Working as a volunteer at a homeless shelter for twelve and one-half years gives one a feel for the facts of life on the street. Catching my attention recently was an article in The Denver Post by Colleen O’Connor on May 29 with this headline: “Study: Fewer are newly homeless; more are families.”
The article reported on the findings in a recently released point-in-time study or census of homeless people conducted earlier this year by the Metropolitan Denver Homeless Initiative. The local economy is still producing people who are homeless for the first time, 24 percent of the population, but at a slower rate than two years ago when it was 45 percent. A local administrator attributed this somewhat positive finding to the successful application of stimulus money from the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program.
The other finding stressed in the article was that adults with children represented 62 percent of the homeless population, up from 21 percent in 2009, a distressing increase, one clearly caused by the lingering effects of the recession. O’Connor quoted administrators from different counties along the Front Range to the effect that the root causes were a lack of jobs providing a living wage and a lack of affordable housing.
I scanned O’Connor’s article a second time looking for information about the crucial problem of chronically homeless people. They are the people who have been homeless for more than a year or for four times in the past three years. They make up 10 to 20 percent of the homeless population that cost the taxpayers 80 percent of the total bill for this social problem. They sleep on the street over long periods, catch pneumonia, are taken to the emergency ward and the rest of us pay their bills. We also pay for their visits to jail and rehabilitation facilities.
Denver’s Road Home, the organization implementing the recommendations of Denver’s Commission to End Homelessness within the Decade, has concentrated on reducing the number of chronically homeless people in our city by a variety of methods, including the development of affordable housing. The Post article did not mention the number of chronically homeless people counted in the 2011 point-in-time study.
Then I remembered hearing the director of the St. Francis Center, Tom Luehrs, say a couple of weeks ago that the point-in-time study had been released. I asked him if there was any good news in it. He said the number of chronically homeless people counted was low. So I looked again at my copy of the study. There on page 15 was the number, 233 single homeless respondents in Denver County.
The study, however, provides no comparative data. Is 233 a good number or a bad number, high or low? I communicated this problem to Luehrs. He arranged for a conference call with an official at Denver’s Road Home during the next day I was scheduled to serve as a volunteer at SFC and we learned that at the time that the recommendations to end homelessness in Denver were made, in 2005, the number of chronically homeless people was 942. Examination of point-in-time studies from 2005 to 2011 show a steady decline in the number of chronically homeless people in Denver over that period.
Luehrs went on to say part of the reason for the progress was the “outreach effort” made by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, Urban Peak, and the St. Francis Center. Workers in these organizations go into the haunts where chronically homeless people gravitate, seeking them out and advising them about services available to them, such as new affordable housing and case workers. As we anticipate change in the city administration and council, it is clear that there is much to be done if we are to end homelessness in Denver. It is, however, exceedingly good news that during a severe recession the number of our chronically homeless citizens has significantly decreased, proof that our plan is working.
Phillip K. Tompkins is emeritus professor of Communication and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His most recent book is “Who is My Neighbor? Communicating and Organizing to End Homelessness.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
