Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman wants to ban camping along the I-225 corridor and create a court specifically to address homeless cases, an approach he called "tough love."
The approach includes two new proposals from Coffman, Councilmember Steve Sundberg and Councilmember Curtis Gardner, which will be heard at the council's study session on April 22.
The first of the two proposals would "put the entire I-225 corridor under a new trespass ordinance," in which individuals would be ticketed and given a date to appear in court, Coffman said. The second measure would create a new specialized court to deal with low-level offenses by homeless people, such as violating the trespass ordinance, illegal drug possession or retail theft.
The twin proposals, if enacted, would further affirm Aurora's preferred approach to curbing its homelessness crisis — by giving individuals the opportunity to accept services, including treatment, on the one hand, and by adopting, on the other hand, a policy akin to zero tolerance for homeless people who refuse help.
It also brought to the fore the arguments for or against "tough love," as Coffman put it, or "harm reduction," which many often see as the philosophically contending approaches to homelessness.
Currently, people camping along the interstate are given a 72-hour notice to move and, if they do so, they are not penalized, even if they set up tents in another unauthorized location.
The new proposal takes away the 72-hour notice and results in immediate tickets to individuals, making them subject to arrest if they don't appear for their court dates, Coffman said.
While the proposal only covers the I-225 corridor, it is written in such a way that the corridor can be expanded to other "problem areas" without needing to go back to the council for a vote.
The idea behind the proposed new court — which Coffman called the Housing, Employment, Addiction, Recovery and Teamwork or H.E.A.R.T Court — is to give offenders the option to either go on probation with court-ordered requirements to participate in homeless services, such as addiction prevention and mental health treatment, or go to jail.
Participants would have priority access to shelter with services in the city's pallet home communities, Coffman said, adding that, if they successfully completed the court-ordered requirements, their charges would be dropped.
Coffman said oftentimes when the city's outreach teams offer services and resources to homeless people, the latter refuse the services.
"The goal of the two proposals is to make it untenable for our unsheltered homeless to stay on the streets and, at the same time, make the necessary resources available to help them via the new court," he wrote in the Facebook post.
The mayor described the current handling of the situation as a game of "whack-a-mole," with the city enforcing the camping ban but giving people notice, causing them to move somewhere else, where they will later be told to move again.
"This is a much more aggressive approach, However, it's also a much more humane approach," Coffman told The Denver Gazette on Monday. "The goal is not to punish, but help get them on their feet."
Sundberg agreed, saying he wants homeless people to exit homelessness and "succeed" — not punish them.
"If we need to clear an area that is a safety concern, we'll be able to steer them into this supportive court environment, where they are surrounded by a team of people that wants to see them succeed," Sundberg said. "Occasionally, it takes enforcing the law to make that happen. This is not to punish them. We're out to steer them in the right direction and also enforce some safety standards."
'The opposite effect'
Cassie Ratliff, the chief impact officer for homeless service provider Family Tree, said she disagrees with the approach of "harshening" penalties for homeless people. She also insisted that attributing homelessness to mental health and substance abuse is incorrect.
"To say that homelessness is a mental health and substance abuse problem, when studies continue to show the root causes of homelessness are lack of affordable housing, family breakup, loss of employment, does not take into account the actual root causes of homelessness," Ratliff said. "We also know that our Black and Brown neighbors are overrepresented in homelessness resulting from systemic issues."
The "criminalization" of homelessness only makes it more difficult for people to exit homelessness, Ratliff said. When people have court dates and criminal charges, it's often difficult to get housing.
"These actions can actually have the opposite effect of what is being proposed," she said. "These are not solutions to getting people into housing."
Insofar as the new court, Ratliff called it a good idea — but only if the court could be "client-centered, trauma informed and individualized to meet each person's needs."
"They have to be flush with resources and we hope that Aurora's court will offer similar support (to courts of the same nature in Arvada and Lakewood) to help end peoples' homelessness," Ratliff said.
Echoing Ratliff, Fatima Kiass, who has been homeless three times throughout her life and now owns a consulting business to help social workers and homeless people access resources, agreed that "criminalization" doesn't help people exit homelessness but makes it worse.
