A transcript for this video is available immediately below the story.
Young families living out of cars. Surgery patients, sent from the hospital back to the street. Limited resources. Freezing temperatures, and few safe, warm places in which to seek shelter. Even fewer solutions.
These concerns, among others, filled Longs Peak United Methodist Church in Longmont during a community meeting on the Monday before Thanksgiving.
The Way Home, a brand new homeless prevention task force, partnered with local nonprofit Homeless Outreach Providing Encouragement, or HOPE, to host the meeting. Alongside a panel of experts, the organizations invited the Longmont community to offer feedback on a proposed homeless services center.
This project does not yet have a building, an operating budget, a plot of land or even a website. But Jake Marsing, chairman of The Way Home, says they want to find solutions — and they want to find them quickly.
“I believe in setting aggressive goals,” Marsing said. “JFK said we’d get to the moon by the end of a decade, and we did, just barely. If we get this done by the end of next spring, just barely, then I’ll be happy.”
While Longmont is home to many homeless prevention organizations, like the OUR Center and Agape Safe Haven, Marsing believes the homeless services center would fill a critical gap in the current system.
The center would ideally offer a wealth of resources, including case managers, showers, storage space, housing assistance and most notably, Longmont’s first 24/7, 365-day-per-year shelter. Currently, temporary emergency warming shelters in Longmont are run by HOPE and Agape Safe Haven, and rotate from church to church.
But these shelters are only open from November 1 until April 30. With weather as unpredictable as Colorado’s, many believe this timeframe is simply not long enough. This year alone, Longmont saw 7 inches of snow before October 15. As temperatures drop, the need for warm beds skyrockets.
Cameron McKay has volunteered with HOPE and other homeless prevention services for five years. He says that year-round sheltering is essential.
“As a volunteer, I see how important it is to have a safe place to sleep at night that’s also a legal place to sleep at night,” McKay said. “If you sleep outside, you can get ticketed because of the city’s anti-camping laws.”
In Boulder County, those experiencing homelessness must go through a system called coordinated entry, where they are screened for services and assessed based on their needs. Most people with higher needs end up at the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless, regardless of where they live.
While Marsing is in favor of the coordinated entry system, he says that it’s not set up for Longmont residents.
“Folks in Longmont have a difficult time getting to Boulder,” Marsing said. “Think for a second how difficult that would be for you if you were experiencing homelessness, if you didn’t know where you were going to sleep at night, shower the next day — basic survival things.”
Longmont City Council representative Joan Peck echoed that sentiment. Peck recently got back from the National League of Cities summit in Los Angeles, where she attended three sessions on homelessness.
“Every single one of them made the statement that most homeless people stay in the city where they reside,” Peck said. “They do not go to other cities just to get services.”
The Way Home and HOPE said that based on estimated needs, a good start for the shelter would be 40 beds, and that they’d expect to serve single adults as well as families.
But many people in the meeting brought up how important inclusionary, affordable housing is.
Recently, a new inclusionary housing ordinance was initially approved by Longmont City Council. The ordinance would mandate that developers designate 12 percent of livable square footage in new developments as affordable, both for home buyers making 80 percent of the area median income and for renters making 60 percent of the area median income.
Edwina Salazar, executive director of the OUR Center, asked the community to invest more in the center’s housing-first model, which takes people off the street and gets them into immediate housing. The program has a 75 percent success rate at keeping people off the streets — but spots are limited.
Sandy Stewart, who worked at the OUR Center for 15 years, is also a passionate supporter of inclusionary housing.
“My feeling about building a shelter is that it’s not going to take care of the majority of people that we’re dealing with. We need housing and we need it now,” Stewart said, to widespread applause.
Marsing himself is a proponent of the inclusionary housing ordinance, but he says the need for emergency services that the center would offer can’t wait.
“We’re still looking at a couple years before that takes effect. That’s a long way away,” Marsing said. “And the community has an immediate need right now.”
