BREAKING CAMP: Homeless advocates say camping ban is moving homeless people around but not necessarily into housing

AURORA | A year after the City of Aurora banned homeless encampments on public lands, abatements have ramped up, and even as camps persist, officials say campers are being connected with resources and help.

Hundreds of campsites have been abated since the ban went into effect last May, according to the city. At the same time, records provided by the city indicate that abatements have failed to deter camping overall, with some sites being swept multiple times every month or even multiple times in a single week. The city was not able to quantify how often the same individuals have been targeted by sweeps.

The ban prohibits unauthorized camping on public land and was created to discourage homeless camping in Aurora and manage the public health risks posed by encampments.

Mayor Mike Coffman brought his proposal for a ban forward in February 2022, and the conservative majority of Aurora’s City Council passed it into law. While a mosaic of laws gave Aurora the authority to disband camps before the camping ban went into effect, during the COVID-19 pandemic, city staffers said they were limiting sweeps to camps that posed a particularly serious health or safety threat.

The decision to temporarily pause camp abatements was consistent with guidance from public health agencies that advised cities not to break up campsites to avoid displacing people who were trying to quarantine themselves while sick with COVID-19.

Coffman’s measure signaled a shift in the city’s attitude toward camps, as the ban codified a policy of sweeping all unauthorized camps on public land.

An abatement can only take place if there is enough shelter space available to house everyone in the camp. Under the ban, campers are given at least 72 hours’ notice to leave a site and are visited by an outreach team before the city’s contractor arrives to dispose of any leftover items. Any “personal documents or identifications” found at a site are turned over to the Aurora Day Resource Center for temporary storage.

Supporters of the ban argue that it would be a helpful tool to curb camping and would benefit campers by connecting them with resources such as shelter, even though Aurora’s shelter capacity was and remains limited.

Aurora is likely home to hundreds more homeless people than available shelter beds, with the city reporting in February of last year that 285 beds were available between all of the city’s shelter resources or as many as 360 beds during inclement weather.

Since then, the city has made limited strides toward increasing capacity, for example supporting 30 new Pallet shelters — individual, prefabricated housing units measuring 8 feet by 8 feet — at two shelter sites in Aurora operated by the Salvation Army.

City spokesman Matthew Brown said a total of 132 homeless campers had accepted shelter at the Salvation Army sites, located at the group’s warehouse on Peoria Street and at Restoration Christian Ministries on East Sixth Avenue, between which there are nearly 100 individual Pallet shelters.

An outline for addressing homelessness brought forward by Coffman and passed by the majority of the council in the fall envisions a large central facility that would include housing and other services.

The former campus of the Ridge View Youth Services Center in southeast Aurora is also closer to becoming a substance abuse treatment and transitional housing complex capable of housing about 195 adults at a time, according to a news release published by the state.

But the revamped Ridge View campus won’t be operational until 2024, and Aurora was home to at least 612 homeless people last year, according to the 2022 point-in-time survey conducted on behalf of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Results of the city’s 2023 count of its homeless residents are expected to be released in the coming months.

Council members and others who opposed the camping ban describe it as cruel to homeless residents who had nowhere else to go and ultimately ineffective due to the city’s lack of shelter resources, arguing that it would only shuffle campers from one location to another.

Mile High Behavioral Healthcare CEO Bob Dorshimer reported in July that people impacted by sweeps were simply setting up camp elsewhere in Aurora and that only three people out of dozens swept had accepted offers of shelter at the Aurora Day Resource Center.

He told the Sentinel this week that, while the renewed focus on outreach had been successful at connecting more homeless people with resources, the regular sweeps were not encouraging the Aurora Day Resource Center’s clients to get off the streets.

“Sweeping people from encampments only succeeds in moving them someplace else,” he said.

Emma Knight, the city’s manager of homeless programs, told the Sentinel in December that the ban was pressuring more of Aurora’s homeless residents to seek out services.

Close to a year after the ban went into effect, data reported by the city indicates the pace of abatements has increased, with 369 abatements completed in the 11 months since the ban took effect compared to roughly 80 abatements in all of 2021.

Abatements since May 2022 have cost the city about $130,122, with another $51,285 billed to the Colorado Department of Transportation for camps located on their properties in Aurora. Brown said the council had budgeted a total of $250,000 for abatements.

Other data — such as the total amount spent on implementing the ban, the frequency with which abatements were targeting the same people and whether members of the public were reporting encampments less often since the ban went into effect — were not readily available.

City spokesman Ryan Luby wrote in an email that some of the information was being compiled for a presentation on the first year of the ban that staffers are scheduled to deliver to Aurora’s City Council in June.

Coffman wrote in a statement that city staffers had seen an increase in the number of homeless campers looking to get off the streets and into shelter since the ban was introduced. Specifically, he described a surge in interest in the Salvation Army’s two Pallet shelter sites.

“I can’t imagine what this city would look like without a camping ban,” Coffman wrote. “It would definitely be much worse.”

