There's a simple story that we're all used to hearing. There are people who aren't from here. They're taking our resources, and if we just send them back where they came from, everything would be so much better here. That narrative is really comfortable and seductive in some ways, and it's also the narrative at the heart of a recent study by the Spokane Business Association that made claims around how many people in Spokane are homeless and are actually from Spokane. A lot of news outlets in town reported on this study and just blanket put the claims in their headlines with no critical analysis of the study whatsoever. But not free range. We've got all the analysis that you could want and more. So sit back, relax, and let's talk data. This is Free Range, a co-production of KYRS and Range Media. I'm Aaron Hedge. I'm Aaron Sellers and the Aaron team. The dream team really, right. I'm making little heart hands. You can't see them, but I am. We're here today. Uh, uh, Luke and Val are out today. And we are here to talk about a really important study about a study that was commissioned by a local business association that says a lot of things about the local homelessness community. It sure says a lot of things. That's right. And we're here to 'cause, 'cause Aaron has been. Obsessing of this story since, uh, they were in New Orleans last week for an investigative editor report as an editor's conference. Kind of a national like investigative journalism conference when this study came out. And we're very interested in breaking this down. Aaron has a story coming out possibly this evening, question Mark, mark, possibly tomorrow morning. We're not exactly sure. It depends on the editing process. They've done, they've gone gangbusters on the research on this story. Um, and yeah, we wanted to break it down because we, we feel like at range that there's been some coverage that's been really credulous of this story or, or of the study. And so, um, yeah, I guess, uh. Maybe we can just start out with the scene, Aaron, and, and you, you, you had a heads up that the story was coming was, was coming. You, you had talked to the Spokane Business Association's leader, Gavin Cooley. Is he, is he, what's his title there? I can't remember. Well, he used to be the CEO, but now I think he's like the strategic initiatives manager. Okay. But he's a, he's a kind of a higher up. He's, he's, he has a lot of influence there and, um, I think there's only two employees, so yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. But yes. Can you talk about, just, just tell me the scene where you, where you kind of like learned that the study had been published and, um, and what the, what your initial reactions to it were. And what does it basically say? Let's, let's, let's start with just like some table stakes. Yeah. Okay. So I was in New Orleans. I'm relaxing in my cold hotel room because it's like so hot there, so sweaty, so hot heat dome, heat dome season in New Orleans. And I, despite being off work, I like to stay caught up on what's happening. So I check, you know, the headlines. I check the, the, the news stations and I see a headline. Studies reveal over half of unhoused move to Spokane after losing housing. And I realize that SBA a's study has been published, I click open the story and it does a and, and who, who, who is the or original, like publisher of this thing. Like that. Headline, what was the news source was from Fox 28 and KHQ, both published the same. So TV news station, a TV news station, and I click it open and it's just blanket reporting The findings of this study, 50.2% of people aren't from Spokane or first experienced homelessness outside of Spokane. It's just parroting the top level findings from this study. Right. And I know about this study 'cause a few months ago I got an email from service providers who sent me a list of the questions that the SBA intended to ask on this survey. And they also sent me information about the person conducting the survey, who is Dr. Robert Marbut. He was formerly called Trump's Homelessness Czar back in Trump's first term, which meant he was in charge of shaping and guiding a lot of the homelessness policy coming outta the federal government during Trump's first term. This guy's also kind of made a name for himself across the country. Uh, he does studies for local governments or business interest groups. And I get the questions for the survey. And first of all, there's like misspellings. Let's, let's talk about, let's talk about Dr. Marba a little bit more. Like what is, uh. Let's talk about the rhetoric is, um, like what are the, well, I think what's kind of what I wanted to talk is, is Dr. Marba the questions. Okay. Right? Yeah, totally. The questions, they just ask the same question a bunch of different ways, basically, where were you born? How long have you been in the city of Spokane? Where did you attend your senior year of high school? Do you have family that lives in Spokane? What year did you first start experiencing homelessness? What is the reason you came to Spokane? Where were you living when you first started experiencing homelessness? Just like a lot of different ways to ask the question, did you come here because you were homeless or were you a Spokane resident that became homeless through some circumstance in your life? And I feel like that is rooted in a lot of the rhetoric that comes out of Dr. Maritz's kind of ideology. There's two key things that I see with, studies Mar has touched, or places Mar has advised on homelessness policy. The first big thing is that his central thesis tends to be homeless people go to big liberal cities because these big cities have homelessness services and people come from all over the country to go to these places to get services. This is not a word for word quote. This is just sort of the, the ideology simmering around the messaging he's putting out. That's the tenor. Right. And I, and I think that, like, I think I, I do think there's a general perception of that. When I came to Spokane in 2021, I heard a lot of that rhetoric. And, uh, Spokane is the biggest city between Seattle and Minneapolis. Minneapolis, and, and it's, you know, it's perceived to be this kind of center of services for, for