fire department is the crisis lane's default (and most expensive) front door, which is why the CARES team — social workers reducing 911 high-utilizer calls by ~72% in early cohorts — may be the levy's highest-leverage investment.

Background — the fuller story. HB 1590 (2020) let cities adopt a 0.1% sales tax for affordable housing councilmanically — no public vote required — and Spokane's council did so in December 2020, branding it HEART. It collects ≈$7.5M/yr for affordable and supportive housing and related services, and can be bonded to accelerate construction. It is the city's one significant discretionary housing lever, which is exactly why fights over it matter: the 2026 delay episode (documented in the pre-NOFO memo on this map) showed HEART's vulnerability to being steered by whoever holds the council majority. In any city-goes-alone scenario, HEART is the tax that gets leaned on — and the reason this map keeps asking what happens to regional integration when each government spends its own fragment.

Background — the fuller story. National opioid litigation — the $26B distributor/J&J settlement plus later deals with pharmacies and manufacturers — flows to Washington jurisdictions under the One Washington MOU, restricted to opioid abatement: treatment, recovery, prevention, harm reduction. Spokane County expects ≈$29.2M through 2038; the city holds its own smaller share ($1.5M planned). Local uses so far map directly onto this map's treatment lane: $775K toward STARS's 16-bed inpatient wing, $5M to the stabilization center, $500K to SFD CARES. Two truths govern it: it is genuinely flexible within abatement — and it is a wasting asset on a fixed clock, which argues for infrastructure over operating dependence.

Background — the fuller story. Spokane Valley runs no shelter of its own; its strategy is contracts and partnerships — HHAA document-recording receipts (≈$640K/yr) plus targeted ARPA-era awards (~$8M range) to providers like Family Promise and Reclaim Project, alongside participation in regional planning. Valley politics have historically favored accountability-first approaches and resisted city-of-Spokane-centric solutions. That makes the Valley the swing constituency of regionalization: any unified measure that cannot win a Valley council vote or a Valley precinct probably is not regional enough to work.