EDITORIAL: No room for reality at Aurora’s planned homeless inn

The power of science is indisputable.

The folly of ignoring solid science is equally obvious.

Just a few months ago, astronaut Frank Rubio returned from spending 371 days in space, returning to Earth in what is essentially a man-made asteroid, and landing in perfect health.

Hundreds of millions of Americans have essentially returned to their pre-pandemic lives because of the science behind vaccines and healthcare.

Yet, despite science-driven solutions regularly answering the planet’s most complicated and perplexing problems, Aurora, the region, and the nation are saddled with leaders and decision makers whose policies defy the data, the science and, often, common sense.

Aurora is currently poised to purchase the aging Crowne Plaza Hotel and convention center in the far northwest for as much as $40 million. Proponents of the plan hope to turn it into a Mecca of services for homeless people.

The need to make a substantial effort to address the city’s growing homelessness crisis is unavoidable and dire.

Here and across the nation, as is often the case, however, buzzwords, propaganda and politispeak are driving this critically needed project, not data. Not science.

Mayor Mike Coffman says he’s behind a plan for helping homeless people, which he dubs, “work first.”

The phrase is as empty and quixotic as “tough on crime,” “closed borders,” and  “trickle down economics.”

Essentially, Aurora taxpayers will dole out $40 million to buy and convert a 255-room hotel and complex into a 255-room homeless shelter and complex.

The dream among Coffman and his city council allies is that homeless people will be drawn to the facility in droves, abandoning their tents and camp sites all across the city, trading in their bedrolls, addictions and mental illness for a job and a room at the inn.

These “guests” will then quickly outgrow the need for a free room at the shelter with their newfound incomes and move off into the community to rent their own flats and become “productive members of society.”

Missing from this expensive daydream is the factual evidence that the vast majority of people living in tents, behind dumpsters or anywhere they can have serious drug or alcohol addiction problems, or acute and often chronic mental health issues.

The experts know, and the data reveals, that most of the working homeless are living in cars, RVs or on the couches of any friend or family that will let them.

The notion of “housing first” vs “work first” is that conquering drug and alcohol addiction in a tent under the I-225 viaduct over East Sixth Avenue is nearly impossible. The sheer number of people failing to do that speaks to the difficulty.

Instead, the vast majority of ailing homeless people in Aurora will still be homeless and camping in public. Almost two years ago, Coffman’s “tough on camping homeless” plan to sweep encampments played out exactly as experts and science predicted it would. Aurora simply shuffles hundreds of homeless people from camp to camp, from alley to alley, from dumpster to dumpster.

Douglas County buses them here and to Denver. Denver shuffles them to Aurora and other suburbs. The suburbs shuffle them back.

Taking the anti-science movement among Aurora lawmakers full-circle, Councilmember Dustin Zvonek says that a new and improved Aurora homelessness plan will return to criminalizing people for “trespassing.” This will dump the region’s social and health problems on the legal system, which is vastly expensive and consumes already overtaxed systems that can’t even address real crime problems.

Despite wishing it were true, jails are not mental hospitals.

This and similar plans are warped by insisting homelessness is primarily a problem of weak character, personal responsibility and sloth.

It isn’t that there hasn’t been a virtual parade of real experts providing real science to Aurora lawmakers. It’s just that the majority of city council refuses to accept and act on the reality.

In the nearly two years since Coffman and his allies began their grand scheme to get homeless people out of sight, little has been accomplished.

Not only is the city this time prepared to dump $40 million into a new scheme, but there’s not even any money allocated to operate the massive facility. Instead, Aurora lawmakers are hoping and expecting the region’s already overburdened and under-resourced homeless services providers to operate a 255-room hotel for homeless people, complete with a full-menu of social services.

These agencies are expected to figure out the money thing by themselves.

The project itself has astounding potential, but not without heeding good data, good science and good sense. 

The data and science is out there, city officials have only to read it and heed it.