unhoused folks. Right. It's definitely a narrative that's pervasive. So, so talk to us about like, what's going on in that narrative. Yeah. So look. I wanna spend my time first debunking that. Sure. Right. Like we get these survey, this survey from Marette that is like, look, everybody. We were right. More than half of people in Spokane first experienced homelessness somewhere else and then came here. And that's like a scary fact that sort of, if you already buy into that narrative that people are coming here to get our resources and keeping us from properly using our resources to help the homeless people that really deserve it. IE the homeless people that lived here before, like that fact is that headline with no dissection is going to be like a gold star for you. Oh my God. I was right. This survey backs it up. But then you look at the survey and there's big issues with it, so it asks the question itself, right. Where were you when you first started experiencing homelessness that fails to account for people who, for example, experienced homelessness when they were a kid somewhere else? Right? Let's say you live in Minneapolis, you're a 7-year-old, your mom's homeless for a little bit, you're homeless with her. Then you. Grow up, you go to college, you go somewhere else, eventually you move to Spokane. You have a life of family here, a job, and then circumstances change and you become homeless. When you take this survey, you'd have to answer, I first experienced homelessness somewhere else, and you might think I'm spinning kind of a, a yarn that just pokes holes in this for no reason. But most of the people who took this survey had were older than 45. And so that's a lot of years, right. For somebody to have experienced something. And then that's maybe actually the more minor problem with the survey. The bigger one is sample size. Well, I think let's, let's, let's dwell on that just for a minute. Like, I think, I think the point of what you're saying is like that question does not account for a lot of, a lot of, a lot of potential circumstances that could exist in a person's life between mm-hmm. When they first experie experiences experienced homelessness and. You know their current situation. Right. Okay. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. So not only does the, the question not account for that, but they're extrapolating this data from 230 ish responses. I say ish, the numbers wishy-washy here. One News station reported 2 31 News station reported two 60 a source, who was a volunteer there, told me that they got almost 400 surveys and then threw a hundred out. Today. I was finally able to get Dr. Mart on the phone via text message, and he told there was somewhere between 230 and 235 surveys that they used and they threw out between 30 and 35 surveys for not answering all the questions. Which that answers opens up another question for me, which is like, why can't you tell me the exact number? But we don't need to dive into that. Sure. And he's like convinced that this is accurate, right? He's telling me that this has a 95% like he's con a 95% confidence rate because he says he drove around with volunteers and they did a grid search of downtown where they pointed out every single person they saw sitting downtown that they thought was homeless. And that number added up to 403 people. So they're saying, we got surveys from 230 ish people that we use to extrapolate this data, and that's over half of the homeless population because the homeless population is 403. We saw them. That's an estimate. So our confidence rate here, you know, we got really good data and there's so many problems with that, that I needed so many words to unpack and that I'm so disappointed that some of these other TV news stations that covered it took zero words to ask any of these questions. What is, I'm, I'm really interested and I was reading. The copy that you have down, which is currently being edited what is a grid search? What does that mean? So the term, at least how he's using it, comes from a place that did missing children surveys or like, looked for missing children. They did like a grid search to try to find missing children in an area. He didn't go into this methodology. He just has a one line referencing it. And then I went through their website. It's now defunct, the institute that did it and, and looked at at what they did. But what he told me they did is they get in a car and they've got volunteers sitting on one side of each car and they drive back and forth in a grid downtown Spokane going, there's a homeless person over there. If you're on the right side of the car, you're like, oh, there's two homeless people sitting over there. He says they took pictures of each homeless person so that they could compare and make sure that they were unique. One of the volunteers who was in the car for at least an hour told me that all he was doing was pointing at people and saying, there's a homeless person there. And then, but the person said, no pictures, just that they didn't say that. They took pictures. He said all he was doing was pointing at people and saying, there's two homeless people over there. I see another two. And this is again, failing to account for the fact that they're just. Driving around looking at people that they think look homeless. There's not a control for that. Right? Right. Like they said, you know, if you were, they're assuming people who look homeless are homeless, are homeless. Yeah. Okay. And then they're using that to estimate the amount of unsheltered homeless people in Spokane. But then the surveys that they actually went out and got like 60 ish or more were from sheltered individuals. So now we're mixing two different populations. 