Colorado Village Collaborative Statement on Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman’s Experience on the Streets of Metro Denver
This article is written in response to Mike Coffman’s recent remarks regarding the week he spent on the streets. View press here.
In his important work on the systemic nature of racial injustice, Bryan Stevenson effectively explains that in order to deeply understand a problem, we must “get proximate” to that problem. We must get up close and engage deeply from the ground level in order to understand something and ultimately transform the very thing we hope to understand. While we applaud Mayor Mike Coffman’s willingness to get proximate, deeply engage with, and seek to understand the problem of mass homelessness in America through his recent immersion experience, we remain critical of his reductionistic conclusions drawn from seven days on the streets of Metro Denver.
Towards these ends, this letter presents five major rebuttals to Mayor Coffman’s assertions, which are outlined below:
Homeless people did not cause mass homelessness. In comments provided to CBS4 reporter, Shaun Boyd, Mayor Coffman echoed a famous line from former President Ronald Regan by saying that homelessness, “is a lifestyle choice.” Famously, Reagan’s views on this issue led to drastic cuts to the federal housing budget in the early 1980’s that have not since been replaced. The fact that over 560,000 Americans will have no place to call home tonight is not the result of individual, lifestyle choices, but of failed public policy that is now four decades in the making. The more than 10,000 people that are experiencing homelessness on a given night across the state of Colorado are not to blame for this reality, their suffering is an unfortunate downstream byproduct of failed federal policy. In short, we have failed our sisters and brothers.
Homelessness is a housing problem. Mayor Coffman incorrectly claimed that homelessness is not a product of the economy, COVID, or increased housing and rental rates. National data however, fails to support this claim and suggests that the leading cause of homelessness in America is the fact that housing prices have skyrocketed across our country and wages have failed to keep up. While wages may increase at an average rate of 1-3% annually, housing prices have risen at 5-10% annually over the past several decades. According to the latest annual gap report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, we face a national shortage of 7,543,488 housing units, and Metro Denver alone faces a 90,636 unit shortage. In 2017, the national online real-estate marketplace, Zillow, produced a report that revealed a direct correlation between rising rent prices and the numbers of people experiencing homelessness in America. Moreover, reports published in April 2020 estimated that COVID would result in a 45% increase to our nation's homelessness population.
Homelessness disproportionately impacts BIPOC communities. While a full transcript of Mayor Coffman’s conversation with CBS4 has not been released, the public comments failed to draw any correlation between systemic racism and the problem of mass homelessness. However, data from the Metro Denver Homelessness Initiative’s 2020 Point In Time report highlights the reality that Black people, Indigenous people, Multi Racial people, Pacific Islander, and Latinx communities are all disproportionately impacted by homelessness across our region. In the release of this annual report, MDHI Executive Director Matt Meyer clearly and effectively stated, “Homelessness is an issue of race and must be approached through this lens.” Simply stated, the same systemic realties that brought rallies to the Denver and Aurora streets this summer disproportionately send black and brown people to the streets with no place to call home.
Trauma and adverse childhood experiences are the leading causes of substance misuse. Mayor Coffman is quick to describe “drug culture” as the cause of homelessness, but just as the Aurora Mayor is silent upon the intersections of race and homelessness he remains silent upon the impacts of trauma on both homelessness and substance misuse issues. Literature building upon the 1990’s Kaiser Permanente study on Adverse Childhood Experiences encourages social service practitioners to approach recovery from a variety of life challenges from a stance that asks not, “What’s wrong with you?” rather, “What happened to you?” The traumatic experiences that many facing substance misuse issues encountered during their childhood, through no fault of their own, have led to addiction and a variety of seemingly insurmountable life challenges. Moreover, the retraumatization and instability caused by homelessness does not provide the stability and support needed to overcome the daily challenges of substance misuse. In order to overcome that challenge, we need solutions that take into consideration the immense complexity of the problem we are facing.
Housing and services end homelessness. Mayor Coffman, however fails to turn his attention towards these sorts of solutions, instead suggesting that people experiencing homelessness are “settled into this sort of lifestyle” and “not moving on.” The Mayor describes an experience in daytime and overnight shelters where people experiencing homelessness are seemingly content with their present circumstances. Again, this position is not supported by real data. For those unfamiliar, Denver’s Social Impact Bond project initially sought to house the 250 most costly homeless utilizers of Denver’s jail and emergency health service systems. Those identified to meet the criteria were offered the chance to move directly into housing, and all but one of those people readily agreed to do so. In other words, out of a sample size of 250, less than one percent of those experiencing homelessness did not want to enjoy the stability that housing and services could offer. International best practices unequivocally demonstrate that housing first, paired with wraparound services, provides those recovering from homelessness the support they need to thrive.
In conclusion, we are grateful to Mayor Coffman for his efforts to get proximate to this issue and treat the homelessness crisis with the intensity of focus that it deserves. Spending seven days outside in Metro Denver during some of the coldest times of the year expresses a deep and intense commitment to understanding this complex problem. However, the assertions highlighted by the CBS4 story are not only reductionistic in scope, but harmful to reinforcing a national narrative, most recently championed by the Trump Administration under HUD Secretary Ben Carson, that views homelessness as an individual, isolated, and local problem. The reality, as we have described, is that in order to address the larger drivers of our homelessness crisis we must continue to work upstream, not only locally, but at the state, and federal level to advance solutions commensurate with the scale of this problem.
We haven’t always had mass homelessness in America, and mass homelessness doesn’t have to be a permanent feature of our society. But moving forward into that future, which is possible, will require advancing solutions based upon our deepened understanding of these issues, paired with equal portions of public and political will. To arrive where we can go, our newfound proximity to these problems must lead us to reimagine our mutual responsibility to one another and take action to bring about a new and better future based upon that new collective vision. Mayor Coffman has demonstrated his willingness to go out into the cold. Is he now willing to do the upstream work required to bring our neighbors back inside to the warmth and stability of home?
We’re aiming to do that difficult work every day, and welcome Mayor Coffman to join us, and so many of our partners, in that important endeavor.
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