"It's so easy to pass these laws and want them to be passed when you're not affected by it," Kiass said. "It only makes it harder for people to access services because they feel like they have to hide more."
She said the reason people oftentimes turn down services, as Coffman said, is because they don't know how to navigate the systems. When there are multiple resources from multiple service providers in various places, it's difficult to understand what would be helpful, she said.
"As a survival mechanism, we've been taught not to talk to strangers. Then you add the layer that there's four or five different outreach teams bothering you," Kiass said.
Having the new court system also complicates things for homeless people, especially those with challenges, such as developmental disabilities and trauma that make it difficult to navigate and understand the resources available, she said.
Adding a legal challenge on top of that makes it even harder, she said.
Homeless data
A recent, wide-ranging report painted a complicated, incessant and sorrowful picture of homelessness in metro Denver, a crisis that has soared in recent years and which is costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
The report suggested that tens of thousands more homeless people resided in metro Denver than an annual count showed and the self-reported causes of the crisis point to deeper problems that having a shelter per se won't necessarily resolve.
Despite the dispiriting numbers, the report offered some nuggets of good news — notably a 16% reduction in homelessness among veterans — and its authors remain optimistic, noting the work by a network of groups and individuals to try and help homeless people get back up on their feet.
The Metro Denver Homeless Initiatives' latest "State of Homelessness Report " also described a homeless population that is struggling with mental and chronic health and, more notably, substance abuse challenges.
Indeed, the report, which accumulated data from various sources, outlined factors contributing to homelessness, notably substance abuse (24%) and mental health concerns (31%).
Other major contributing factors included chronic health conditions (24%) and disabling conditions (21%), according to the report, which drew data from the annual point in time count.
Meanwhile, the California Policy Lab, which analyzed the responses of more than 64,000 "sheltered" and "unsheltered" homeless adults, showed similar results : 50% of "unsheltered" people reported mental health conditions contributed to their loss of housing and 51% reported the use of drugs or alcohol contributed to their loss of housing.
Meanwhile, the overdose crisis has, in particular, hammered the city's homeless population. Homeless people made up 38% of the overdose deaths last year. Drug overdose deaths hit Denver harder in 2023 than they ever have in 100 years of record keeping, according to preliminary numbers from last year.
Other advocates argued that drug addiction is so interwoven into the homeless crisis that, unless local governments and providers make solving it the big priority, all other strategies are bound to fail. They said that so long as local governments and homeless providers do not require some level of personal responsibility and accountability in their strategies, the hundreds of millions of dollars in spending won't solve the crisis.
“Johnston is going to be scratching his head as to why homelessness isn’t gone in four years,” Tom Wolf, who roamed the streets of San Francisco for five years as a homeless person struggling with heroin and fentanyl addiction, said last year, referring to Denver Mike Johnston, who has made moving homeless people from the streets into shelters his top priority. Wolf had visited Denver and appeared at a virtual town hall hosted by The Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics.
Today, Wolf, who serves as director of West Coast initiatives for the Foundation For Drug Policy Solutions, said he prefers an all-of-the-above strategy to tackling homelessness, but Denver and other cities in Colorado must deliberately move away from a strategy with a heavy — and often sole emphasis — on treating homelessness as primarily an economic issue, in which the underlying cause is the lack of housing and the solution, thereby, is more housing.
'Operational this summer'
Coffman said that, initially, the focus of the approach would will be along I-225 because it's a large area. While there are other "problem areas" to address later, the city doesn't have the resources to address the entire thing, he said.
The idea has been in the works since late last year, he said, and he and other councilmembers as well at Judge Shawn Day have visited various courts across the metro area to develop the idea.
This included visits to courts in Denver, Fort Collins, Boulder, Lakewood and Arvada.
While he doesn't know exactly when the proposals would actually take effect, if passed, he said the whole idea would "be operational this summer."
When asked about the extra resources the city may need to create a new court and enforce the stricter rule, Gardner said it's about shifting resources — not necessarily about adding new ones.
"We're spending resources now one way or the other, so I think this is a better approach that addresses the underlying issues," he said. "Rather than being reactionary, it's more of a proactive approach. It certainly will take resources, but we're spending money now, we're using resources now."
Reporter Noah Festenstein contributed to this article.
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