Aurora’s answer to homelessness: complex

AURORA | Aurora lawmakers bet big this week on Mayor Mike Coffman’s strategy for tackling homelessness, voting to spend $40 million to transform a hotel into a “navigation campus” that could help homeless people find housing after helping them find jobs.

Situated on the far side of Interstate 70, if the Crowne Plaza hotel were any farther north, it would be in Denver. But Aurora City Council members who inked the deal Monday said the hotel was a pre-built answer to the question of how the city would fulfill the goal included in Coffman’s plan of bringing together under one roof all of the services people need to exit homelessness.

“This, in my opinion, seems to be a good solution,” Councilmember Francoise Bergan said. “If we are truly compassionate, we want to help those who are experiencing homelessness to be productive, to be able to overcome substance abuse disorders, to get mental health help and eventually to transition into working and being a productive member of society.”

The 255-room hotel stands next to other hotels and businesses serving Denver’s International Airport. Among other spaces, Crowne Plaza features a convention center that could be used for group sheltering as well as an industrial kitchen and laundry.

Besides hosting shelter beds, a kitchen staff and case managers, the campus is also slated to offer a medical clinic, behavioral health and addiction counseling, transitional housing and housing navigation, employment and workforce development services.

Aurora negotiated a purchase price capped at $26.5 million for the 13-acre property, which it plans to close on in May. The rest of the approximately $40 million investment — including money controlled by the city, overlapping counties and the state — will be used to renovate the hotel.

The money to buy the hotel and convert it into a campus capable of sheltering and providing assistance to the city’s several hundred homeless residents will come in the form of $15.4 million from Colorado’s Department of Local Affairs, $10.2 million in COVID-19 relief funds controlled by the city, and $8.3 million, $5 million and $1.1 million in pandemic funding from Adams, Arapahoe and Douglas counties respectively.

While the city says the navigation campus could open as early as next year, Aurora has yet to find one or more nonprofit groups willing to run the facility.

City spokesperson Michael Brannen wrote in an email that the city asked for proposals last summer and is whittling down submissions with the help of county representatives and the Metro Denver Homelessness Initiative.

Brannen said the city has yet to determine how much it will cost to run the campus. In response to the question of what would incentivize a nonprofit to take over, he said the operator “will be able to make an immense impact in the lives of people experiencing homelessness in the region.”

Coffman’s strategy for dealing with the phenomenon of homeless encampments that the conservative majority of Aurora’s City Council codified in 2022 dictates that the city won’t spend general fund dollars to operate or maintain the campus.

That means keeping the doors open will depend on finding a charity or charities willing and able to invest a still-unknown amount of money in the campus each year.

Coffman wrote in an email Sunday that the city was “close” to finding a nonprofit operator for the campus.

He said Aurora may have one nonprofit handle the overall operations of the facility as well as programs such as transitional housing for people who are working full-time and substance abuse treatment, while a subordinate nonprofit runs the campus’ congregate day shelter, which wouldn’t require homeless people to have jobs or participate in other services.

The mayor originally envisioned building the campus from scratch, which prompted pushback from progressives who argued it would be more efficient to invest in properties distributed throughout the city.

At one point, city staffers considered constructing the campus on city-owned land near East 32nd Avenue and Chambers Road. A city news release published last week said that land will instead “be used for other city services.”

Coffman wrote in his email that consolidating homelessness services into a single campus was “far more cost-effective” than the alternative. Other council members questioned whether the city would be better off spending its $10 million somewhere else.

Councilmember Curtis Gardner — a conservative who joined progressives Alison Coombs and Ruben Medina in voting against the purchase — suggested Denver’s investment in facilities to house homeless residents had fueled the phenomenon of unsheltered homelessness instead of fighting it.

“I think our approach here in Aurora is different, a work-first approach. I think that’s much different from the approach that Denver is taking,” Gardner said Monday.

“Once this facility is operating, I do hope that it is more successful than what we have seen in Denver and in other cities, but I think that there are cheaper ways to accomplish housing for folks where we have abated camps.”

The comparison to Denver is a sensitive subject — last year, Aurora’s neighbor converted multiple hotels into homeless shelters as it scrambled to meet Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s promise to get 1,000 homeless people into housing by the end of the year.

Councilmember Dustin Zvonek pushed back on the suggestion that Aurora’s plans for the Crowne Plaza property were comparable to the steps taken by Denver last year. He brought up how Coffman’s plan prioritizes employment and substance abuse treatment as paths to stability when considering what programs the city would support.

