Je co homelessness stakeholders agree on cause but not action steps

Wheat Ridge Mayor Bud Starker, Je co Commissioner Tracy Kraft-Tharp and other community members discussed homelessness in Je co

BY ANDREW FRAIELI AFRAIELI@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

e League of Women Voters of Je erson County and the Je erson Unitarian Church Community Action Network co-sponsored a virtual panel discussion on Feb. 28 to “explore what can be done in Je erson County to ease the plight of the unhoused.” is included the Mayor of Wheat Ridge Bud Starker and Jeffco Commissioner Tracy Kraft- arp along with various nonpro t, city and county representatives.

If there is anything that they all agreed on, it’s that everyone needs to work together. But opinions on how that translates into action di ered greatly, as do the consequences.

e current amount of people experiencing various forms of homelessness — from vehicular and couchsur ng to unsheltered on the street — is always changing, but even this varied in the panel. at 2019 count also showed that 20% of Je co’s homeless population were sleeping in their cars. e Colorado Safe Parking Initiative, a nonpro t represented by Linda Barringer on the panel, is an e ort to make this particular form of homelessness safer and easier to escape by working with various businesses and churches across the metro area to use their parking lots at night.

Mayor Bud Starker said the city believes there to be only 250 people homeless across the county, whereas the 2022 Point-in-Time count for Je co, a count of people who have used shelters and are experiencing unsheltered homelessness on the rst of January — considered an undercount by homeless activists as it’s done in winter, among other issues — shows there to be about 500.

A month-long count in August of 2019 showed there to be, in more detail, about 1,000 individuals experiencing some form of homelessness in Je erson County, with 93 in Wheat Ridge alone. Starker would not elaborate on where his stated 250 number came from besides not from the 2022 PIT count.

Barringer said they found, across 13 “SafeLots” and 120 families, that 85% were newly homeless, and this was only serving 10% of the 2200 requests they’ve received in the past year. ere are four “SafeLots” in Je co, one recently piloted in Lakewood.

Diverse across these groups in working toward helping resolve homelessness is what that resolving actually looks like.

According to Starker, the needed action has two sides for Wheat Ridge: helping the unhoused directly and mitigating their visual e ect on the community.

“ ere’s the needs of the unhoused folks in our community, and how we address that population and help them become housed. And, we have the impacts their homelessness situation has on our community, which we receive a lot of complaints about,” he said.

Later he elaborated on “cleaning up” homelessness even as the city has no shelters, “the perception that it degradates some of public spaces — makes them dirtier and more chaotic,” and that the city is allocating more sta and resources for “cleaning and maintenance on our right of way.” is includes working with CDOT and RTD, he said, “to encourage (the unhoused) to keep their facilities cleaner and really stay up with their obligations in our city.” e Severe Weather Shelter Network, the major emergency sheltering network for cold weather the county depends upon, also does background checks for violent o enses. Pastor Ben Hensley at the Lakewood United Methodist Church, the only participant in Lakewood’s CSPI pilot program, critiqued the Network for this requirement calling the background checks

Kraft- arp’s perspective was the county being a “facilitator and funder,” acknowledging the county has no shelters itself, but “many temporary beds,” of which almost all are volunteer and nonpro t run. Until Lakewood’s recent emergency weather shelter opening of the Whitlock Recreation Center, there were no city-run shelters of any caliber either.

Another variation of resolving homelessness across the panel consists of choosing who to help. Evergreen Christian Outreach, or ECHO, has its own services and shelter beds. Program Director Tim Clancy elaborated in the discussion that ECHO does an interview to see if the people looking for shelter would be “successful” in the shelter, along with a criminal background check and sexual predator check.