COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—The campsite is swept clean. An American flag pokes out of one tent. A Bible sits on a table crafted out of wooden crates. A black kitty, welcomed for his mousing skill, scurries around. The resident, in camouflage pants and knit cap, doesn’t want to talk about his life along Monument Creek in Colorado Springs.
He does say one thing: “I’m not going to be here long. This is just temporary.”
His neighbors, Eloy and Seven, hung a Christmas wreath on a tree outside their tent along with a sign that reads “Santa Stop Here.”
They, too, will be moving on soon, Eloy says. A lady is helping him get a construction job this spring. Seven can go back to her job in a month or so.
If most of the estimated 250 or so people who are camped along Monument and Fountain creeks don’t want to be there, well, the city and plenty of its residents don’t want them there, either.
The colorful tents and their colorful residents, both very visible amid the barren winter landscape, have been the focus of months of lively debate, public forums and study by lawyers. But Colorado Springs is just one of dozens of cities struggling to find a solution to unsightly and unsanitary tent cities that house thousands of homeless across the country.
In Colorado Springs, the issue emerged when the homeless complained that police and a city contractor were making sweeps through the camps and scooping up their few personal belongings. An investigation reported that one homeless man, a veteran, lost his driver’s license, Social Security card, clothing and sleeping bag in one “clean up.”
Now Boulder is contending with homeless outrage as well. Several homeless, fed up with being dealt fat fines they can’t pay for sleeping outside, took their complaints to the City Council, urging a moratorium on ticketing the homeless for sleeping outside.
The American Civil Liberties Union has taken up their cause, as it did in Colorado Springs.
Ticketing homeless people who sleep outside isn’t new to Boulder, and homeless advocates say the number of tickets last year went up slightly, but so did the number of homeless.
Greg Harms, executive director of the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless, said there are numerous reasons a homeless person would sleep outside rather than in a shelter.
“There could be mental-health issues; they may be too paranoid to come to a shelter; they may have been asked to leave a shelter, may not like shelter rules” that don’t allow couples to bunk together and that bar pets and alcohol.
“Or they may have come once and the shelter was full,” and just never went back.
Many Boulder homeless said they think police have stepped up enforcement of the no-camping rules after complaints from residents.
“Tonight I’ll be sleeping over there, and tomorrow morning I’ll probably be in jail for camping out,” said Freddie Allen, pointing toward an alley between the Boulder court house and another building.
In his pocket, Allen had a summons for public drinking.
Nearby at the busy public park along Boulder Creek, a group of homeless friends jeered at a police cruiser slowing down to look them over.
But Vic King admitted the fears of residents would likely come true if the Boulder council puts a hold on writing tickets for camping and outdoor sleeping.
“If they did have the moratorium, there’d be tents out here for sure,” said King, who sleeps under bridges, in parking garages and in alleys when shelters are full.
Many of those in Boulder, like Colorado Springs, are chronic homeless, with the drug or alcohol abuse problems or mental illness that often accompanies that status.
Others just had a run of bad luck, and some are victims of the tattered economy’s one-two punch of mortgage foreclosures and job losses.
Robert Holmes, executive director of Homeward Pikes Peak, a nonprofit group that assists the homeless, estimates that about 5 percent of Colorado Springs’ 2,500 or so homeless are recent victims of the economy’s tailspin.
The past year has added maybe 100 new tents to the city’s creekside camping landscape, Holmes said.
Rust Ives has seen plenty of newbies move in during the three years or so he’s lived in a tent alongside Monument Creek.
He thinks it’s been three years, anyway. “You lose track of time,” he said.
When he first moved in, “it was just Charlie over there and Chris there,” he said, pointing to campsites on either side of him. “In the past year, all these other people showed up.”
Some are good neighbors, like Charlie and Chris. Others, Ives said, stay up all night drinking and making noise.
Back when he had a life, as he puts it, he installed fiber-optic cables, owned a house and four cars and raised tropical fish.
“God just decided I got too greedy, I guess,” said the welterweight of a guy who said he’ll be 53 next month.
“But I feel about 960.”
Detroit; Los Angeles; Nashville, Tenn.; Charleston, S.C.; Providence, R.I.; Phoenix; Sacramento, Calif.; and Seattle all saw tent cities either spring up or grow significantly in 2009, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors 2009 Status Report on Hunger & Homelessness.
The approaches to dealing with the encampments is as varied as Nashville is different from Seattle.
The report found Des Moines, Iowa, has stopped enforcing restrictions against the encampments unless there are complaints. In Portland, Ore., one tent city actually has municipal approval.
Denver has an ordinance against sleeping in public areas, but enforcing it with citations is a last resort, said Revekka Balancier of the city’s Human Services Department.
When police find someone sleeping outside, the first step is to try to get them to a shelter or treatment center, she said.
“If a person refuses to cooperate, then the officer does have the authority to cite or arrest as long as they’ve done the warnings. But our biggest goal is to connect the individual with assistance.”
Eloy Valverde, who lives for now alongside Monument Creek, down a steep slope from Colorado Springs’ America the Beautiful Park, hopes he’s found that assistance.
His hopes are pinned on a lady he said got him on a list of job seekers, has shown him how to use the computer at the library downtown to check for jobs, who’ll help him get back on his feet, back into a home where his two children can visit him.
In the meantime, Eloy and Seven will spend their day hunting what they need most at the moment: propane to keep them warm at night.
———
Denver Post Staff writer Michael Booth contributed to this report.
———
Information from: The Denver Post,
