This commentary is by Harold Niedzielski and Bob Yates. Niedzielski and Yates serve on the board of directors of All Roads, which operates Boulder’s principal homeless shelter, in North Boulder. Yates is a former member of the Boulder City Council. Niedzielski is a CPFS community peer recovery navigator in Boulder County; he was formerly homeless.
We have a compassionate and generous community. But we cannot help everybody. While that might seem like an obvious thing to say, our community has been trying to do the impossible. We have been providing long-term shelter to any homeless person who shows up at our door, regardless of how long they have been in Boulder County.
Our community’s experience with that policy has been this: About one-third of the people who come to the All Roads homeless shelter became homeless in Boulder County; about one-third became homeless elsewhere in Colorado; and the remaining one-third became homeless outside of Colorado.
This is not sustainable. Because of capacity limits at the 160-bed homeless shelter in North Boulder, our generous policy has resulted in us turning away people with long ties and deep roots in Boulder County. Some nights, there are only one or two turnaways. Other nights, more than a dozen people cannot be accommodated because the shelter is filled to capacity, including with people who recently arrived in town.
Last year, it broke our hearts to turn away nearly 2,400 people who sought shelter from the elements. We need to modify our practices so that we turn away fewer people who need our help.
So, after operating Boulder’s principal homeless shelter for 44 years, All Roads is changing how we do things.
Starting next month, those who arrive from outside Boulder County while homeless will be allowed to stay at the shelter for a maximum of 10 days. This should be adequate time for them to make more permanent arrangements. If needed, All Roads will help these people with transportation to a place where housing or other shelter can be confirmed. And if the new policy does not work as expected, we will make adjustments.
This “rapid exit” approach was recommended by nationwide homelessness experts Clutch Consulting Group in their report to the City of Boulder last August. In response to the Clutch recommendations, the city challenged All Roads to significantly cut the average number of days a person resides at the shelter, so that we turn away fewer people. We will do this by prioritizing those with Boulder County connections. Those arriving from elsewhere will be helped to reach their next destination, which sometimes will be back where they came from.
Now, let us be clear about what is and is not changing. First, the change in protocol by All Roads will apply only during warmer weather months, between May and October. Second, people whose homelessness arose in Boulder County will not be affected. Third, anyone already living at the shelter will be grandfathered and likewise will not be affected. Finally, we will continue to provide day services to anyone who seeks them. Only overnight sheltering will be changed.
Some may assert that limiting a person who arrives here homeless to only 10 days’ stay at the All Roads shelter is a policy that lacks compassion. But we would observe that it is likewise unfortunate when we must turn away a local person who became homeless in our community simply because someone who has arrived from somewhere else has taken one of the limited number of shelter beds.
All Roads is an independent nonprofit with finite resources. We must allocate those resources in a way that is fair, compassionate and effective, for the benefit of people who are experiencing homelessness, as well as for those of us who are fortunate to be housed. We need to ask ourselves whether it is a good use of limited funds to provide long-term shelter to people who have no connections to our community.
The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness and HUD recommend rapid exit and diversion as the best ways to decrease street homelessness, transience between cities and a community’s cost of providing homelessness services. Cities as diverse as Newark, Houston and San Francisco have adopted these policies. It is time for Boulder to embrace best practices.
Each year, All Roads helps hundreds of people permanently exit homelessness, including 29 people last month alone. Yet the number of unhoused people present in our community never seems to decrease. In part, that is because for every person we help become permanently housed, another person seeking shelter arrives from out of town. It is a cycle we cannot escape unless we make a change.
That change is happening now. We believe that as word of this new approach spreads, fewer people will come to Boulder seeking shelter. And we hope that this change results in more communities taking care of their own, just as we will take care of ours.
This is the trolley problem made real. Heartbreaking.
How will you determine if a person is local to Boulder or arrived homeless?
This is simply diversion on steroids. If it didn’t work well before why would it work now that you’re doing more of it? This quote from the article begs the question: “….In response to the Clutch recommendations, the city challenged All Roads to significantly cut the average number of days a person resides at the shelter, so that we turn away fewer people. We will do this by prioritizing those with Boulder County connections. Those arriving from elsewhere will be helped to reach their next destination, which sometimes will be back where they came from.”
