PERRY: Playing shell games with Aurora homeless people is painful and pointless

So, Aurora, are you feeling about $2 million better about our homeless problem?

That’s, roughly, what the city has spent in the last year to buy a couple dozen shed-shelters, a few thousand meals, provide some showers and chase people away from their camping sites on city medians, highway shoulders and parks.

Just like in Denver, some other suburbs and just about every city large and small across the country, homelessness has been in our faces for the last few years.

It isn’t like homelessness is new to this nation or this community. It’s just that for decades since the Great Depression, we’ve been able to pretty much ignore it.

The occasional wave of “vagrants” along East Colfax, or squatters in an abandoned house or building, have long been effectively chased over to Denver, and then back again, for a very long time. 

But exorbitant housing costs, flagging wages, the pandemic, stunning inflation and cheap and plentiful street drugs and alcohol have made for a perfect storm of “what the hell happened” all along the Front Range, and, truly, all around the state.

“Luxury” accommodations for the luckiest of the homeless are on a relative’s couch or in their garage, or inside a working car with a heater.

The less fortunate, and there are thousands of them in the metroplex, many of them in Aurora, suck it up in tents or sleeping bags or even just puffy coats wherever they don’t get chased from.

In January 2021, Mayor Mike Coffman pretended to be homeless for a week along the Colfax corridor, sharing his week-long escapade with a local TV reporter, and drawing the moniker “Homeless Mike.”

Real homeless people, and those who work with them, had several other choice names for Coffman for bragging that, in just seven days, he had unlocked the secrets of homelessness.

He told TV reporter Shaun Boyd that most of the people on the street he encountered, without ever telling them who he really was, were drug addicts “choosing” daily highs over going to a shelter and getting a job.

During more than one public session of excoriation, Coffman was schooled about what treating addiction and mental illness are really like, and how the old get-a-job tropes do literally nothing to help someone to get it together.

The answer, Coffman said, was forcing them out of their camps. There never was a clear answer then as to what would happen to homeless people, often struggling with critical addiction and mental health issues, after they were shooed off their median or grassy patch alongside a bike trail.

Mike’s insistence on just getting them out of sight is a popular sentiment among some Aurora residents with homes. 

“As long as you move them away from my house, I am for any technique used,” Good Citizen said in a comment on a story from last week looking back at a year of abating homeless camps. “A can of gasoline and a match comes to mind.”

Fortunately, Good Citizen’s only Aurora power is posting unnerving threats.

Experts warned that shooed homeless campers would just move to another nearby camping site.

A relative few of the people shuffled off have taken advantage of the cluster of shed-homes on a city-sponsored compound. Residents can stay no longer than 90 days and need to show some kind of progress toward resolving whatever got them there.

It’s mixed results, some positive, but mostly it’s people running out the clock and then moving on again, insiders and some residents say.

Bob Dorshimer, who’s worked with all kinds of people in crisis for a very long time, currently runs Mile High Behavioral Healthcare and the Comitis Crisis Center.

He knows what “best practices” are from decades of experience, not days.

He said success is not defined as people having an epiphany, throwing away their heroin syringe, taking on three jobs and getting a cool one-bedroom overlooking a street where their new-used car is parked.

“It starts with tucking in your shirt,” Dorshimer said. It’s long talks with trained people who care helping someone decide they might try therapy and methadone and just see what happens, and then doing it.

And he said it’s a misconception believing that these homeless campers are mostly partying millennials turning on, tuning in and dropping out.

Many of these people have been living in some kind of isolation and on the streets for so long that it can take weeks just to help them back into normal social behavior, like combed hair and socks.

He said he’s never encountered so many homeless people in their 60s and 70s during his entire career.

But even people closer to working age are far from ready to step right back into the fray.

“They aren’t anywhere near ready for resumes,” he said. “They need a belt.”

Dorshimer said Aurora’s push into “abating” camps may not have reduced homelessness by any meaningful measure, but the shuffling and outreach teams and frequent trips to the Comitis Day Resource Center and the dozens of new contacts has been helpful.

“We’ve had more engagement than ever,” he said last week. “I think that’s success.”

More success, he said, would come in spending the next $2 million not on “Band-Aid” notions like chasing people around or letting them cycle through shed villages.

It’s going to take more people taking more time to persuade more homeless people to talk about getting help getting dry or clean.

Just putting people in apartments with no strategic resources won’t work, he said. “Housing first has to come with much more than just housing.” Engagement is the key, he said.

And shoes. 

“Shoes are the dead giveaway for homeless people looking for a job,” he said. Many of the people he knows need much more help re-entering the world of the housed.

“And decent shoes.”

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