Finally, Denver wins praise for doing something right: addressing homelessness
It was a vivid image. A young man, either unconscious or sound asleep, was curled on the pavement in a doorway, urine staining his pants from his crotch to his shoe. We were on a trip to Portland, Ore., to watch our grandson compete in a cross country meet and took the opportunity to wander around the city and visit my old haunts.
The young man was not the only person we saw living on the streets of the city, which counts something like 7,500 unsheltered people. He was just the most pathetic.
In the years I worked in Portland in the 1970s and ’80s, homelessness was less widespread, less obvious and the city oozed a cheeky counterculture optimism. It was the place, after all, that returned federal funds appropriated for the Mount Hood Freeway — which would have cut through huge swaths of urban neighborhoods and exacerbated the city’s summer air quality problems — and asked for the money to be released to build light rail instead. It was the place that tore up downtown to create a carless transit mall, put limits on the number of parking places in the urban core and made cycling to work cool.
That was when the seeds of the Portlandia culture were sown.
I was there. Like any self-respecting Portland twentysomething, I refused to wear a bra, drank cheap jug wine and wore beat-up hiking boots with impunity.
.
Now, Portland circa 2026 feels seedy.
Despite a lovely walk along the Willamette River, the great restaurants and coffee shops, the spectacular views and flowers everywhere, that brief encounter with a man who passed out and wet his pants on the sidewalk sabotaged all my best efforts to reflexively defend a place I used to love.
And I live in downtown Denver.
But while our city still has work to do to address the problems of homelessness (more than 500 people still live on the city streets, according to a recent survey), it has made great strides in getting people into homes and shelters.
An opinion piece in the New York Times last week hailed Denver as a model for addressing homelessness. It said Denver puts such cities as Los Angeles, Seattle, Burlington, Vt., — and to my mind, Portland — to shame.
It cites data showing the city’s unhoused population has dropped 64% since 2023 and quotes business owners and others praising the mayor’s determination to keep his promise to get homeless people sheltered in a city with some of the most expensive housing in the country.
The cost of the effort is significant. While the mayor’s office and the city auditor have bickered about the exact total, it appears it’s somewhere between $158 million and $178 million.
It should come as no surprise. It costs real money to buy hotels, build tiny houses and contract with nonprofit organizations to manage the projects, which is a big reason cities don’t have great track records for dealing with their unhoused populations.
An even bigger reason is that it also requires a politically fraught combination of compassion and tough love to get recalcitrant campers out of their tents and cardboard shelters and into decent housing.
There’s no law against being broke and living with untreated mental illness, after all, and sending cops to break up camps looks a lot like gun-toting goons trampling the rights of the most vulnerable. I get it.
But it’s not that simple. I mean, what kind of people are we really if on the pretense of defending their rights, we just look away from the unhoused sleeping on the sidewalks and leave them to live in urine-soaked squalor?
And that doesn’t even begin to address the challenge of getting stubborn NIMBYs to accept low-income housing in their neighborhoods. (You know who you are.)
The folks at the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and other boots-on-the-ground agencies remind everyone that it’s a diverse population — veterans, single mothers, runaways, addicts, mentally ill people and those just down on their luck — who end up living in cars or on the streets. Sometimes they resist help, but often they are eager to accept services they either didn’t know were available or had no idea how to access.
One of our neighbors is a prime example.
An older single woman with an array of health problems, she ran out of money after she burned through her divorce settlement. Family members and friends stepped up for several months to pay her rent while she searched for affordable housing.
Month after month, she was calling them, pleading for help as her search became increasingly desperate.
With the clock ticking, she began selling off her few possessions, and with just days to go before she would be on the street, a friend connected her with services that found her subsidized housing in Denver — in a place that even allowed her to bring her dog.
It’s a small victory in the battle to address a problem that has seemed to defy solutions for decades.
Enough of these kinds of victories have happened in Denver recently to make us stand out. We can take pride in that.
Still more work needs to be done, of course, and the mayor is the first to admit that, but this is what a functioning government looks like. It takes time, money, goodwill and determination. It shouldn’t be exceptional. It’s what we deserve and what we should expect, though too often that’s not what we get.
So, for once let’s celebrate our success. Let’s give the mayor and the taxpayers who have supported this effort the credit they deserve.
Then, let’s get back to work.
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