Homelessness is a series of trapdoors and obstacles

BY ANDREW FRAIELI AND OLIVIA LOVE COLORADO COMMUNITY MEDIA

Jonathan Townshend Garner spent nine sleepless nights in 2017 covered in snow staring up at the bottom of a frozen overpass in Aurora. Just a few short months before, the 35-year-old was planning to purchase a condo with his girlfriend.

He never expected that a breakup would send him down a series of increasingly di cult trapdoors — without housing or insurance, each door became harder to climb through. Because of those cold nights in 2017, Garner even lost his legs.

What led Garner to homelessness is not unique. As homeless rates continue to climb in this country for people in many di erent situations, the causes can range from one lost paycheck to addiction or mental health issues with no money to support treatment.

In Garner’s case, he was in a stable housing situation that was reliant on two incomes. e loss of a girlfriend meant the loss of a second, necessary paycheck.

“I’m all of a sudden in a situation where I’ve lost half my income in regards to what’s going towards payments,” Garner said.

Homelessness a ects many types of people. It also comes in all forms from living on the streets to couch sur ng or sleeping in a car. Common among all situations that have forced someone into homelessness is the world around them not being designed to help.

According to HUD fair market rent data, rent for a studio apartment in the metro area has increased by more than $300 per month since 2019, but minimum wages have only increased by about $2.50 an hour — increasing the percent of wages needed to be put towards housing from 54 to almost 60%.

e National Low Income Housing Coalition — a nonpro t that aims to end the a ordable housing crisis through policy and data research — deems housing costing more than 30% of wages spent on rent and utilities as una ordable, placing workers at risk for homelessness.

is lack of a ordable housing acts doubly as a factor for becoming homeless and a barrier from escaping it.

Unable to deal with the breakup and loss of income, Garner said it triggered a dormant alcohol addiction.

“As soon as she left, I started drinking again too, which was probably one of the worst decisions that I made,” he said. “And I’m a hell of a drinker. It took me no time before I was drinking before work every day.”

His addiction became another trapdoor. He was evicted from his home as his costly addiction grew, losing his job within a few months, and he continued falling until he landed on the streets.

In 2017, he found himself buried by snowdrifts, numbed to the elements by frostbite and an empty bottle.

Over the next three and a half months, he was in an ICU burn unit, where his legs were amputated for frostbite. What happened to land him there remains a blur, with Garner saying he was just lost in a blizzard of snow and substance abuse.

Garner had not looked for a shelter because he felt he deserved what he was experiencing on the street, his addiction giving him too much bluster to ask for help.

“And so when things have gotten so bad for me, I was like, ‘I guess that’s where you go when you’re at this place,’” Garner said.

But from Aurora to Lakewood, many who look for shelter have a hard time nding it — especially in winter.

The stick and carrot of winter shelter

“Police show up to tell you to leave, but don’t have an answer as to where we can go,” said Marshall Moody, who experienced homelessness in Lakewood over the summer.

He wasn’t hunting for winter shelter, but acknowledging how there were no shelter options in Lakewood, and describing how he felt harassed by police telling him to move along.

In Aurora, one of the only overnight shelter spaces is the Comitis Crisis Center.

“Comitis has, what, 30 beds? I’m sure there’s easily 200 homeless people in Aurora. Easily,” said Jason, 40, who declined to give his last name, pointing out the lack of shelter options.

Jason has been homeless since 2019, falling on hard times after breaking his back and not having the ability to a ord medical care.

Anna Miller, director of business development and public relations at Mile High Behavioral Healthcare — which Comitis Crisis Center falls under — has said before that the center has an outreach team that goes out every day working with the city and police department to inform people on the streets about available resources. e organization was supportive of Aurora’s camping ban passed last summer. e issue is that cold-weather injuries like frostbite and hypothermia can set in as high as 45 degrees depending on wind and moisture. is is according to doctors from Denver Health and the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, which sent a joint letter to HOST and DDPHE asking the city to raise their cuto .

But like the ban, these opinions are from the summer.

During the winter, many more people experiencing homelessness look for indoor shelter due to low temperatures, snow, rain and windchills causing regular, local shelters to ll up fast. is is where short-term emergency weather shelters come in.

For much of the metro area, the “extreme weather” needed to open these emergency shelters — which vary from the Severe Weather Shelter Network across Je erson County that uses a network of churches, to opening some day-only centers for overnight stays — requires the temperature to be freezing or below with moisture, and 20 degrees or below without moisture.

In Denver, the required cuto is 10 degrees or six inches of snow — though, according to Sabrina Allie, the communications and engagement director for the Department of Housing Stability — or HOST — in Denver, the city council has asked the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment, which created the cuto , to revisit these regulations.

“Hypothermia and frostbite may develop in minutes and often occur in the setting of risk factors for heat loss or decreased heat production including pre-existing medical conditions, exhaustion, dehydration, substance use and malnutrition, all of which are common among people experiencing homelessness,” doctors said in the letter.

Some see winter shelter as a carrotand-stick situation though, requiring the cuto to not be too comfortable for those experiencing homelessness.

“We do not want to enable, we want to empower,” said Lynn Ann Huizingh, executive director of development at Je erson County’s Severe Weather Shelter Network. “We do the best we can to provide some good relational development, but we also want to encourage people to pursue answers that would lead them o the street, and if they get too comfortable, they just don’t have any reason to try and pursue anything else.”

However, at all times, the goal is to keep people from freezing to death, Huizingh added.

Aurora’s policy, according to Emma Knight, manager of homelessness for the city’s Division of Housing and Community Services, is to open emergency cold-weather shelters at 32 degrees during wet weather, and 20 degrees otherwise.

In Garner’s case, freezing to death almost became a reality. Instead, he left the hospital as a double amputee — disabled, homeless, and penniless.

“And I wish I could have said that that was my rock bottom as well. But it wasn’t,” Garner said.

Police interactions and laws against homelessness

Over the next nine months, Garner continued drinking and using drugs while trying to condition himself to his surroundings.

“ ere isn’t a rock bottom, there isn’t some stable ground that you hit. It is a series of trapdoors that gets progressively lower on to in nity,” Garner said.

Some of these trapdoors take the shape of police interactions and the possibility of jail time due to criminalization of homelessness. In the summer of 2022, Aurora passed a camping ban, following in the footsteps of Denver, which passed a similar measure a decade ago.

“Can’t camp, but you have only one shelter in the city of Aurora,” Jason said, referring to the Comitis Crisis Center. “ e camping ban doesn’t mean we can’t be outside — that’s really the main point — the camping ban means we can’t be safe outside.”

Terese Howard, homeless advocate and founder of Housekeys Action Network Denver, said these bans just push people around, possibly into more dangerous and secluded areas if they don’t just move a block away from where they were before.

Police harassment often comes out of these laws as well, Howard said. O cers will tell people experiencing homelessness to “move along” without o ering alternatives, according to Howard.

Denver’s camping ban speci es “shelter” to include “blankets, or any