“The way that we plan to operate or have the operators operate the campus is one where the housing comes with conditions,” Zvonek said.

“That’s what’s different from Denver. That’s what’s different from San Francisco. They play a game of ‘hide the homeless,’ where they call it a success when they’re taking people off the street and putting them into a room, and just because people can’t see them, they call them ‘housed.’ That’s not compassion.”

Since the council’s progressive minority dwindled to just three members of the 11-person body in November, conservatives have had a free hand to craft the city’s policies on homelessness and other social issues. 

Still, Coombs shared her perspective Monday night that the purchase was a waste of money that was based on models in other cities that have failed to move homeless people from tents to stable housing. She also criticized the campus for the fact that it does not include housing for families.

“We are spending these funds on a facility that does not include a plan to take care of our families that are experiencing homelessness,” she said.

Councilmember Steve Sundberg, whose ward includes the Crowne Hotel property, said in an email that he was optimistic about the campus, which he called a “one-stop shop” for people looking for help to exit homelessness.

“The location, although not centrally located, appears to be advantageous,” he wrote, mentioning how the hotel was fenced in and separated from nearby housing by the interstate to the south as well as gates and water features.

The winter count

Coincidentally, the council’s vote happened just hours before dozens of volunteers fanned out from City Hall to participate in Aurora’s annual estimate of its homeless population.

An identical scene was playing out in cities and counties across metro Denver and the nation.

Like every community that accepts funding through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care program, Aurora takes part in HUD’s Point-in-Time Count, which provides the federal government and the city with a snapshot of the minimum number of people living on Aurora’s streets and in its shelters.

Every participating community conducts the survey on the same day in January, dispatching volunteers to encampments and polling shelters to get a head count of homeless residents.

Last year’s Point-in-Time Count found that — as of Jan. 30, 2023 — Aurora was home to at least 573 unhoused people, including 409 people staying in shelters and 163 people sleeping outdoors.

The methodology of the survey all but guarantees it will be an undercount, since the residents of an encampment may or may not be present when volunteers arrive, and camps hidden from view may or may not be noticed. That number also doesn’t include people who are couch-surfing without a permanent place to live.

Another source of insight for the city when gauging the size of its homeless population is data collected through metro Denver’s Homeless Management Information System, which tracks individual homeless people accessing services.

Between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023, the system recorded 2,077 unique people accessing homelessness services in Aurora — more than three and a half times the tally of the Point-in-Time Count.

Aurora’s director of housing and community services, Jessica Prosser, said the Point-in-Time Count is still useful as a “rule of thumb” and helps the city keep track of how its homeless population has fluctuated over time.

“You’re not going to get every single person,” Prosser said. “But we try to do a really good job of doing a lot of (prep) work, where our outreach teams are out in the community all of the time and they’re mapping and using GPS locations of where people are.”

Along with other city employees, community members and aid workers, Prosser hit the streets before dawn Tuesday to search for homeless residents and speak with them about their experiences on the streets.

Bengemin Williams, who met Prosser’s group while panhandling near Colfax Avenue and Sable Boulevard, said he had been homeless on and off for years, with his most recent stint in Aurora having lasted about three months following an eviction.

Williams said he suffers from schizophrenia as well as other mental and physical health problems that impact his ability to hold down a job. He was skeptical of the idea of the city requiring homeless residents to find employment before they are found housing.

“They should work on both,” Williams said. “It’s rough on the streets.”

Homeless people staying in shelters were counted the night before. For Jessica Wilson, the Aurora Day Resource Center has been her home for about two weeks, ever since she was released from jail.

It’s been Wilson’s first experience of homelessness as an adult — when Wilson was a young child, her mother struggled to provide for her five children alone, and so Wilson and her family spent time without stable housing.

A long way from her home state of Texas, Wilson is once again doing her best to navigate the precariousness of extreme poverty in an unfamiliar place.

“You don’t know who’s good and who’s bad,” she said. “You kind of just have to pray about it. Hopefully, it’ll be a great outcome.”

She, too, questioned the wisdom of Coffman’s work-first model, saying she believes housing is a prerequisite for people to be focused and successful at work.

“It’s very hard to stay employed when you don’t have stability. You don’t know where you’re going to sleep at night, and you don’t know where you’re going to go,” Wilson said. “You’re in survival mode.”

However, Wilson and Williams were both hopeful that bringing homelessness services under a single roof would save Aurora’s homeless residents trips between service providers located in different parts of the city, a process made even more time-consuming by the reliance of many unhoused people on public transit.

