It was a housing crisis that created apartments like the Wolfe and the New Washington in the first place.
The New Washington was originally built in 1910; the Wolfe in 1896 ("new building, new furniture, new bedding," advertising of the time blared). That's when Spokane's population exploded, tripling in size in a single decade. More than 150 dorm-style, single-room occupancy apartment buildings — tenements and flophouses with names like the Otis and the Alberta — were built to handle the surge. And over the next 100 years, these sorts of units became a crucial part of Spokane's unofficial safety net. Even the poorest could eke by living in apartments like these to avoid life on the streets.
But whenever there was a surge of downtown revitalization — whether in Expo '74, in the '90s, or in the mid-2000s — more of these buildings got sacrificed. And it was up to nonprofits and homelessness activists to try to find the displaced a new spot.
In fact, by 1990, the Wolfe and the New Washington — then the Sydney Hotel and Washington Apartments — had been shuttered. Both were resurrected by the nonprofit KJNW Enterprises, with an aim of creating a rehab environment for homeless people and drug addicts.
Frank Howe, who was KJNW Enterprises' director, said the project had been an incredible success: One floor of the Washington was for men, one for women, and a third was dedicated exclusively to Native Americans of either gender. All three floors were drug-free. The 24-hour supervision was strict — if you broke the rules, including not keeping your floor clean, you could get kicked out.
"For a few years, nobody knew we were here," Howe says. The cops — even the firefighters — rarely showed up, he says. They didn't need to. But while the nonprofit tried to scrape by, selling gift certificate books to fundraise and relying on volunteers, it wasn't enough. They had to sell.
And under the future management, the apartments quickly gained a reputation for housing a different type of clientele: sex offenders.
For many property owners, sex offenders are considered off-limits. There are whole pools of housing money — like HUD funding, Section 8 housing vouchers and project-based vouchers — that nonprofits lose if they house Level III sex offenders, who are those considered the most likely to reoffend.
But Linda Wolfe-Dawidjan, the woman who took control of the New Washington apartments in 2000, was willing to rent to sex offenders. In fact, she eagerly sought out even Level III offenders to live at her apartments.
By 2002, the Spokesman-Review reported, 40 of the 53 tenants in the Washington apartments were sex offenders — and 13 of them were Level III.
Dave Bilsland, who worked as Wolfe-Dawidjan's troubleshooter at the Wolfe for a few months, says he believes she started out doing good things.
"Generally pretty decent, but could be a real harridan if she got mad," Bilsland recalls. "Four-foot-11, but nobody messed with her... Don't piss her off."
Considering many of these offenders had nowhere else to go, some admired her for stance, for the way she ran a tight ship and promised to keep a tough eye on her troubled tenants. In 2003, Wolfe-Dawidjan was profiled in multiple major newspapers, including the New York Times, and was even given a Carl Maxey Racial Justice Women of Achievement award by the local YWCA.
Part of Wolfe-Dawidjans' compassion may have come from personal experience: She herself had been an alcoholic — so was her mother. And, back in 1993, her own son, Jason Wolfe, had to register as a Level 1 sex offender when he was 21.
Jason Wolfe writes in court records that it made it difficult for him to find jobs for years. But effectively, the two apartment buildings became his job — though neither made a ton of money.
Jason Wolfe officially took ownership of the Wolfe in 2005; his mom signed over the New Washington to him in 2007.
"I wanted to help him have his own business," Wolfe-Dawidjan wrote in a 2011 declaration during a divorce case.
But by then, Jason Wolfe lamented, state-level policy changes had dramatically reduced the number of sex offenders being sent to the Wolfe and the New Washington, significantly affecting the income from his apartments during the Great Recession.
Meanwhile, under Jason Wolfe's management, the apartments took a downward turn. By December 2015, before any of the deaths cited in this article, the Washington State Department of Corrections concluded things had gotten so bad that they officially stopped sending supervised sex offenders to either building.
In a brief emailed statement to the Inlander, the department said the reasons included "substandard living conditions including regular issues with bedbugs and general uncleanliness," "illegal activities regularly taking place on the premises" and a "lack of cooperation from the building owner."
Indeed, the Department of Corrections wrote in a 2016 filing that they had documented hostile behavior from Jason Wolfe himself on "numerous occasions" and was "no longer willing to place agency staff in this high-risk environment."
Today, public records show that about 18 Level II or III sex offenders live in or very close to the Wolfe or the New Washington apartments. Patrick Kinchler, a Level II sex offender with three counts of child molestation on his record, has served as the property manager of both buildings, with access to surveillance cameras at each.
Some of the people who've died in the last few years were sex offenders — Warren Troy Plowden, to name one, raped a 17-year-old girl in 1991. But they're no longer on the sex offender registry. Once someone is dead, they're finally removed. ♦
