I lived near Spokane for twenty years.
Good things;
Airport, close to downtown and small enough to be in your car 4 minutes after disembarking.
Healthcare, many excellent options.
Recreation, great skiing, biking, hiking, kayaking all around and lots of liked minded people if you are so inclined.
Education, good for a city of it’s size.
People, generally nice (like everywhere).
Bad things;
Snow isn’t usually too bad in Spokane, BUT very little sun for the 6 months of winter.
Crime, lots of car theft and burglary due to lingering meth problems.
We visited briefly last summer, it was the starting point for our Great American Roadtrip.
We stayed downtown and explored the park. Downtown seemed pretty lively, with a large mall with two department stores (rare for a city this size nowadays). Riverfront Park had some neat stuff, like a wagon slide and old carousel.
One thing I did find odd, was the amount of homeless people around downtown and the park. Not your old homeless with shopping carts, but younger folks, often with dreadlocks and skater attire. We got to the downtown Olive Garden and thought there was a huge crowd waiting, but no, it was a large group of homeless teenagers and twenty-somethings.
Spokane is big transportation hub and a link between several distinct regions. That’s the big reason why there’s a city there at all, but I think it’s also led to there being a large transient population in the literal sense-- people who are homeless but are mostly traveling from place to place as opposed to actually living in Spokane.
With the younger ones you saw, I’m sure there’s always some of them, but last summer the Rainbow Gathering (which is sort of like a much less-organized Burning Man) was held in western Montana and the whole NW Rockies region definitely saw a major influx of hippie traveler kids in from (presumably) the west coast.
It really is a great city. It’s big enough to get most of what you would find in a large city without many of the issues. The weather is great, all four seasons with a really nice spring and fall. There may be crime but you never really feel unsafe. I think it’s mostly property crime and crime between people who know each other like family and friends. It is a blue collar town that is in the process of growing up. There is pretty good food and most people are nice, but it is a car town, the bus system is pretty bad and it is spread out.