In 2005, then-Mayor John Hickenlooper helped spearhead a plan called Denver’s Road Home, which had an ambitious goal: ending homelessness in 10 years. A decade later, with $63 million in private and public funds spent, has homelessness been forever vanquished?
Anyone who’s recently been to the 16th Street Mall or Civic Center knows the answer: no.
While it is notoriously difficult to obtain anywhere close to an accurate head count of a transient population, over the years the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative has attempted, through its “point in time” surveys, to provide at least a snapshot of the homeless population on one given day each year. Their surveys through the years show the number of homeless consistently and stubbornly hovering around the 10,000 mark in the seven-county metro area: 10,268 in 2005; 11,061 in 2009; and 12,605 in 2012.
Such numbers are deeply discouraging. After all, 10 years is a long time and $63 million is a lot of money. What do we have to show for it?
That’s hard to tell. According to the Denver City Auditor’s recently released performance audit of Denver’s Road Home, it’s difficult to gauge the effectiveness of this program due to a serious deficiency in data collection and analysis. The audit criticized DRH for, among other things, waiting until year 10 of the plan to focus on analyzing the data it receives from service providers and failing to establish evaluation systems to identify effective programs.
This is a serious failing, indeed. Communities are struggling to fund many competing needs with insufficient resources. When large sums of money are expended on a tiny percentage of the population, people have every right to know not only how the money was spent but also the outcome over the long term. DRH clearly needs some whip-cracking number-crunchers to produce data that can pinpoint which programs work and which should be retired.
Of course, these days, to offer even the mildest criticism of the homeless or the programs designed to aid them will bring forth accusations of NIMBYism and cold-heartedness. But after 10 years and $63 million, such accusations ring hollow.
There surely are some Grinches out there, but many people are willing to help a woman with children who has lost her job and can’t find another, or a veteran suffering from PTSD. They just don’t want to be taken advantage of.
And some people may indeed have a jaundiced attitude toward the homeless because if they live or work where the homeless congregate, they often don’t see the women, children and veterans. Instead, they see drinking, drug-dealing, fighting and panhandling or the complete trashing of beautiful public spaces.
This happened recently to San Miguel County Sheriff Bill Masters, who discovered a large transient camp just above Telluride. The furious sheriff videotaped the mess, describing the “tons of trash in our National Forest.” Nobody wants their money subsidizing this sort of behavior.
Denver’s Road Home will expire in 2015, to be replaced by a new program, the Way Home. But whatever the program is called, is it even possible to “end homelessness” any more than it is to “end poverty”? No.
Even Denver’s Road Home executive director Bennie Milliner is willing to concede that point. In a 9News interview last year, he quoted the prescient words of Jesus: “The poor you will have with you always.”
Teresa Keegan (tkeegan@ ) works for the courts in Denver.
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