The Bill
Spokane already pays for homelessness — roughly $90–100 million every year. Here is the itemized receipt.
The receipt
⚠ TRANSPARENT ESTIMATE — every number below shows where it came from. Verified figures are marked ✓; estimates are marked ≈ with the math spelled out. Corrections welcome.
| Line item | Basis | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| County jail — behavioral-health share ✓ | $53.2M budget × 60% BH-involved · ~830 avg daily population · ~16,000 bookings/yr | ≈$31.9M |
| Emergency room visits ≈ | 1,738 people × 3.1 visits × $3,000 | ≈$16.2M |
| Inpatient hospitalization ≈ | set deliberately low, at 0.8× the ER line | ≈$13.0M |
| Shelter operations ✓ | city + county shelter contracts | ≈$12.0M |
| SRSC crisis stabilization ✓ | budget, up 32% since 2024 | $11.3M |
| Courts ≈ | municipal & district court processing | ≈$3.0M |
| Charitable circuit ≈ | meals, supplies, donated services downtown | ≈$3.0M |
| EMS overdose response ✓ | 1,795 OD responses (2025) × ≈$1,050 | $1.9M |
| Police — camping & street calls ≈ | ~10,000 contacts × $150 · calls up 145% in 2024 · SPD publishes no total | ≈$1.5M |
| Encampment cleanup ✓ | $629K trash contract + staff share | ≈$1.0M |
| Medical examiner ✓ | 344 overdose deaths × ≈$2,000 | $0.7M |
| The status quo, every year | ≈$90–100M |
✓ = verified against a primary source · ≈ = estimate, methodology stated. The basis column above is a summary — the full derivation of every line is in How we calculated this, and the audit trail is in Sources & Library.
How we calculated this
The receipt is only as good as the math underneath it. Every derivation is below — starting with the city that measured it directly.
Start with Boise$53,000 per person, per year — and all 100 still homeless
In Boise, city hall did something almost no city had done: it picked the 100 people who had been homeless the longest and added up what those hundred people actually cost the public in one year — every jail night, ER visit, ambulance ride, police call, and court date. The answer was $5.3 million — about $53,000 per person, per year. And here is the part that changed the debate: at the end of that year, all 100 were still homeless. The money had bought laps around the system, not exits from it. Boise learned it was already paying handsomely — just for the wrong thing.
The core question: what does ONE person cost?two independent methods converge on $40K–55K/yr
Everything on this page is built from a single number: the cost of one chronically homeless person, for one year, in the status quo. Get that number right and the rest is multiplication. So we price that one person two completely independent ways — and check whether they agree.
| Two ways to price one person, one year | Result | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Way 1 — build the receipt from the bottom up. | $35K–60K/yr | Follow one person and add up their actual line items: jail nights ($150 each), ER visits ($3,000 each), ambulance runs ($1,200–4,200), police contacts ($150), shelter nights ($53), detox stays, court dates. National studies that did exactly this land at $35,000–$60,000 a year. Boise measured its own 100 people: $53,000 each. This map’s persona receipts (Dave, Tanya — see The Stories) build the same kind of receipt, item by item, and land in the same territory. |
| Way 2 — divide the whole bill from the top down. | ≈$22K/yr average served | Take Spokane’s entire status-quo bill — the ≈$95M itemized below — and divide it by everyone it touches over a year. The Jan 2026 point-in-time count found 1,738 people, but annual populations run 2–3× the single-night count (a standard finding), so call it ≈4,300 people served. That’s ≈$22,000 per person per year on average — with the chronic core running several times the average (benchmark chronic cohorts: $29K Denver, $31K Central Florida, $39K Charlotte, $53K Boise), and light-touch cases far below it. |
| Where the two ways converge | ≈$40K–55K/yr | Two methods that share no data — one built from a single person’s receipts, one divided down from whole system budgets — land in the same band. One chronically homeless person costs Spokane roughly $40,000–$55,000 every year they remain outside. That is the number to remember. |
Now multiplyone person → the chronic core → the whole crisis
- One person ≈ $40K–55K per year — roughly the salary of a teacher or a firefighter, spent producing nothing but another year on the street.
- The chronic core — Spokane’s 2024 count found 536 chronically homeless residents. 536 × $40K–55K ≈ $21–29M a year from this group alone. (Boise cross-check: 536 is about five of Boise’s 100-person groups; at Boise’s measured $53K each, ≈$28M — same answer.)
