Last month, Mayor Michael Hancock’s office reached out to me about jointly working on a regional approach to the growing problem of homelessness in the Denver metro area and I agreed. However, I felt I didn’t have a good understanding of the issue so I decided to go homeless for a week in Aurora and Denver to better understand the challenges.
From noon on Saturday, Dec. 26 to noon on Saturday, Jan. 2, I had nothing more than one set of clothes, an extra pair of socks, a field jacket, a back pack, a sleeping bag, tarp, a tooth brush, tooth paste, soap, a towel, and two water bottles. I didn’t carry money or food.
The greatest challenge was the cold winter weather, especially at night without a tent; but I quickly learned to look for card board boxes that I could break up and use to separate my sleeping bag from the ground.
Getting food was never a problem in the shelters or in the encampments but not having money meant that I either panhandled for cash or had to walk everywhere because I couldn’t pay for a bus ticket. I walked and walked.
Over the course of the week, I stayed in one shelter in Aurora, two shelters in Denver and an encampment in the vicinity of Lincoln and Speer. I carefully utilized my time to observe and to talk to as many of the homeless at the shelters and at the various encampments. The following were my observations:
The shelters
What each of the three shelters that I stayed in had in common was that they offered a menu of services, beyond the meals and a place to sleep, to anyone desiring to better their lives. In the shelter in Aurora, I was asked if I needed help with anything from mental health services to health care to help with finding a job. I experienced the same during the intake processes for both of the shelters that I went to in Denver. I observed that there were three distinct categories of people experiencing homelessness in the shelters.
Mental illness
The first category I encountered were those who suffered from mental illness. They were able to understand that they could get food and a place to sleep at the shelter but little else. They would often be seen incoherently talking to themselves but never interacting with others. They simply existed in their own world and without places to go like the Denver Rescue Mission, they might not survive.
Drug and alcohol addictions
The second category, and by far the largest, was composed of those experiencing chronic homelessness due to drug or alcohol problems. They tended to be older than the others, and their problem seemed more likely to be alcohol-related than due to drugs.
A surprising number that I talked to were receiving Social Security Disability payments, or said they were applying for benefits. The combination of not having living expenses at the shelters gave them the latitude to use the money to get drunk or high during the course of the day when they were required to leave the Denver Rescue Mission. I was not surprised to see that some of the homeless from the shelters and from the encampments panhandled on the streets during the day.
In most of my conversations, the people utilizing the shelters who have substance abuse problems might talk about what they did before becoming homeless but they never talked about how they could return to that life. They seemed to have fallen into a lifestyle that they had no desire to leave. For those that did want to change, they could leave the shelter by enrolling in the 9-12 month New Life Program for Men that was pitched to us during mealtimes at the Denver Rescue Mission. No doubt, programs such as Step Denver and Ready-to-Work also offer a path out of chronic homelessness when drugs and alcohol are involved.
Economic reasons
The third category of people in the shelters were those who lost their housing due to economic reasons, often COVID-related, beyond their control by either the loss of a job or the loss of income from self-employment. What was surprising about this category was their resilience and optimism. They were consciously using the shelters as a means to either wait out the COVID restrictions until their work returned or were starting as day laborers until they could find a full-time job. Their goal was simply to use the shelters as a means to save enough money to get back on their feet so they could afford a place of their own again.
An example of this was a Mexican immigrant that I met at the Aurora shelter who cleaned houses but lost the majority of her accounts when homeowners were encouraged, because of COVID, not to have nonfamily members in their homes. The loss of income meant that she could no longer afford her rent so she is waiting out the pandemic by staying in a shelter and, in the meantime, working the few accounts that she has left.
Encampments
My goal was to stay at an encampment in Aurora for my first two days. The encampments in Aurora are not only very small, usually not more than four tents, but tend to be isolated from public view. There was one exception to this and it was in a field east of I-225 on Colfax. When I saw it last, the large field afforded enough space between the tents that I felt it would be a good introduction to understanding the culture of encampment life before going to the larger and more congested ones in Denver.
I had heard that the encampment had been “cleaned up,” but I assumed that it would be repopulated by now. I was wrong. When I got there, the field was empty and, as I was taking my sleeping bag out of my backpack, a young man rode up to me in a bike and advised me not to stay there because city workers come by every morning to make sure the area remains clear. So, unfortunately, I spent my first night sleeping in a parking garage on the Anschutz Medical Campus without accomplishing what I had hoped to do.