So, again, All Roads is simply sending people back to where they came from? Somehow, I doubt that’s what Clutch had in mind. Does this mean back to the last shelter they stayed at? What if every other city did that to All Roads? The notion that most of that two thirds number of people being turned away would have somewhere else to live is magical thinking at it’s most cynical. To say that these folks will be helped “with transportation to a place where housing or other shelter can be confirmed” is not ethical or realistic. In reality, that likely means a bus ticket to some other shelter they are no more connected to than Boulder.
While other cities the size of Boulder (and much smaller) struggle to address the issue of homelessness in their communities by working together to step up, wealthy Boulder slinks into a defensive crouch insisting that there’s no room at the shelter. A real solution would be to bring back the BOHO shelter system at the churches which helped many people get back on their feet. Boulder shut that down in 2017 because they wanted total control. No churches or nonprofits – other than the shelter – need to further concern themselves with homelessness.
This feels very classist to me. I don’t know where all of the All Roads funding comes from, but it seems to be mostly public sources (e.g., Boulder County).
What if we treated all groups with a “fair and compassionate approach” rather than just our neediest and most vulnerable? I’m thinking about tax breaks and incentives for corporations that aren’t located here, 2nd and 3rd home owners that don’t pay their fair share. The airport is another great example. It’s used by a very small portion of Boulder’s residents, but is highly subsidized using public resources.
The policy of taking care of our own and shipping everyone else out is so popular that it has been silently in practice across the state and country for years now: diversion. It’s part of the reason we see 20 plus new faces every day. For example, many cities in California bus people out of the area. Locally, Aurora and other Denver Metro areas have been known to issue bus tickets directly to Boulder.
It’s almost comical that nonprofits that exist to “end homelessness,” including our own adult homeless shelter, are really saying, we exist to only help to end certain types of homelessness. The kicker is, “those with local ties’ isn’t a HUD federally funded program rule. In fact, it’s pushing the envelope that could lead to real penalties: a loss of federal funding. HUD Emergency Solutions Grant (ESG) requires awardees to be low-barrier and prioritize housing for veterans, chronically homeless adults, transitional age youth (18 to 24) and families with children regardless of “local ties.” Clearly, this is an area for the shelter to address, but in a world of constrained and decreasing federal funding, adopting a policy that knowingly jeopardized further funding seems wild to me. So wild that it makes me think this policy was coerced, and of course, this is just my opinion.
Beyond funding complications, offering a bus ride out of town doesn’t guarantee that the person actually gets on the bus and doesn’t come back or bypasses the bus ticket and joins existing campers on the Northside, downtown, or anywhere else in the city. We cannot forget that we already have an existing camper population that doesn’t utilize shelter services.
The idea that one nonprofit alone can make a dent in homelessness is absurd. It takes every homeless and homeless related agency rowing in the same direction to make any lasting impact: a comprehensive plan with a shared goal. We don’t have that in Boulder or Boulder County. For years, we have practiced selective inclusion when it comes to what nonprofits are in the loop and supported a very fragmented system all working to achieve different goals. For example, the municipal court system. We can step up the camping ban all day long, but what good is it when that court system rips up camping tickets for food stamps or a new social security card? Meanwhile, DA Michael Dougherty has long called for more alternative sentencing beds and treatment and mostly been ignored.
There isn’t a single shelter in the country that’s a glamorous place. The folks at our shelter have a challenging job and provide a critical service. All Roads is the only adult shelter for Boulder County. The reliance on that shelter alone to end a massive and growing societal problem is ridiculous. It can’t. The county and city need to let All Roads breathe and get back to the drawing board because All Roads issuing bus passes will not reduce our homeless population, let alone “end homelessness.”
This practice of other cities in the Denver metro area of sending unhoused people to Boulder should be investigated. How is it accomplished? Are police officers in these cities formally or informally instructed to encourage unhoused individuals to travel to Boulder? Are free bus tickets distributed with encouragement to travel to Boulder? How many have been sent to Boulder in the last decade? What has been the impact of such practices on Boulder?