- The whole crisis — add everyone else who cycles through: 1,800+ counted homeless, thousands more touching the jail and ERs each year. Counted system by system in the itemized bill: ≈$90–100M a year. The chronic core’s $21–29M sits inside that total — under a third of the people, an outsized share of the money.
The itemized bill — where every number comes fromthe full derivation behind each line of the receipt
| Line item | Annual cost | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Jail time for the behavioral-health population | ≈$31.9M | ✓ $53.2M total detention operations (2024) × 60% of inmates with behavioral-health involvement (a share documented for years in Spokane). Verified against the county’s own dashboard: ~830 average daily population, 15,891 bookings in 2024, 16,283 in 2025 — and rising. Deliberately excludes courts and prosecution — they get their own line, below. |
| Courts, prosecution & public defense (BH-linked share) | ≈$3.0M | ≈ Benchmark-based: court costs run 2–6% of totals in linked-record studies (Santa Clara). ~16,000 bookings/yr, 60% BH-involved, each generating filing, hearings, prosecution, and defense time. [Added after benchmarking, Jul 2026] |
| Emergency-room visits by people who are homeless | ≈$16.2M | ≈ 1,738 people counted homeless × 3.1 ER visits per person per year (the CDC’s national rate for homeless patients) × $3,000 per visit. Much of this is never paid — it lands on the hospitals and on Medicaid. |
| Inpatient hospital care — medical & psychiatric admissions | ≈$13.0M | ≈ Benchmark-based, set deliberately LOW: in every linked-record study, inpatient care is the largest single line — typically 2–4× ER spending (health care was 53% of Santa Clara’s $520M; Central Florida’s $31K/person was mostly hospitalization). We price it at 0.8× our ER line. Includes psychiatric boarding days. [Added after benchmarking, Jul 2026] |
| The crisis stabilization center (SRSC) | ✓ $11.3M | The SRSC’s actual 2026 budget — up 32% from 2024. This is the reactive "front door" the region built because the upstream systems don’t catch people earlier. |
| Emergency shelter operations (public + private) | ≈$12.0M | ✓ City-contracted shelters (~$7M: TRAC-successor scattered sites, HoC, Bridge, inclement) + private/faith shelter operations (UGM ~$8.5M share, Truth, Salvation Army — shelter portion). Every benchmark study (Charlotte, Denver, Boise, Culhane) counts shelter as a status-quo cost; our first draft left it out. Cross-listed in the Funding Map ledger — the two exhibits measure different questions. [Added after benchmarking, Jul 2026] |
| Ambulance & fire responses to overdoses | ≈$1.9M | ✓ 1,795 overdose responses (SFD, 2025) × ≈$1,050 full cost per response ($57M fire budget ÷ 54,279 total responses). |
| Police time on camping & street-crisis calls | ≈$1.5M | ≈ Camping-related calls rose 145% in 2024; estimated 10,000 documented contacts, citations, and responses × $150 of officer time each. Flag: SPD publishes no total for these calls — that missing number is itself a finding. |
| Encampment cleanup | ≈$1.0M | ✓ $629K/yr in camp trash removal (city, 2023) plus a share of the $1.4M solid-waste abatement budget. One-time state cleanup grants excluded. |
| Medical examiner — overdose & street deaths | ≈$0.7M | ✓ 344 overdose deaths × ≈$2,000 per case ($2.4M office budget ÷ 1,156 cases). |
| The charitable survival circuit | ≈$3.0M | ≈ Donated meals, clothing, and mobile outreach across ~15 organizations. Not tax money — but a real cost the community pays each year to keep people alive in place. |
| THE BILL — status-quo crisis spending | ≈$90–100M every year | Recurring — this bill arrives again next year, and the year after, for as long as the status quo holds. (First draft: $65–70M; revised upward after benchmarking against five comparable-community studies — see the fine print.) |
What this money does not buynot one line on this bill ends anyone’s homelessness
Read back through the table and notice what’s missing: not one line on this bill ends anyone’s homelessness.
- A jail stay ends with release — usually back to the same sidewalk, often within days.
- A $3,000 ER visit ends with discharge — back to the same sidewalk, often the same night.
- A camp cleanup moves a camp. It has never shrunk one.
- Even the crisis center, doing exactly what it was built to do, stabilizes people for hours or days — then returns most of them to the conditions that produced the crisis.
That’s why this is the status-quo bill: it’s the interest-only payment on a debt whose principal never shrinks. Spokane pays it in full, every year, and on January 1 the balance is the same — or worse.