In Denver, I found that the people staying in the larger and better organized encampments have a communal sense of belonging, benefit from a lot of public support, and uniformly avoid going to shelters as an alternative to encampment life.
A communal sense of belonging
During the week, I spent the majority of my time at the encampments that were in the vicinity of 22nd and Stout, 11th and Acoma, Broadway and Speer, and Lincoln and Speer.
These encampments had a youthful communal sense of belonging to them. They shared donated items from the public, were organized with a social structure that involved informal leadership that exercised varying degrees of authority, and they had a counter cultural feeling to them that reminded me of the Hippie movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s where a common bond was formed by “dropping out” of society and using drugs.
The drug of choice at the encampments is predominantly crystal methamphetamine, and I often saw young people injecting it and smoking it in clear glass pipes. No one that I talked to in the encampments expressed a desire to change, leave the encampments, or accept the outreach efforts made by city workers and volunteers. Whenever I came close to questioning those choices, they abruptly stopped talking.
Public support
I was surprised by the level of support that Denver residents give to the people staying in the encampments. On my first day at an encampment, I asked someone how do you get food. He gave me a strange look and said “people bring us food.” I had a hard time believing that at first until I saw individuals bringing food to the encampments and even restaurants bringing donated meals. On my last night in an encampment about 5 p.m. a car rolled up and a woman shouted “anybody hungry?” I’ve got some hot chicken noodle soup.” She gave me a container of some great homemade chicken noodle soup with banana nut bread for dessert. Then, about 30 minutes later another car pulled up, “anybody hungry?” This time it was a Tupperware container full of homemade beef stew, with a roll, a bottle of water, and cupcakes for dessert. She asked me if I also wanted a blanket.
Avoiding shelters
In Denver, the first thing that surprised me about the encampments was that there was never overlap between those who stayed at the shelters and those who stayed at the encampments.
Initially, since I stayed in a shelter before staying at an encampment, I would ask those around me if they had stayed in an encampment thinking that they could give me some advice about where to stay. They would give me a blank stare and then say that they had never stayed at an encampment. The same thing happened when I talked to the people at the encampments — I never met anyone who had stayed in a shelter.
The homeless advocates, who loudly and aggressively defend these encampments in the news, at the polls, and in court, often say that the reason why the people in the encampments don’t go to the shelters is because they are concerned for their safety, worry about getting their few possessions stolen, and fear being in a congregate living environment during a pandemic.
In my observations, those claims are false. I never feared for my safety while I was at a shelter and always had concerns when I was in and around the encampments. I never had anything stolen in the shelters but had a number of items stolen while staying at an encampment.
I was required to wear a mask and was constantly reminded about the need for social distancing at the shelters, but I never saw anyone wear a mask at an encampment or practice social distancing despite living in close proximity to others.
I believe that the central reason why the people staying at the encampments never access the shelters is solely because the shelters have rules that prohibit the possession or use of drugs in their facilities.
The reaction
As you have seen in a series of stories produced by CBS Denver about my experience, I concluded that the people staying in the encampments are there by choice — a lifestyle choice. These so-called advocates for the homeless have excoriated my observations.
They characterized my weeklong experience as nothing more than a “publicity stunt” and said that people experiencing homelessness in these encampments are not there of their own choosing but are there because of circumstances beyond their control. They repeated their mantra that the immediate solution to this problem is to stop the sweeps, place dumpsters and portable toilets in the encampments to address the unsanitary conditions, and to spend whatever resources are necessary to unconditionally give them permanent and supportive housing.
Conclusion
Denver has a crisis on its hands when it comes to these homeless encampments. Mayor Hancock is an extraordinary mayor whose staff works tirelessly to treat people experiencing homelessness with compassion, dignity and respect while fending off the stream of so-called advocates who distort those truths.
I deeply appreciate that he reached out to me to see if we could work together, along with other mayors, to find regional solutions to reduce the problem of homelessness across the Denver Metro area. While the problem of homelessness is significantly greater for Denver than it is for Aurora, we will not develop effective solutions so long as we are operating in silos. The week I spent experiencing homelessness was a long and tough one but it was well worth the sacrifice to gain a better understanding of the challenges of homelessness.
This content was originally published here.
