This commentary is by William Sweeney, who is currently on the staff of Bridge House and has served unhoused and food insecure populations for many years.
Metro Denver Homeless Initiative (MDHI) is an agency that plays a significant role in overseeing and coordinating care for the unhoused population across the seven-county Metro Denver region (called a “continuum of care”). On April 24, the entire seven-county cohort of agencies — about 500 representatives — came together at the Boulder JCC. The new MDHI executive director, Jason Johnson (a Boulder native), introduced himself and the program using this popular phrasing: Together we would “end homelessness.” This is a commonly stated goal — and it is also unattainable.
Homelessness, poverty, unemployment — these are structural components of modern societies. We cannot end homelessness, but we can manage homelessness, just as we manage unemployment.
The model for managing homelessness
How can we address homelessness? There is a well-known formula for managed homelessness: Built for Zero. This is the brand of Community Solutions and a Colorado-wide program focused on rehousing unhoused military veterans. Because homelessness is structural and endemic, the goal is to create a state called “Functional Zero.” Structural homelessness occurs, but it is managed to the goals of being rare, brief and non-recurrent.
Success is usually defined as no more than a small number of actively homeless persons entering (or sometimes reentering) the support system and reaching a resolution (housing or other long-term outcome) within a short period (such as a month). This successful systemic response is a continuum of care: housing supply, long-term treatment, programming resources and emergency response capacity are sufficient and balanced.
Who becomes unhoused — and why
Who is the unhoused community? A cross-section from among us all. Depending upon definitions and assumptions, estimates can run up to 3% of our population. One might ask, for example, whether an over-the-road truck driver with no fixed home address is within the definition of homeless. Applied to Boulder’s approximate 100,000 population, these estimates would place the Boulder homeless population at not more than 3,000 — consistent with a variety of estimates. This population has been studied by scientists, service providers, government employees and volunteers for decades.
Two things stand out: First, mostly, for things that can be counted, like age or race, the unhoused community has about the same composition as the overall population. Second, and in contrast, the unhoused population underrepresents the segments of the overall population that are most privileged. In other words, traits that can be counted or classified are not the root causes of homelessness. Instead, the degree to which one has access to privilege and resources determines whether one will avoid homelessness. And, if one becomes homeless and has the least access to privilege and resources, one is least able to leave homelessness by one’s own effort.
Reframing the conversation: Housing is a need, not a want
What does the unhoused community need? Michael Block, executive director of All Roads, recently posted that surveys indicate 90% of the unhoused want to be housed. That is an accurate report on the surveys, but like the simple statement that we want to end homelessness, it is not very enlightening. Classifying housing as a “want” and not a “need” understates the central role of housing in providing security, and even survival. Treating it as a need — or even a right — implies a collective responsibility to ensure access to it. In some states and some nations, housing is an enforceable human right.
Food and water are similar absolute needs for life. While those needs may not always be met in the ways we hope, they must still be met. As Block describes, the need for housing is met in many ways – from leasing an apartment, reuniting with one’s family of origin, or even entering an institution or incarceration. These examples reflect the diverse circumstances of unhoused people and underscore that this fundamental need takes many forms.
Boulder has the infrastructure — but not enough capacity
Housing First is a slogan or label, referring to the approach of providing stable housing before addressing other needs like employment or treatment. It is being retired from our lexicon by federal action. What does not come and go is the call to address our neighbors in need. Boulder has many agencies, public and private, each capable of bringing a selection of services to some members of the unhoused community: perhaps those with high degrees of vulnerability, or domestic violence survivors, or heads of households with children, or pregnant women, or those recovering from illness or injury, or youth, or addicts — the list goes on and on.
We all have a common goal: assisting those we serve to restore fullness to their lives, including access to the resources of survival: housing, clothing, food, water, safety, employment and the like. No provider can do it alone, no one method or program can be best for all, and the more we all collaborate, the better we each can serve.
The human cost of failing to act
In study after study across the country, coroners and scientists find that persons who have died and who experienced homelessness died prematurely. The range of studies clusters around three decades of prematurity overall, plus or minus five years. Someone who has experienced homelessness has a life expectancy thereafter of living to about 50, rather than the normative 75. In other terms, a weather-beaten sidewalk resident who is in “middle age” has the frailty and life expectancy of an elder. In the December 2024 Homeless Memorial, the 54 persons named and remembered all met the definition of a premature death.
For over 20 years, Bridge House has organized an annual memorial at the Boulder Bandshell. On the Winter Solstice, we remember and honor those who died during the year while they were homeless, or who were housed but previously homeless. That number has risen steadily over the years.
Until 2017, the number of people who were homeless increased, as did the resources for assisting them. Since 2017, however, the number of shelter beds has decreased while the numbers of homeless persons and the numbers of deaths have increased. Melissa Arguello-Green, executive director of Bridge House, says, “We welcome all to join Bridge House in organizing and attending the annual Homeless Memorial. This is a symbol of our shared contribution of love for our unhoused and rehoused neighbors.”
A broader definition — and a broader responsibility
Finally, let’s open our focus a bit. This discussion has described the unhoused community, and mostly the unsheltered adult segment — the “face” of homelessness. They are only one segment of the unhoused community: There are youth, families with children, vehicle residents, the precariously housed, the food insecure, those whose different abilities or disabilities limit their life functions, those with injuries or diseases or behavioral health disorders, and so on.