Marsing also emphasized that one of the center’s main goals would be to prioritize accountability, all while working within the existing system. Those who wish to stay at the emergency shelter would need to be actively working on leaving homelessness behind. The key, Marsing said, would be to help people on a path to permanent housing.
Accountability is already a fundamental component of existing homeless prevention in Longmont, including efforts spearheaded by the Longmont police department.
Deputy Police Chief Jeff Satur says programs like the department’s Angel Initiative, which is aimed at tackling substance abuse, have significantly reduced police contact with the homeless population.
Of 130 participants in the program since 2017, Satur estimates that about half were experiencing homelessness. The Angel Initiative strives to help people maintain sobriety, offers housing assistance to those who need it and provides job support.
In October of 2017, Satur pulled statewide statistics on participants in the Angel Initiative. Before entering the program, participants were contacted by the police 1,000 times. After the program, those same participants were only contacted by police 270 times — a 73 percent reduction.
“To me, that’s a positive. It shows that we’re having an impact on those people’s lives,” Satur said.
Satur said that from everything he had read about the proposed homeless services center, the police department would support and work with it, as long as the goal would be to “give people a hand up rather than a handout.”
“Our community is a giving community and welcoming community, but on the other side of that, it’s impossible to take on the problems of Denver, or Loveland, or Colorado Springs, or some other state,” Satur said.
Marsing said that “a hand up” is absolutely in line with the mission of The Way Home, especially as they continue working towards solutions to the housing crisis.
“We all want to make Longmont a better place. We want to better people’s lives,” Marsing said. “The only way to do that is by enforcing accountability.” ♦
Video Transcript
Transcript
(BEGIN VIDEO)
(COMMUNITY MEMBERS TALKING UNINTELLIGIBLY IN BACKGROUND)
TEXT: On November 19, a new advocacy group called The Way Home partnered with Homeless Outreach Providing Encouragement (HOPE) to host a community discussion at Longs Peak United Methodist Church in Longmont.
TEXT: Community members, including experts on homelessness, were invited to comment on a proposed homeless services center that would offer the only dedicated year-round emergency shelter in Longmont.
(BRIEF SHOTS OF COMMUNITY MEMBERS TALKING WITHOUT SOUND)
(BACKGROUND NOISE FADES)
TEXT: While opinions on the proposed shelter varied, everyone agreed that the current system isn’t working — and that the community must come together to solve the housing crisis.
JAKE MARSING, CHAIRMAN OF THE WAY HOME: …Right, that’s the issue as we see it. The question is what’s the solution, right, and I think that’s what we’re here to take input on.
JONATHAN SINGER, COLORADO STATE REPRESENTATIVE: I guess I’ll disagree. The ultimate goal is not to build a shelter, but to eliminate the need for one. And where I could use your help — and this is more of an ask from you — is, systemically we need to ask ourselves, what is the state doing to get in the way?
CHAD MOLTER, DIRECTOR OF SHELTERING SERVICES, BOULDER SHELTER FOR HOMELESS: One thing that I’ve learned in my time in Boulder that’s been very liberating is that shelters don’t work so well. You put a lot of people together who have high needs and a lot of impairments, and they tend to get sicker. We’ve been building shelters since the ‘80s — the problem seems to be getting worse. I’d like to see us, as a country, aiming higher at more resources for housing.
MELISSA BRIM, FOUNDER OF LONGMONT HELPING HANDS: And we found, in a school bus, a four-week-old, a one-year-old, a five-year-old, mom and dad — starving in a school bus. No heat; you could see their breath, and they could not be fed. And I’m not pointing fingers at the OUR Center. I get a little upset because I’m so heartbroken over this. I know we’re here for a solution, and I’m so grateful for that.
KATHY PARTRIDGE, LONGMONT CITIZEN: I have no solutions. I’m just telling my story and bringing it home. We’re middle class people; this could happen to any of us. And so when we’re talking about finding these solutions for a place for people to shelter on the way to getting back on their feet, we’re not talking about the other, we’re talking about my friend. Thank you.
(END VIDEO)
Under the Flatirons 2018 