How Spokane compares — Wichita & Boise benchmark (FY2024–25)
Three counties of almost identical size (536–558K residents), three very different systems. An SBA best-efforts comparison counted every dedicated government homelessness operating dollar once, at the administering entity — vouchers and behavioral-health money tracked as separate layers:
| Measure | Spokane | Wichita/Sedgwick | Boise/Ada |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 homeless count (unsheltered) | 1,806 (617) | 736 (195) | 772 (126) |
| Homeless per 10,000 residents | 32.5 | 13.7 | 13.8 |
| Government homelessness spending | ≈$30.9M | ≈$6.3M | ≈$7.1M |
| — of which recurring (one-time removed) | ≈$21.9M | ≈$6.1M | ≈$4.6M |
| Government $ per county resident | ≈$56 | ≈$12 | ≈$13 |
| Government $ per counted homeless person | ≈$17,100 | ≈$8,600 | ≈$9,200 |
| Estimated private philanthropy | ≈$17.1M | ≈$10.8M | ≈$19.2M |
| Total estimated system spending | ≈$48.0M | ≈$17.1M | ≈$26.2M |
The honest reads, in both directions: Spokane governments spend 4–5× per resident what Wichita’s or Boise’s spend — and Spokane’s need, while genuinely higher, is ~2.4×, not 4–5×. So neither slogan survives contact with this table: "Spokane just needs more money" ignores that we already outspend the benchmark on every ratio; "spending caused the problem" ignores that Washington’s state funding structure (CHG, doc fees) drives much of the gap and that Boise’s system is ~three-quarters private philanthropy. Note the layer difference: this benchmark counts dedicated government homelessness operations (~$31M) — a narrower lens than this map’s $120–150M all-in ledger, which adds the ~$85M voucher layer, the 0.1% behavioral-health tax, settlement funds, and private capacity. The two figures reconcile; they answer different questions. Full comparison: What Do Three Comparable Communities Spend? (SBA, June 2026).
The comparison that matters
The comparison that should end every budget argument
Housing all 536 chronically homeless people in permanent supportive housing would cost about $13.4M a year (536 × ≈$25K) — roughly one-seventh of the status quo, with 85–90% of people still housed a year later. The status quo spends $40–55K per person per year to keep someone homeless. Boise measured it directly: its 100 longest-homeless residents cost $53K each in one year — and all 100 were still homeless at the end of it.
- Housing one chronically homeless person, with support services (permanent supportive housing), costs ≈$25,000 a year — this map’s own derived Spokane figure.
- 536 people × $25,000 = ≈$13.4 million a year — roughly one-seventh of the status-quo bill above.
- And unlike the reactive bill, that spending ends — nationally, 85–90% of people placed in supportive housing are still housed a year later, and their jail, ER, and EMS costs fall the moment they’re inside.
Spokane is not too poor to solve this. Spokane is paying a premium — every year — to keep it unsolved. The question isn’t whether we can afford to fix it. It’s how much longer we can afford not to.
The honest fine print
No line is double-counted: jail, ERs, EMS, the SRSC, and the medical examiner are separate systems with separate budgets. The per-person pricing (Ways 1 and 2 above) and the itemized bill are cross-checks on each other, not additions — the 536-person chronic-core cost sits inside the ≈$65–70M total. Real costs left out entirely because they can’t yet be pinned down: court and prosecutor time, private security, lost downtown commerce (storefront vacancy estimated at 30–40%), property impacts, psychiatric boarding days in hospital beds, and the costs borne by families. The Bill is therefore a floor, not a ceiling. Benchmarked July 2026: the first draft (≈$65–70M) was tested against five comparable-community studies — Santa Clara County’s $520M/yr linked-record analysis (health care 53%, justice 34%), Central Florida’s $31,065/chronic person (mostly hospitalization), Charlotte’s $39,458, Denver’s ≈$29K, Boise’s $53K — and revised upward: every one of them counts inpatient hospital care and shelter operations, which we had omitted. Sanity checks: per county resident, this bill runs ≈$170/yr vs. Santa Clara’s ≈$274 (2012) — we remain the conservative estimate; and our $40–55K per chronic person sits mid-band among the five studies. Still excluded (unquantifiable today): outpatient and non-crisis Medicaid treatment, private security, lost commerce and property value, benefits administration, and family costs. Sources: Spokane County Detention Services Capacity Dashboard, SFD 2024 Annual Report, SRSC budget reporting, CDC homeless ER-utilization studies, Medical Examiner 2024 Annual Report, city cleanup reporting, and the 2024/2025 Point-in-Time counts — see Sources & Library.