(The Center Square)–Spokane-based providers are cheering after the Washington State Supreme Court struck down one of the city’s most controversial laws on Thursday. While considered a win for the homeless community, the decision left some business owners biting their nails as a new reality sets in.
Widely known as Prop. 1, the citizen-led initiative received roughly 75% of the vote in November 2023. The law made it illegal to camp within 1,000 feet of a school, park or daycare. However, the Spokane Police Department couldn’t cite people until June due to a prior federal ruling that prohibited enforcement without available shelter beds.
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Martin v. Boise, it cleared the way for officers to cite individuals on the street violating the law. Jewels Helping Hands, a local provider, and Ben Stuckart, former Spokane City Council president, were already ready to go, lawsuit in hand.
“The [Washington State] Supreme Court’s decision is a win for our community,” Stuckart, now executive director of the Spokane Low Income Housing Coalition, wrote in a Thursday news release.
Two other courts ruled against Stuckart and Garcia ahead of Thursday’s dramatic reversal.
The state’s highest court agreed to take up the lawsuit in June before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Martin v. Boise, allowing SPD to enforce Proposition 1. Stuckart and Julie Garcia, executive director of Jewels Helping Hands, argued that Proposition 1 criminalizes homelessness, but that wasn’t all.
The defendants claimed that Proposition 1 exceeds the scope of the initiative process. State law requires initiatives to propose new laws, so they said that Proposition 1 was administrative rather than legislative. Essentially, Proposition 1 replaced the city’s existing policy tied to the Martin v. Boise decision.
“Letting people suffer [and] die on our sidewalks isn’t compassion — it’s abdication,” Brad Barnett, president of the Spokane Business Association, wrote in a press release. “Prop 1 was designed to restore safety and create pressure for real solutions.”
The old policy required SPD to check for shelter availability before issuing a citation for illegal encampments. However, with limited bed space, enforcement was practically impossible at times. Residents and business owners responded with Proposition 1 despite concerns about legality.
“This decision shows that courts still matter,” Garcia wrote in the release. “We must respect the legal process and allow the court to play its proper role in our democratic system.”
According to Thursday’s ruling, the city’s once-infamous Camp Hope led local attorney Brian Hansen to push the initiative. Garcia ran the encampment, which once housed more than 600 people, but it ultimately shut down before Proosition 1 reached the November 2023 ballot.
The Washington State Supreme Court compared the case to others in Port Angeles and Seattle. Those rulings held that initiatives dealing with regulatory programs were administrative acts. In other words, you can’t override administrative powers given to local governments by state law.
“I’m confident the city will abide by this ruling and respect the court’s decision,” Stuckart wrote in the release.
Anticipating the ruling, Councilmember Michael Cathcart suggested adopting a law identical to Proposition 1 last July. At the time, City Attorney Mike Piccolo said the verdict wouldn’t determine the legality of camping bans, just whether Proposition 1 was administrative, so reinstating it may remain an option.
“The court overstepped. By every definition, this was a policy proposal — not an administrative tweak,” Cathcart told The Center Square after Thursday’s ruling. “This decision to silence the 75% of Spokane who demanded action to protect our kids and our community must not stand.”
Cathcart said residents were loud and clear and committed to reimplementing the policy through a council vote; however, he’s not sure if it will have the support of his peers or Mayor Lisa Brown.
John Estey, executive director of Clean & Safe Spokane, issued a statement following the ruling.
“While we disagree with the decision … nothing in this ruling prohibits the Spokane City Council from passing this same language to complete the will of the voters,” Estey wrote.
Last year, Cathcart and Councilmember Jonathan Bingle, representing a conservative minority, proposed several ordinances and resolutions aimed at enforcing Proposition 1 and similar laws. The majority stalled the proposals, sending most back to committees as residents weighed in.
After a months-long series of roundtables, it was clear that some of Cathcart and Bingle’s ideas held weight with the community. Still, the council didn’t reintroduce them until recently, partially due to pressure within the council office but also because of a lack of clarity around Proposition 1.
Councilmember Paul Dillon, among the majority, told The Center Square that he doesn’t regret not waiting for Thursday’s decision. Dillon said it was time “to get moving” on the policies but didn’t rule out voting another version of Prop 1 with the rest of the council.
“There will be some discussion around the legality of that,” Dillon said. “We have the ACLU lawsuits hovering around us as well; there’s just a lot of gray area.”
He recognized that people were both celebrating and frustrated over the ruling. For some, it struck down a law they argue criminalizes their neighbors. For others, it eliminated a tool that SPD uses to protect residents and their businesses from public camping and open-air drug use.
“Instead of helping, this ruling enables the status quo — one where Spokane has one of the nation’s highest rates of overdose deaths and homelessness,” wrote SBA Board Chair Larry Stone, who helped fund the initiative’s campaign with Clean & Safe Spokane.
Spokane conducted its most recent Point-in-Time Count in January and expects to release that data soon. The January 2024 count recorded over 2,000 homeless individuals countywide, but city data shows over 7,000 people accessed services last year as overdose deaths climbed 15%.
Many residents critical of the council and Brown’s scattered-site homeless model argued until the ruling that SPD wasn’t enforcing Proposition 1. Data shows citations are significantly higher compared to 2023, but some feel like the city should do more, as people die on the streets.
“We know that enforcement alone is not going to solve homelessness,” Brown wrote in a statement on the ruling.
The mayor has led several efforts with city and county officials since taking office to address homelessness. Brown most recently announced a $1.5 million investment aimed at expanding access to sobering beds, a street outreach team, and other initiatives.
“Our legal team is currently reviewing the Court’s opinion in detail, and we will be working together to thoughtfully chart a path forward that reflects the Court’s guidance, as well as the best interests of our community,” Brown wrote.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