'cause if you want a survey about unsheltered people, and you're saying, we got surveys from 250 or 235 of the 403 unsheltered people, I still have issues with that. But at least you're comparing apples to apples when you say, okay, I've got 253 responses. And some of them are from people who are sheltered. And that tells you everything you need to know about unsheltered people and makes up this portion of the total population. Now you're just looking at apples and oranges and you're probably listening to this saying, wow, that's too many math words, and I don't like this. And I'm gonna tell you I've spent too much time with math words and I don't like it either. But somebody had to do it because we can't just accept blanket studies with no methodology, methodology attached, no raw data. I had to go begging for any of these numbers because everything I was finding in other sources either had no raw numbers attached or reporting different raw numbers for survey size. This is crazy. Who did you go begging to? Dr. Robert Mart. Okay. I could have gone to Gavin Cooley. I don't think he would've answered me. I think I burned that bridge last time I was reporting on this when I was asking questions because you, you interviewed Gavin Mart when you knew the study was gonna happen? Yeah. It was like the day before they started conducting surveys. Mm-hmm. And what did, what did Gavin tell you? Well, if you give me two seconds, I can tell you exactly what Gavin told me. Okay. Uh, I think Aaron has a, an audio file queued up for us to, to listen to. I do. Um, if it works every time we play a, we're never sure. We're not radio people. Folks, if we're not pulling punches here, how much money are you spending to essentially replicate data that's already been collected? How much money did this cost? Aaron, why do you think that's even, I, you're kind of like the city council member saying, Gavin, why at 5:00 AM aren't you handing out brochures and handing out food? You don't think it's relevant to ask how much money you're spending on this When the city has just completed their point in time count that asks largely the same questions. Aaron? I don't think, no, I don't think it's relevant at all. Are you suggesting we should only be giving money to help with homelessness? In which case, how much are you giving you personally of your salary? Are you giving the help with homelessness because, you know, it could be going that way? I'll tell you if you answer the question. Yeah, yeah. Um, no, I'm not, I'm not gonna answer the question, Aaron, because it, it, it has no bearing whatsoever on what we're talking about we, how we spend money in that fashion. Okay. So he ended the interview shortly after, if you can't tell from the, the direction and range has not range has not been able to speak to Gavin since I've, I've requested interviews from Gavin. Luke has an interview request out today. Yeah. Uh, and we don't, we don't know what the result of that is. And what's funniest, I mean, two things about this. First. I've been texting with Dr. Mart all day today and I sort of saved the question that I was worried about for last, right? I got all the answers that I knew I needed and then I asked that same question. How much did it cost for you to run this survey? It's been about an hour and he hasn't responded. And we were responding back and forth. So I don't, I don't know that I'm gonna get an answer from Dr. Margaret either my text message. Yeah. But one of the things you hear me talking about in this clip is why are we spending money to replicate data? And I think this is the interesting counterpoint that I have now seen one TV news article that at least does reference like, oh, the city has issues with this because they ran their own point in time count survey and it found something completely different. So I do wanna talk about that point in time count survey. Yeah, please can, can you, can you actually explain to us what point in time data is and Yeah, yeah. Obviously, like how those numbers stack up against the SBA study. Yes. So the point in time count is a count that is supposed to be conducted in cities across the country if you want to be eligible to receive HUD dollars from the federal government, uh, the housing Urban Development Housing Urban Urban Development. Yeah. I always forget what that It's a, it's a federal agency that basically oversees housing in the United States and sets regulations and also provides funding to local municipalities, counties to provide housing to, to people who need it. Yeah. So in order to get that funding, you have to do point in time counts. You get your individual city data, and then it also contributes to a larger national picture of homelessness data. Uh, this happens every, I think it's usually like the end or middle of January. And I, was able to look over the city's complete set of data from 2024. We'll be getting 20, 25 data very shortly. Basically, with everything happening at the federal government, they have been extremely slow to get results back to the city. So we aren't getting the results from 2025 as early as we usually do a systemic problem in any federal government program. Yes, which affects local, local police. Uh, but the 2024 numbers, which had a sample size of 2021, people found that there was about 80% of people who were homeless on the streets of Spokane, who were from Spokane County. There was another 5% who were people from Washington, so not Spokane County, but from the state. And then the remaining 15% was mostly made up of people from the Pacific Northwest. So there's a few outliers of like, oh, somebody, you know, thought they had a job lined up here and flew in from New Jersey. But for the most part, that remaining 15% is people from Montana, Idaho, Oregon, places who are adjacent to us. And that actually lines up with trends nationally. It would actually be really weird if Spokane fit the pattern that Maritz's saying we fit. Because nationally, and this is like one of the data pieces I looked at, was a study of veterans, homeless veterans that was done in 2015 that looked at over a hundred thousand veterans and the places that they were accessing services. And it found those numbers basically lined up almost identically 80. 