With muted fanfare and a flurry of press releases, Denver’s Road Home, the city’s social program created to end homelessness in Denver, celebrated its fifth anniversary in September.
Also known as “Denver’s ten-year plan to end homelessness,” the program’s real purpose is not to end homelessness in Denver but to establish and perpetuate the homeless services industry in the Metro area.
This industry consists of all the public and private social service agencies that purport to help the homeless. The industry’s real mission is to create well-paying, stable jobs for Denver’s social service bureaucrats, functionaries who exploit a naïvely generous public and the work of many volunteers.
Using well-tuned pitches invoking (and thereby exploiting) the frail elderly, destitute single mothers, and refugee families, the industry has perfected its skills at badgering donations from a public cornered by political correctness and middle-class guilt.
The industry actively solicits donations from local corporations and businesses, solicitations that may sometimes border on extortion when those who hesitate to contribute are threatened with being stigmatized by the homeless services industry’s aggressive “development” (i.e., fundraising) officers.
In a November 11, 2010 Denver Post article marking the so-called halfway point in the Denver’s Road Home, the program’s executive director Amber Callender remarked on the reception the program received when it was first approved in 2005.
Referring to homelessness, she said, “Some people begged him (Mayor Hickenlooper) not to say he’d end it.” This is a very revealing statement from the homeless services industry. It shows the industry doesn’t want homelessness to end so its employees can hang on to their jobs.
The industry downplays this conflict of interest: if homelessness ends, homeless agency employees lose their jobs. So the real strategy is to expand and sustain their industry and perpetuate their positions.
I read the Road Home 2010 update and saw evidence that the program intends to perpetuate itself. The update boasts of donations received, homeless housed, and apartments built.
But nowhere does it talk about making the homeless self-sufficient. The program demands no effort from them, and their role is limited to receiving services.
Paternalism happens when someone is intrusively taken care of without an accompanying requirement that the person learn self-sufficiency. Denver’s Road Home is really a paternalistic program because it focuses on distributing services, food, and housing and not on teaching people how to provide their own food and housing.
It’s intrusive because it makes recipients dependent on the handouts they receive, and the handouts disincentivize their seeking their own solutions. The handouts create a perpetual culture of poverty and dependency.
The whole concept of “ending homelessness” and setting this as a goal is really done for fundraising purposes. When social service programs declare an end to homelessness as their mission, it implies that if you support the program now you won’t have to support it in the future because homelessness and its associated ills will go away. It’s a false contract.
The mission of Denver’s Road Home is not to end homelessness in the city, but to perpetuate it. The city’s homeless services industry needs to be dismantled and rebuilt to incorporate an honest approach to helping the homeless.
There’s nothing wrong with helping the homeless, but when that help becomes a bureaucratized and paternalistic industry, it’s time to end the private and public support the that industry receives.
Jeffrey Beall lives in Denver. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