Brannen pointed out in an email that the navigation campus is located next to a Regional Transportation District bus stop served by the Route 121 bus line, which follows Peoria Street through Aurora. He also said the nonprofit that is ultimately chosen to operate the campus will be expected to offer other transportation options.

Prosser said frustration with legging it between different agencies and service providers is an “overwhelming theme” of conversations between Aurora’s homeless residents and city workers

“We hear that feedback from people experiencing homelessness a lot, that just to start the process where maybe they need an ID or they need documentation of something, they have to go to three different places to get that,” she said.

“As we’re looking at this as a facility to serve all, we want to make sure a lot of those services are there. And we’ve talked with a lot of service providers about having a presence at the navigation campus because navigation is really the key to this, getting people connected to the services.”

Don Hanson wasn’t numbered among the city’s homeless Monday night or Tuesday morning, but he visited the Aurora Day Resource Center on Tuesday and said he believed any campus built by the city should include access to transit.

Hanson has been homeless on and off in Aurora since 2004 while grappling with alcohol abuse and other health problems. While he said he’s encountered homeless people who choose not to take steps to exit homelessness, he expressed frustration that often the people who desire help and stability are unable to access it.

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” he said. “The sad part of it is there are people who really need help, and they can’t get it. They’re handicapped, and they can’t get any kind of help at all.”

Hanson said his age as well as neck and back problems would prevent him from working. Regardless, he said he remains committed to overcoming his health problems and doing whatever he can to exit homelessness.

“It’s my own fault I’m in this situation. So it’s up to me to get me out of it. Somehow, some way I will,” Hanson said. “I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again. I’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there.”

A change of plans

The purchase of the Crowne Plaza property is the largest single step Aurora has taken toward implementing Coffman’s “work-first” homelessness plan, which was rolled out a few months after but separately from the city’s ban on encampments in 2022.

Coffman said in an email that the city’s only work-first program for transitioning homeless people from temporary shelter into stable housing remains Ready to Work Aurora, which is run by Boulder-based nonprofit Bridge House.

On Monday, Zvonek argued that having additional shelter beds available at the navigation campus would guarantee Aurora is able to continue to sweep encampments by offering additional shelter space to accommodate campers, which the city is legally required to have before carrying out a sweep.

“It allows us to aggressively enforce our camping ban and potentially look at ways to strengthen it, because we will have a place to offer every person who is on the sides of our roads or just beyond fence lines in neighborhoods,” Zvonek said. “They pose a serious public safety concern for our residents.”

Sweeps of encampments have ramped up since the council passed the ban in 2022, despite concerns that the enforcement actions are only pushing campers from one campsite to another and a lack of data indicating otherwise.

Coffman and Sundberg also said they are working on an update to the city’s camping ban that would allow Aurora to sweep camps more quickly.

The mayor said their in-progress proposal would “tighten up” the ban along Interstate 225, while Sundberg said it would involve installing “No Trespassing” signs near waterways under bridges and in areas where camps could pose a fire hazard, which he said would allow the city to accelerate the abatement process.

Sundberg and the mayor also say they are working on a special court where low-level offenses by homeless people would be diverted with the goal of connecting defendants with physical and mental wellness programs.

“These problem-solving, homelessness resource courts are all about creating a supportive atmosphere, where individuals are highly encouraged to succeed,” Sundberg wrote, adding that the courts could begin operating as soon as April. “The judge, while holding folks accountable, cheers them on. People can even bring their dog.”

Besides who will operate the campus and how much ongoing operations will cost, another unanswered question is how much blowback the project will receive from neighbors. Homeowners and businesses are often the most vocal opponents of new facilities designed to cater to the homeless.

While the city said in its news release that staffers have visited the Crowne Plaza hotel “several times” in recent months, it has just begun soliciting input from neighbors.

Sundberg wrote in an email that he was unable to do outreach on his own while the city was still privately negotiating the purchase of the hotel.

Denver City Council member Stacie Gilmore, whose council district is located across the street from the proposed navigation campus, said she looked forward to Aurora following through on its promise to create “good neighbor plans” in conjunction with Denver residents and businesses.

“For decades, the Far Northeast has been resource strained,” Gilmore wrote in an email. “Having access to a campus with a medical clinic, behavioral health counseling and other services will provide more stability to those in need and be inclusive of those residents directly adjacent in Montbello, Avion, Parkfield, Highpoint and Green Valley Ranch too.”