The League of Women Voters of Jefferson County and the Jefferson Unitarian Church Community Action Network co-sponsored a virtual panel discussion on Feb. 28 to “explore what can be done in Jefferson County to ease the plight of the unhoused.” This included the Mayor of Wheat Ridge Bud Starker and Jeffco Commissioner Tracy Kraft-Tharp along with various nonprofit, city and county representatives.
If there is anything that they all agreed on, it’s that everyone needs to work together. But opinions on how that translates into action differed greatly, as do the consequences.
The current amount of people experiencing various forms of homelessness — from vehicular and couchsurfing to unsheltered on the street — is always changing, but even this varied in the panel.
Mayor Bud Starker said the city believes there to be only 250 people homeless across the county, whereas the 2022 Point-in-Time count for Jeffco, a count of people who have used shelters and are experiencing unsheltered homelessness on the first of January — considered an undercount by homeless activists as it’s done in winter, among other issues — shows there to be about 500.
A month-long count in August of 2019 showed there to be, in more detail, about 1,000 individuals experiencing some form of homelessness in Jefferson County, with 93 in Wheat Ridge alone. Starker would not elaborate on where his stated 250 number came from besides not from the 2022 PIT count.
That 2019 count also showed that 20% of Jeffco’s homeless population were sleeping in their cars.
The Colorado Safe Parking Initiative, a nonprofit represented by Linda Barringer on the panel, is an effort to make this particular form of homelessness safer and easier to escape by working with various businesses and churches across the metro area to use their parking lots at night.
Barringer said they found, across 13 “SafeLots” and 120 families, that 85% were newly homeless, and this was only serving 10% of the 2200 requests they’ve received in the past year. There are four “SafeLots” in Jeffco, one recently piloted in Lakewood.
Diverse across these groups in working toward helping resolve homelessness is what that resolving actually looks like.
According to Starker, the needed action has two sides for Wheat Ridge: helping the unhoused directly and mitigating their visual effect on the community.
“There’s the needs of the unhoused folks in our community, and how we address that population and help them become housed. And, we have the impacts their homelessness situation has on our community, which we receive a lot of complaints about,” he said.
Later he elaborated on “cleaning up” homelessness even as the city has no shelters, “the perception that it degradates some of public spaces — makes them dirtier and more chaotic,” and that the city is allocating more staff and resources for “cleaning and maintenance on our right of way.” This includes working with CDOT and RTD, he said, “to encourage (the unhoused) to keep their facilities cleaner and really stay up with their obligations in our city.”
Kraft-Tharp’s perspective was the county being a “facilitator and funder,” acknowledging the county has no shelters itself, but “many temporary beds,” of which almost all are volunteer and nonprofit run. Until Lakewood’s recent emergency weather shelter opening of the Whitlock Recreation Center, there were no city-run shelters of any caliber either.
Another variation of resolving homelessness across the panel consists of choosing who to help.
Evergreen Christian Outreach, or ECHO, has its own services and shelter beds. Program Director Tim Clancy elaborated in the discussion that ECHO does an interview to see if the people looking for shelter would be “successful” in the shelter, along with a criminal background check and sexual predator check.
The Severe Weather Shelter Network, the major emergency sheltering network for cold weather the county depends upon, also does background checks for violent offenses. Pastor Ben Hensley at the Lakewood United Methodist Church, the only participant in Lakewood’s CSPI pilot program, critiqued the Network for this requirement calling the background checks a barrier so high “it’s not really an effective emergency response.”
Executive Director of Development at SWSN Lynn Ann Huizingh has told the Jeffco Transcript in the past that the background checks are meant to protect volunteers and guests from people with “violent offenses against other person in the last year.”
“We do not want to enable, we want to empower,” Huizingh has said about their temperature cutoffs, believing opening at any warmer temperatures would not “encourage people to pursue answers that would lead them off the street, and if they get too comfortable, they just don’t have any reason to try and pursue anything else.”
The panel, including Lakewood Homeless Navigator Matt Wallington, Clancy, Barringer and Douglas, did agree that the dominant reason for homelessness is lack of affordable housing, with Douglas touting the county’s 15-Year Housing Plan.
“What was really critical last year was when we started to look at some solutions. We really realized there was a need for more plans,” Douglas said. “It’s really meant to be a place where we pull together all the plans…and put it together in a document that can really help all our policy-leaders and community stakeholders look at a roadmap over the next 15 years.”
The plan is still being developed with a panel of “community leaders,” though Douglas said that there were no people experiencing homelessness on that panel.
Ending with questions, Wallington responded to a question relating crime and mental health to homelessness by saying that only a third of those experiencing homelessness in Jeffco had any kind of mental illness, and any crimes committed were petty crimes like stealing clothes or food.
High police contact does not mean a higher crime rate either, he explained. They are simply seen more. Barringer added that the “SafeLots” actually lowered crime in the area.