5% of homeless veterans stayed close to the place they originally accessed services for homelessness. So you're living in Miami, you become homeless there. That's the first place you access services and you continue to access services. Very close to that. Another 15% were doing what they called migration, which is traveling large distances to other places in the country and accessing homeless services at Veterans Affairs offices quite distant from the place they originally access services. So in general, Spokane's data had a larger sample size. The question I thought was much more controlled than asking somebody, like, where did you go to home? Like, where did you go to high school? Where were you first homeless? The question that the City of Spokane survey asked was, did you live in Spokane County before you became homeless? Yes or no? If no, where did you come from? Specify city and state if yes, specify the neighborhood you lived in. So that's pretty specific data asking, did you live here before you became homeless? It could get better. Um, I talked to a data scientist, or technically I think his title is that he's a professor of housing and homelessness policy who looks at housing and homelessness data. And he, you know, told me that yeah, the, the HUD question could get even more specific, but it is significantly better than the question that was asked by Dr. Maritz's study. So there's, there's this, this difference between what the SPA study or the study that was commissioned by SPA said and what Spokane City Data say you spoke with a, a homelessness data expert. I don't know their name yet. Yeah. Let me find his title. Did they, what did they say to you? Okay. So, yeah, take your time. Sorry, I'm looking through again. This document is lengthy. His name was Dr. Dennis Culhane and he is a homeless and housing researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. He previously served as director of research at the National Center on Homelessness among Veterans from 2009 to 2018. Honestly, one of the most interesting things he told me was that while the City of Spokane point in time count study is, it has a bigger sample size, the questions were more specific. Both surveys have some issues when we try to make predictive claims about the characteristics of unhoused people in Spokane. And primarily that issue comes because the surveys are what's called cross-sectional surveys as opposed to longitudinal surveys. So I'm gonna do my best to explain the difference here, and then I'm gonna give you a clip of Dr. Col ha adding some more nuance here. And we are, keep in mind, we are not data scientists, so we are relying entirely on Dr. Col Hane. But Aaron's been. Going after this. Really smart. So yeah, let's just pair it whatever you can. Okay, so a cross sectional survey looks at a cross section of a population. Okay? You go out on one day and you were like, I mean with the homeless people example, it's like, okay, I went out and on Tuesday I saw 25 homeless people and I talked to five of them. And so I looked at that cross section of the larger cross section of people that I saw, and then that is supposed to be representative of the population of a whole, which did not encompass people I didn't see, or people I didn't talk to. It's a kinda gives you a limited picture. And some of the issues with that, specifically when you're talking about homelessness is that you're more likely to see on the streets. People who are chronically experiencing homelessness, people who are experiencing it in that moment may be camping in their car. They might be sleeping with their friend. They might be at the library applying for jobs. They might be any number of places besides the street. And of course, people who are chronically experiencing homelessness may also be any number of those things, but it's just really hard to make statements about the characteristics of a group when you're looking at a cross section that mixes different populations, like sheltered versus unsheltered or chronically homeless, versus this is someone's first time being homeless. And both of these surveys looked at a cross section. So, so, so we, we broadcast from the Spokane Public Library and often unhoused people hang out here. They try to, like, they, they use their libraries, resource resources to search for jobs and seeing people printing out resumes or all kinds of stuff here. Applying for veterans' benefits. Those people, many of whom could be doing better than their neighbor, but still be unhoused could walk out and be, uh, be counted among the homeless population at any given time. Right. But they're not this, they're not in the same situation, right? And so, like, these are all the little nuances that make a cross section survey complicated. And even when I talk to the city about the point in time count data, they'll tell you right up front, yeah, our data from a point in time count. It's not predictive in the way we want it to be. It's an indicator, but it doesn't tell the complete story, and we have to do other data collection to tell that complete story where we look at the survey from SBA and they're making very definitive claims about what this says about homeless people in Spokane. The city also has the other kind of survey that Dr. Cohan mentioned, the longitudinal survey. And so that's something that looks at a group of people over a sustained period of time. So you take one group of people and you're looking at them for like a year, and then you can maybe make some predictive claims about their characteristics. It's a lot easier. Than to try to model off of a tiny cross section. And the city does have longitudinal data. They have it in a couple of ways. They have a longitudinal systems analysis that they published publicly. And what we found from that was that over 7,000 unique individuals in Spokane accessed homelessness services. That means that there's, more than 7,000 people who needed services this year, 22% of those people have exited homelessness to permanent or transitional housing. And the average length of stay or experience of homelessness cumulative days was 99 days. So like three months. That's all stuff we found out from the city's longitudinal systems analysis. And then they have their own private data collection called HMIS and that I wasn't able to dig through because it collects a lot of pieces of data that are confidential or private. It's not, easily down like healthcare data and stuff like that. Yeah. And like social security numbers. Mm-hmm. And birthdays and like stuff that people give them when they enter like a shelter or a service that the city provides, like an eviction defense. All of these things that are wraparound services or homelessness services, the city collects in a much more confidential data pool that isn't. A nice easy graph for public consumption and city spokesperson. Aaron Hutt told me that their longitudinal analysis across all of this data that they've been collecting for years reveals the same pattern, the same, like roughly the same numbers, that the point in time count shows. 