There are many service providers, and virtually all are nonprofits. No one — or even a few — can serve every or even most needs. All have in common that they are under-resourced and rely on some form of governmental assistance, even if that is only tax exemption. We hear every day of budget cuts at the city, county, state and federal level, and the cuts are falling disproportionately on the services for those who most need assistance. All of us can donate money, or food, or clothes, or volunteer time. We are going to be needed more than ever.
This also starts much smaller as we’ve seen since the closure of the youth shelter. Ensuring the folks that are being served are being helped by qualified professionals with training in mental health, addiction management and trauma informed care. “Under resourced” shelters are consistently hiring lower paid staff with great hearts, but not the skills required to effectively lead and operate these shelters and they should ALL be evaluated for proper staff and licensing before we have another discussion of what to do about even the bigger picture when we aren’t taking care of the few we’ve managed to get in the doors.
While I appreciate that we want unhoused community members to be serviced by professionals, I believe over regulation and licensing puts unhoused people at greater risks. A housing organization for youth (12-21 years old) stopped functioning because their staff didn’t meet the proper licensing. I think the lack of housing poses a bigger risk than good hearted but unskilled staff. The idea that we can have both requires funding that is not available. Until the funding issue is addressed, I think that the additional cost of licensing needs to be set aside to address the immediate and vital need of housing.
As Bill states, homelessness is structurally build into our economic system. And the more complex and exclusive the system becomes, the more the number of under-resourced people unable to compete in the system will increase. It takes a lot of expert intervention to turn that around because once someone has lost the foothold of housing, the physical and mental trauma and of homelessness takes hold. The longer it goes on the worse it gets. All housed people need to do to understand this is to take stock of all the resource needed to keep them housed. Then imagine having none of that and no network of support.
This in the opinion is crucial: “Since 2017, however, the number of shelter beds has decreased while the numbers of homeless persons and the numbers of deaths have increased.” Instead of more shelter beds, legal homeless camps which reduced crime in the area in Denver (https://coloradosun.com/2022/10/24/safe-outdoor-space/) or pallet shelter/tiny home villages, the City has spent 100s of 1000s on consultants, internet “dashboards” and $3 MILLION per year from 2022-4 and $3.7 million this year on “sweeping” the homeless every 72 hours from one illegal camp to another, effectively preventing people from working or otherwise getting it together. I recounted this on stage at the Boulder Crime and Justice Forum and asked why we didn’t try what worked in the Great Depression: letting the homeless live at the edge of town in “Hoovervilles.” Sheriff Curtis Johnson was nodding his head throughout. But I know why: Downtown Boulder Inc. “runs the City,” in the words of the late DBI board member Sam Sussman, and I’ve obtained DBI’s email asking Council not to do anything more for the homeless. So instead, to sucker the compassionate, Council has funded a multimillion “homeless bureaucratic complex.” That will dramatically fail soon as Trump’s recession will increase homelessness and Fed funds to the City will dry up.
We need a lot of changes in order to get handle on this. You can’t manage homelessness with the approach the city is taking. But when not even the progressives on council care much about it, and in fact are exacerbating the problems with their policies, nothing will improve. We know this is an economic problem because we’ve always had people with mental health and addiction issues, it’s just that the majority of them weren’t living on the street until recent decades. If we could for a minute stop obsessing on how to revive city budgets by increasingly pandering to high tech private equity ventures, we might have some energy left to figure out some human centered and scaled approaches that would also stop sucking the last bit of charm and character out of this city.
Roxanne – precisely.
No, the city’s solution for a campout was $60K per person/year. It’s not cheap to provide year-round services outside, that’s why we have houses.
The goal of “ending homelessness” is making this experience rare brief and nonrecurring, yes. Will there never be a person facing housing instability? Of course not. That’s why the BFZ framework is adapted and implemented by MDHI as a proven success model. If we as a society can “shut off the tap” of folks entering homelessness we can make transformative change. Until folks from all sectors ( healthcare, criminal justice, foster care) can prevent folks from entering in the first place we don’t stand a chance. We can house 100 folks but if 300 are right behind them, it’ll forever be a crisis.
Last summer I was traveling across Nevada, returning to Colorado with friends, and we stopped for a night at a hot springs in the middle of nowhere. We talked to a self-identified homeless man who lived out of his car who had also stopped there to camp and soak. He told us that he had recently lived in Boulder for a six-year period. He praised Boulder’s support for the homeless community and said that he enjoyed his time in Boulder. “It is one of the best places for the homeless to go.” (In retrospect, I should have asked him why he chose to leave Boulder.)
It appears that some of the clients of our Boulder homeless service programs, who have been homeless in other US communities, endorse our local efforts. So, while imperfect, perhaps we should keep the perspective that our local support for the homeless may be attractive relative to alternative support offered in communities across the West. Of course, this was the opinion of a single isolated individual who possesses the ability (a car) to choose the community in which he will live, but the sentiment may be held by others. While striving to improve our local response to homelessness, perhaps we pause for a moment and recognize that the services and overall environment on offer in Boulder could be considered relatively inviting. So, a brief pause and a pat on the back for the Boulderites who provide these municipal services!