Council gives Hope Village two more years

Some critics say lame-duck council should have deferred decision to newly elected members

This is a revised and expanded version of the story I posted last night. Major changes and additions are in italics.

Hope Village, the controversial pallet home community that supporters say is successfully helping the chronically homeless to find housing and stability, got a two-year extension at Tuesday’s Longview City Council meeting.

With only Councilman Spencer Boudreau objecting, the council extended an agreement with the local Salvation Army to operate the supervised Alabama Street community until Nov. 15, 2025.

Boudreau also was the sole opponent when the council authorized construction and operation of the pilot project a year ago to replace the squalid, unregulated camp that operated on city property off Alabama Street for the three previous years.

Boudreau on Tuesday night also opposed an amendment to the contract, proposed by Councilwoman Ruth Kendall, stating that the accord can only be terminated ”with cause.” The provision will make it difficult for the incoming council — which will include three new opponents — to change or cancel it.

Salvation Army officials reported that Hope Village has helped 43 people find permanent housing since its opened last December, with 34 still housed.  Operating costs totaled about $911,000 through September, meaning it will cost far less than the $1.4 million limit the city had fixed for first-year costs. A state grant financed most of the expenses in 2023 and is expected to again in 2024.

About 205 people have lived at the restricted-access camp, and about 120 people are on the waiting list for entry. Each living unit comes with heat, lights and electrical outlets. The site has bathrooms, showers and laundry facilities. A eight-member Salvation Army staff counsels and monitors residents. About 28,400 meals have been served.

A succession of speakers commended the Salvation Army’s operation of the 50-home-community for single adults. It features 64-square foot prefabricated homes, a mess hall and portable toilets.  It is saving lives and public money by reducing calls for police service and jail time and shows the community has a heart, they said. 

Tuesday’s council meeting was a sharp contrast to the acrimonious meetings of a year ago, when hundreds of people showed up at council meetings to oppose the project  and demand that the unsupervised Alabama Street camp be shut down.

A woman who identified herself as 35-year resident of the city said, ”I’m proudest of Hope Village. … It makes a statement that we care for everybody.”

John Melink, who ran unsuccessfully for City Council four years ago, called Hope Village “a very important initiative” and drew a contrast between success of Hope Village and the neighborhood’s prior struggles with unsupervised homeless campers.

Still, a few speakers lashed out at the council, accusing members of not listening to citizens who objected to it a year ago.  Some critics said the project is not getting violent homeless people off the street, in particular in the nearby Highlands neighborhood.

“Get your heads of out of your asses,” one citizen speaker yelled at the council. 

Another invited council members to visit the Highlands and witness the need to clean up human feces and confront angry and disturbed people.

Still, no one really questioned that Hope Village is making a difference in the lives of at least some of the city’s homeless, though even its supporters acknowledge it is not the total answer to the homeless problem.

Tuesday’s action occurred a week after Longview voters turned out Councilman Mike Wallin, an outspoken Hope Village supporter, and Councilman Christopher Ortiz and elected a trio of conservative Republicans — Kalei LaFave, Keith Young and Erik Halvorsen. They are skeptical and are allied with Councilman Boudreau and State Sen. Jeff Wilson, a Longview Republican who last spring yanked operations money for Hope Village from the state budget.

This group has criticized the council for not setting specific goals for Hope Village;  for not opening the management contract up to other social service agencies; for not, in their view, establishing adequate safeguards for residents; and for rushing into the project without giving the public and other public officials a chance to weigh in. 

Several of them advocate drug testing for residents and criminal background for admission, noting that drug testing is required at the Community House on Broadway homeless center.

Halvorsen on Tuesday night read the council a letter representing himself and the other two council members-elect, asking that the Salvation Army contract be extended only six months and that the city seek proposals from other social service agencies about how to operate the camp.

Boudreau also wanted to limit the contract extension to six months, saying it’s necessary to review the project and invite others to bid.

“Ends to not justify the means when it comes to tax dollars,“ Boudreau said Tuesday night.

Access to the site is restricted to residents and staff, and drugs and weapons are banned and pallet homes are subject to search. Drug testing is not done, but residents who are in treatment programs are subject to testing there, Hope Village supporters point out.

Police calls to area have dropped to a trickle from the hundreds reported when the  unsupervised camp operated there. Villagers hold weekly trash pickups in the surrounding commercial  neighborhood, which today is tidy and quiet.

The rules and procedures at Hope Village are drawn from successful pallet home communities in Vancouver and elsewhere in the northwest, and may even be somewhat stricter, according to Longview City Manager Kris Swanson.

Longview Council selected Salvation Army to run Hope Village during a declared emergency, which did not require competitive bidding. It’s worth remembering here that Cowlitz County in 2022 solicited proposals to operate a supervised homeless project and received just one bid, from Community House. The county rejected it because of concerns that homeless people would not enter a program that required residents to pass drug tests, as Community House proposed.

Supporters noted that transitioning Hope Village residents to permanent housing is a challenge because the rental market here is so tight and there is a shortage of drug and mental health treatment. 

In addition, some landlords don’t want to lease to the residents and won’t even return phone  calls, Holly Hillman, a case manager at Hope Village, told me when I interviewed residents there last summer. And Hope Village deals mostly with the chronically homeless, who are more difficult to rehabilitate.

Wallin, a forceful defender of Hope Village, said in a election debate last month that the council established Hope Village because the public was demanding swift and bold action to end the”wild west” conditions at the Alabama Street Camp.  Tuesday night, the council approved his contract amendment to extend Salvation Army’s management of the community  for two hears instead of just one.

“The Salvation Army has proven to be a valuable partner to the community” and its effort to confront homelessness,  he said. “We need consistency and continuity” and said the slow pace of government would make it impossible to go through another biding and proposal process in six months. 

Anne Bennett, a medical recruiter from Longview, also urged the council to award an extended contract, saying she supports Hope Village but that “one year is not enough time to gather robust data and judge a program.”

Approval of a two-year extension means the Salvation Army contact will not be up for renewal again until after the 2025 council elections, when the seats of Boudreau and council members Angie Wean and Mary Alice Wallis are up for re-election.

Several speakers suggested that the council should have held off a decision until the new members take office, suggesting that lame-duck councilmen Wallin and Ortiz should yield the decision to their replacements.

Critics suggested that the election was a de facto public referendum on Hope Village. Supporters rebutted that suggestion, pointing out that Councilwoman Ruth Kendall, one of the chief architects of the project, won re-election handily over challenger Randy Knox, who also was allied with the Boudreau, Young, LaFave and Halvorsen. 

Further, Keith Young defeated Ramona Leber, who served on the  council from 1992 to 2007 but who had nothing to do with establishing Hope Village. though she supports it. Young said the city spent too much on it and advocates stricter bans on camping in public spaces.

“Hope Village was not on the ballot. Individuals were on the ballot.,” Democratic activist Teresa Purcell  of Longview told the council.  She supported a  two-year extension of the Salvation Army contract.

LaFave and Young won by relatively close margins, and the election turnout in the Longview was just 38%. Interpreting the election as public rejection of Hope Village seems problematic at best. No one can claim a mandate here. 

My guess is that the quiet majority of voters support the project, which has blunted if not completely solved the problem. And I think they’re willing to give Hope Village more time to prove itself.

For now at least, there is no other palatable alternative on the table.