80 to 85% of people are, quote unquote, from here, either Spokane County or Washington State. Around 15% are not, but are still from our geographic corner of the country. Did I bore you? I'm so sorry. No, no, no, no. Um, do you, one of the things, Cohan talking about it or, uh, no. One of the things that I was thinking about while you were talking was, um, so, so all of this, all of this data is like, you know, there, there's ways to track it in that are more accurate than others. Mm-hmm. But homelessness seems, from our conversation and from all of my experiences going out and just like talking to people on the streets, which I've done a number of times sometimes with you, um, is that homelessness seems really difficult to track. And I think one of, one of the things that like sticks out to me in what you were saying is yesterday I was at a, uh, I was at an event that was put on by Revived Spokane which is kind of just like a, it's an advocacy organization. And, and they were able through relationships with the Empire House, uh, the Empire health Foundation and the State Department of Commerce to, uh, absorb a $4 million grant to establish housing in three small yeah, they're just like houses that were renovated by, by construction firm that they hired to basically move people. Who were originally housed at camp Hope, which was a, a big homeless encampment that lasted about a year and a half between Spokane and Spokane Valley on on, on state property. Try to try to get those people through an initial program and into like permanent housing and with programs like that being funded and then defunded the landscape shifts really dramatically. So it just, it just seems like, like a lot of these numbers, like there, there, there are ways to like reliably study this, but like none of it is exact and there, there's a spectrum of accuracy. Does that sound right to you? Yes. I think there is a spectrum of accuracy and I also think, you know, some of what you talked about, about getting on the ground and actually talking to people. I feel a little bit bad even doing data analysis of this because it feels like it's losing all of the humanity, but all of people's humanity was stripped away by this survey itself, and I don't think that the city survey necessarily did strip people's humanity away in that fashion because it asked so many other holistic questions like, are you a veteran? Do you have a substance use disorder? Do you have a chronic health condition? Instead of making assumptions that people who are unhoused have a substance abuse disorder or a chronic health disorder, like those were. Built into SBAs study and some of the way that they talked about it in their critical finding stuff. The assumptions you're talking about. The assumptions, yeah. Were built in there. And the city survey asks people what reasons led to them becoming homeless. Was it an eviction, was it a mental health problem, a uh, a access to transportation issue? Was it COVID? Was it lack of access to affordable housing? And then it also asks them what services they use from the city and what barriers might exist to using the services that are available. And of course, any three page or one page survey is not going to get at the heart of somebody's humanity. And you need to be willing to do the qualitative data or the Yeah, the qualitative data analysis too, that's actually talking to people about their experiences and. I think I, I'm kind of going off track here, but I just, it's okay. I have been in my little hole, my little data analysis hole, right. Pouring over numbers and studies and statistics. It's really, it's really fun to walk into the newsroom and watch Aaron Sellers work on this study. 'cause they're very excited about it. Pounding Red Bull hyping frantically at my computer with 36 tabs of homelessness studies open. Right? And it's important for me to do that because a lot of people have just accepted this data at face value. But what's missing in my story and what's missing in all of these discussions about this is perspective from people who are on the street. You can talk to one person who might tell you they moved here from somewhere else, and you can talk to another person who will tell you, I lived here with my wife until she died and I didn't have enough income anymore to be able to keep my house. I lost my house and it all went downhill from there. And those are the kinds of stories that you're not gonna see in a. A survey like this, or in a 500 word TV news story about this survey. And unfortunately, you're not gonna find it in my 5,000 word story because I needed all 5,000 of those words to debunk some of the issues with this survey. And so I do wanna acknowledge that that's a, that's a flaw in my own reporting too. Well, I think, I think one of the challenges of reporting on homelessness is that, you can go and talk to five or six people on the street, spend several hours doing so. Their experiences are not going to mirror other homeless folks experiences. And we, we had I, I think we kind of, this was before my time at Range, but Range really kind of owned the Camp Hope story. Our, our former reporter, Carl Seager Segerstrom spent uncounted hours at Camp Hope gathering people's stories. And, but even that is not a complete picture of homelessness in Spokane. It's, it's a very complex. Issue that, that nobody can distill in one story. So yeah, that, that's, that, I think that's a flaw in all reporting. Just it's an inherent flaw of communication. Um, if you wanna know more about cross sections versus longitudinal systems analysis, I do have a clip of the professor talking about that, but he, I'll let you decide if that's boring or not. I don't think that's boring. I'm a nerd, so play it. Okay. Seeing a study. Um, but both of them have a limitation in that when you are doing a cross-sectional sample, meaning a sample you're getting