The Salvation Army said in August that their waitlist for Pallet shelters had nearly doubled since late April, and Salvation Army’s non-congregate shelter director, Tyler Burwell, said April 24 that the waitlist for the Pallet shelters that have not been set aside for sweeps specifically was at 65. He said that all of the agency’s clients who stayed in the longer-term Pallet shelters over the past several months had been able to move on to more permanent housing.

However, Coffman also said the city has been unable to clear camps three days after giving notice consistently because of a lack of resources.

Coffman said he was working on a proposal to be introduced in the coming weeks that would bring on more staff who could help with outreach and abatements. He said he would also be interested in creating a third Pallet shelter site and setting up temporary fencing around areas that “have a pattern of encampments.”

“After a year, I believe that having a camping ban is only a part of the solution when it comes to addressing the challenges of unsheltered homelessness, but the situation would be far worse without one,” the mayor wrote.

The ongoing problem of homeless campers returning to areas where they have driven out of has been brought up multiple times by council members on both sides of the aisle.

At a policy committee meeting in March, Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky said her constituents often complained about encampments along Interstate 225 near Iliff Avenue and Parker Road. Knight told her the city was undertaking “weekly” abatements in the area, but that “once a camp is abated, they can come back that same night.”

A spreadsheet of abatement dates and locations provided by the city shows city representatives swept campsites near Iliff and I-225 more than 20 times between the enactment of the ban and late April, while camps near Parker and I-225 were swept about 17 times.

Campsites reappear frequently along the I-225 corridor, with camps near Sixth Avenue and Mississippi Avenue targeted more than a dozen times for abatements. More than a dozen abatements also took place at Horseshoe Park and several took place at Lowry Park.

Councilmember Steve Sundberg said during the March committee meeting that he and the city’s legal staffers were working on an update to the ban that would allow the city to define “emphasis areas” where the removal of camps would be expedited. He previously said the city would “look like 1969 Woodstock … with all of the campers around” if the council hadn’t passed a ban.

The phenomenon of persistent homeless camps has fueled comparisons with Denver’s camping ban. First signed into law by Mayor Michael Hancock in 2012, the Denver ban is widely considered to be ineffective at controlling the impacts of street homelessness in that city.

Addressing homelessness has become a major focus of the Denver mayoral race, with the two frontrunners, Mike Johnston and Kelly Brough, differing on how precisely to handle the crisis.

Johnston has proposed tiny home communities in Denver as a temporary housing solution, while Brough has endorsed designated campsites and said she would support arresting homeless campers who refuse to move or accept treatment. Neither candidate has proposed striking down the camping ban.

Aurora City Council member Juan Marcano, who announced his candidacy for mayor in January, said he expected homelessness would also become a key topic in his city’s municipal election. Marcano emerged as a vocal opponent of the Aurora ban as it moved through the legislative process last year.

“They’ve been doing this for over a decade at this point, and they don’t have any progress to show for it,” Marcano said of Denver’s ban. “We called out what was going to happen with this policy in our city, that we were going to waste money pushing people around the city. We were right.”

Marcano said he would support rolling back Aurora’s ban and reinvesting the budgeted funds in permanent supportive housing, guiding the city toward a “housing-first” model for addressing homelessness similar to the strategy employed by Houston, Texas.

Council members traveled to Houston and San Antonio last year to study those cities’ approaches to homelessness, ultimately settling on a “work-first” strategy endorsed by Coffman that promises more aid to homeless residents who are willing to participate in programs offering support such as job training and drug treatment.

Coffman told a Denver TV news station in December that he would be running for reelection but has yet to file the paperwork formalizing his candidacy with the city clerk’s office. As of mid-April, Marcano was the only person who had filed paperwork to run for the office.

Cathy Alderman, chief communications and public policy officer for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, said camping bans have not been proven to be effective, mentioning the failure of Denver’s ban to connect homeless campers with resources. Aurora is one of many cities in the western U.S. to have adopted such a ban in recent years.

While Aurora officials have disputed the idea that camping bans are equivalent to criminalizing homelessness — noting that sweeps only take place when there is enough shelter space for every camper and that campers are only ticketed or arrested if they refuse to leave a campsite — Alderman described the policies as “an enforcement mechanism to say you can’t be in the state of being unhoused.”

“Automatically, it says to somebody who is being contacted under a camping ban that there’s something wrong with your mere existence, or the government is coming after you because of your mere existence,” she said. “Ultimately, connecting them with housing and services should be the goal.”

Dorshimer described campsite sweeps and free meals as “a Band-Aid solution” on their own. He said homelessness was too great of an obstacle to expect people to simply “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” At the same time, he dismissed the suggestion that housing necessarily solves problems such as mental illness and substance abuse that trap people in homelessness.

He said most people underestimate the support that may be required to reintegrate a formerly homeless person back into the community.

“It takes enormous commitment from the community and those trying to rejoin it,” he said.