on a given point in time. Okay. There's, there's tremendous bias in the sample by nature of how it is designed, which means that within that sample you are combining. People who have been homeless for a long period of time, people who are newly homeless, people who are just starting their homelessness, and we don't know what their duration will be. So because it is a cross section, it's impossible to interpret. What the relationship is between any of the characteristics you're observing and the what caused their homelessness or what has caused their homelessness to persist, which by the way are two separate phenomenons. We have causal processes that lead to homelessness, and we have separate causal processes that lead to homelessness to persist for people to not exit. Most people exit homelessness quickly. If we had a longitudinal sample, for example, we see about a third of the homeless population usually resolves within two weeks, and you get about half the population exits homelessness. In about six to eight weeks. Mm-hmm. So, but, but those people only show up as a tiny portion of the homeless population on a given day. The, the given day population is represented as much as five times more the long-term homeless than they would be represented in an annual picture. When you look at these point in time surveys, they tend to look like most of the people are chronically homeless. They've been homeless for very long periods of time. They have very complex service needs. And, um, and you, you're, you're inclined to think that that's what causes homelessness, when in fact it's, it's different. So let me give you the analogy would be COVID. There, we know that there's a certain conditions, we know COVID is caused by. An infection and we know that there are risk factors associated with that infection. It is a separate thing that happens of who ends up dying from COVID or who ends up hospitalized or in, you know, on a ventilator, uh, or who gets long-term COVID. Those are very distinct subpopulations. Most people who get COVID have a light, have a light experience, and they resolve quickly. You see what I mean? Yeah. So very different samples. And so when you're sampling on a given day, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to really interpret what these characteristics mean with respect to risk for becoming homeless versus remaining homeless. That's fascinating. I, I think that like. So when I go out on the street, which, I, I take the bus, um, I usually walk to the office from the Central Station in Spokane, the, the SCA Plaza. I see, I see people who I recognize a lot and it, it just seems like that's just any, any, it seems like, from what he's saying is like, and, and from our conversation today, like any, any one person's experience of homelessness is not a representative picture of, of how it works. 'cause I, like, I have, I form a lot of really strong opinions about the way homelessness works in Spokane based off my own experiences. You're a lot deeper in the data than I am 'cause you're a city hall reporter. And yeah, this is it's kind of a humbling experience hearing that like. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, and I think the thing that I've been, when I emerged from my little data hall and I realized I had to write a conclusion to this story, I was thinking about, okay, so this is an issue, right? The way that this survey was conducted, the way that it was subsequently reported on in a really simplistic way that just parroted the statistics with no critical analysis of them. But I think it's emblematic of a larger problem, and that's that there is a very seductive and insidious narrative, a story that we've all been told and continue to be told. That's really tempting that our community. Is great. We are resourced, we can take care of each other. But unfortunately, there's people who come here who aren't part of that community, and they're a drain on our resources. They're taking resources from the people who are from here, who belong here, who deserve those resources. And if we just send those people who came here away, back to where they came from, they'll be happier and will have enough resources to take care of everybody who really needs them here. And that's a really seductive narrative. And I, I think it's one that we see in a lot of campaigns. It's one that we see nationally with homeless data. Dr. Robert Cohan told me that he has you know, he's hardly ever looked at a community and seen a different narrative. Every community in this country that. Thinks that they're doing the greatest thing on homelessness and that they're a magnet for homelessness. I scarcely find anyone who does not claim that we're so good to the homeless. Everyone wants to come here. Col ha said. So that's a thing that's pretty pervasive across the country, and it's also pretty pervasive when we think about how we talk about immigrants and immigration. The United States is great. It's a beautiful place to live. We have so many resources and everybody here would be happy and have enough money to live and thrive if only people from other places would stop coming here and taking our resources. I, I am very familiar with his narrative. And I've, I've noticed the, uh, I, I mean mostly in Spokane, like specifically to Spokane. I'm familiar with his narrative due to your reporting on city council meetings where, business representatives show up and they, they speak at the lectern and they, they lodge their concerns with the city council. And I think that that's like, I think that's really it. It's a resonant concern with just average folks who are like, maybe they're housed, but they're still having a rough time, like paying their rent or whatever. Mm-hmm. Those folks could become homeless at any moment. I know that, like for me, I spent two years getting my getting my master's degree here, wondering if I was gonna be able to pay my rent next month. Um, and if I didn't, I would be homeless and my wife along with me, and I, so, so I, I, I think that, that, that is something that tends to resonate with people. The thing that I'm kind of wondering about, and I don't know if you have, I. Direct insight about this from all of the observations that you made, the deep reporting that you've done, the interviews that you've done with, with business officials or like, you know, people who represent the business community. What is the, like, why do they do this? Like, what is the incentive for, for the business community to, to advance this narrative? I don't know that I have any answers, but I do have some questions. Okay. You have to think about source here, right? Yeah. So. The SBA is the group that's paying to put this survey on. They won't tell me how much money they're spending on this survey. What I do know is that the SBA is founded by somebody, Larry Stone, who gives millions of dollars to conservative political campaigns in the Spokane region, who creates documentaries like Curing Spokane that are supposed to convince you that drugs and people who aren't from here are ruining our city. He spends thousands of dollars to put up billboards to convince you that it's gonna be the end of the world. If we put a bus lane on Division Street, he has all of the money to do that, to do any of those things. Gavin Cooley makes over a hundred thousand dollars a year. I'm fairly certain. And the people who are part of SBA are prominent business owners, developers who have built some of the, the biggest buildings in Spokane that you've seen who are currently working on developing large portions of Spokane, renting those buildings out, making money off of you. And so my question, I don't have an answer as to why they're the purveyor of this narrative, but if you have all of these resources, if you're one of the richest people in Spokane, people are gonna be looking at you, right? Wondering, why do you deserve to have all of that? Why should you, as a developer, get to jack my rent up when I'm the one that might be homeless? Why do you get to own all of these things when I'm living paycheck to paycheck, when I don't know if I'm gonna survive? And sometimes it's easier for people who have those resources to spend a ton of those resources to convince you that the issue is not the money that they have. But the little bit of money that you have that might be taken by someone from somewhere else, it's just it's a ma magician's trick, a flourish of the handkerchief. Look over here and don't look at what I'm doing with my other hand behind my back. And I don't know if I should even be saying that to be completely honest, but that's my question is should you trust a survey that tells you people from not here are the problem when they have the money to be doing all of these things? And you alluded to this earlier, but it makes me think of the me, the meme that's been going around on social media lately. Probably more specifically in leftist circles, but like, um, something to the effect of, and I don't remember the exact wording, but it's something to the effect of they want you to think that your problems. Come from immigration rather, so, so that you don't blame the billionaires. Yeah. And so it's, I would ask if this falls into that trend. Yeah. And I will let anybody listening to this make their own conclusions. I also think kind of secondary, I mean, it's part of the same narrative, but I would be really suspicious of anybody who tells you that community needs to be narrow. Any narrative that asks you to look at somebody and say, they're not like us. They're weird, they're different. They don't deserve help, they don't deserve resources. I think we see that in a lot of these stories. I mean, like, I, I do think you're right that it's at the heart of a lot of the stories that I write is there's a lot of really powerful narratives that are trying to convince you that in order to hold onto your stability. There's an outside threat and we just need to shut that outside threat out of our community. Whether that's trans people playing sports who want to take your daughter's trophy, and community will be so much better if we just have it without them, or whether it's, yeah, we should take care of homeless people if they're really from here and deserve your resources. And our community will be stronger if we just shut the people who aren't from here out or immigration. Those people who take care of your kids, who show up to your neighborhood potlucks, who would be there for you if you needed them, your life would be better if you just shut them out of your community. If we isolated, if we shut down. And what's so difficult about this is I needed 5,000 words to debunk this. I don't know how many people are gonna read what I've written, are gonna sift through the survey analysis, are gonna take the time to understand the issues of the data. They needed very few words to say. Over 50.2% of people in Spokane first experienced homelessness somewhere else. And people seized on that and took that as evidence that that very tempting narrative is accurate and they should keep holding onto it. It's so heartbreaking and lazy that we can so easily spread this propaganda and it takes so much time and effort and willingness to empathize and understand and think critically to do any debunking of the narrative. That old adage, it's like, I'm not sure if it was Mark Twain. That's what I wanna say. A lie goes around the world. Can people here before, before the truth has the chance to put their shoes on? Can you talk about, so there's, there's, there's some really interesting little small anecdotes in this. We've only got a, we've got about. It's eight minutes left before we need to start the close out. Um, how do. Dogs figure, I figure into this study. Oh, I thought you were gonna bring that up ages ago before I had my very serious diatribe. I'm trying to, I'm trying to do these important questions first in the interest of time. Okay. That's fair. This is my favorite little digression on this survey. So I went through and I looked at all of the sort of big claims that the survey made without citing their sources. And here's a quote of a, a claim that the survey made compared to prior Spokane observations. In October, 2019, September, 2022 and September, 2024, the number and size of dogs had increased noticeably. Of note, most of the people experiencing homelessness who had dogs with them were women. Increases in the number of dogs or the size of dogs are often a future indicator of increased levels of violence on the street that was just in there, no citation for like. Proof that more dogs means more violence? No. Telling me where they got those numbers from 2019 compared to 2024. No. Telling me even what those numbers are. How many dogs did you see in 2019 versus 2024? So, when I finally did get ahold of Mark, it's, it's all based on vibes, right? Vibes, the vibe of dog. I don't know. That was one of the first questions that I had to get answered was like, I need to know about the dogs. Whether that's critically important to the survey or not, it's gonna bother me so much if I don't get information on the dogs. Well, I think it's illustrative to the rigor, to the rigor of the study. You know, like. Yeah. And so over text, he said that the info about the dogs came from his own previous visits to Spokane, where he saw quote less than three dogs. He did not specify the actual number. So that could have been one dog or two dogs. I guess either of those would be less than three, maybe a hot dog. Um, he also did not say how many dogs he saw this time or how big any of those dogs were, or where he got the information that dogs of any size are indicators for increased levels of violence. And when I asked him about his lack of citations in general, 'cause there was a lot, and I kind of went through at one point and tried to pull out all of the claims that were made without citations. He said that lack of citations was intentional. Quote, I've never been asked by community groups, agencies, cities, counties, and states to provide citations. That's crazy. Right? Well, I, I, I just, I just remember, I, I remember taking classes as a student and always being told that I had to cite my sources. And I remember writing stories for editors whenever I made a claim, I was asked to cite a source. I, that's, that's anecdotal. I feel like citing sources is important, but apparently nobody ever asked them to. The people who commissioned these studies aren't worried about citing sources, which it's also worth noting that he didn't give me any of those sources. Yeah, like I was asking. Yeah, I didn't get any of 'em. Of course I didn't, I didn't exactly say like, give me all of your sources, but I said, I noticed like a noticeable lack of sourcing. Is there a page I missed? Was there something that wasn't included in the report? Where are your sources for this? And he was just like, nobody's ever asked me. But yeah, you there was a scene in the newsroom, I can't remember which day it was, it was a couple days ago. Time is a flat circle. When you were just kind of go into town on this story and you were ranting about, um, because you're very passionate about this, which is really commendable about who in our newsroom would be y you know, the implications of this, of this study were, were taken to their logical conclusion, and the people who aren't supposed to be here should be kicked out. Like who in our newsroom? So we've got five people. We've got five people. Well, we've got, we've got six people, including our, our intern Clarine Cur. True. I didn't make clear intake the survey. Clarin's also a college kid, so I don't know how that would factor in. We haven't analyzed Clarine yet. We haven't an analyzed, but everybody else you got. But hey, our cross section of five out of six was great. 99% accuracy. Okay. So none of us would count as from Spokane. None of us would be able to answer yes to all of these questions. Luke has lived here his whole life and Luke wouldn't be able to answer yes to all these questions. Okay. But by here, what do you mean? Exactly, that's the issue. They just say Spokane in their survey. There's no differentiation between Spokane County and Spokane City. And normally when people hear, are you, were you born in Spokane? They don't think Spokane County. They think the city that's a wiggle room in data. Right. So Luke, he's from like North Spokane, outside of the city limits, like above me. He lived in Elk for most of his childhood. Yeah. Yeah. And so Luke would've to take this survey, even though he's been here his whole life, if he started experiencing COVID and he would not be able to say I was born in the city of Spokane, he would not be able to say, family brought me to the city of Spokane. He would be able to say, I came here because of a spouse, partner, or friend. 'cause I think he moved into Spokane, or wait, no, he moved here for college, which is not an option on this survey. So he wouldn't be able to answer any of these multiple choice options as to why he came to Spokane. He didn't go to high school here. So even Luke, who's been in this area his whole life would not count as from here. I've been here for seven years. I own a house. If I were to become unhoused tomorrow and Dr. Robert Maric came up to me with this survey on the street, I would have to say that I have no family connections here. I would have to say that I went to high school in Idaho. I would just say that I was born in Lewiston, Idaho. I would have to I came here for college and stayed. So I wouldn't have a great reason for coming to Spokane. And so by his own recommendations in the survey, I would be given a bus ticket back to. To Idaho. I dunno if it's the city I was born in Lewiston, where I have no family, or if it would be to the city of Wii that has no homeless services. But that is what the city of Spokane should offer me. If I was unhoused and took this survey under his recommendations. I came here from Texas in 2021 to pursue a master's degree. I would also be, um, I mean if that, if that was the logical conclusion, I'd also be bused back. We are at the end of our time, so I'm gonna do the closeout. Is there anything else you wanna say real quick? Real quick, like 20 seconds please. When you see these simple headlines about data and surveys, please think more critically about it. And whenever anybody is asking you to shut people out of your definition of community and who deserves help, please really evaluate that before you jump to an easy, simple conclusion that might make sense of what you already know and feel nice. But it's just not going to make the world a better place. All right, well, good work on this. This is Free Range,