This past Christmas Eve, Kristy Milligan was getting ready to leave work. She runs Westside Cares, a nonprofit in Old Colorado City that provides food, health care, clothing and financial assistance to people experiencing homelessness. It’s always busy and difficult just before the holidays, but it’s her favorite time to work and to be present for the people who often need the most assistance. But she was looking forward to some rest and some time off with friends and family.
As she was closing up, she ran into a client named Denise King. Kristy makes a point of knowing everyone who comes through the doors of Westside Cares, and Denise was known for her generosity. Whatever she had, whether it was a few dollars, a sleeping bag or a warm coat, she would sooner give it to someone else living on the street than keep it for herself. Kristy knew the weather was about to turn frigid and told Denise she hoped that she would keep enough warm clothing and bedding for herself over the holidays.
“I said, ‘I think it would really serve you to focus on filling your own cup first. You know, you can’t pour from an empty cup. And I see you doing all these things and giving your last dollar to other people and giving your last sleeping bag to other people, and I’d really love to see you taking care of yourself first.’ And she said, ‘I can’t stop helping people because that would make me no better than the people who marginalize us.’”
On New Year’s Eve, the temperature dropped to 17 degrees, and Denise King died in a tent underneath the 31st Street bridge near Highway 24. Though autopsy results have not yet been released, it appears she froze to death. She was 51 years old.
Though the 2024 El Paso County Coroner’s report has yet to be released, Denise King will likely join the dozen or so homeless people who have died of hypothermia on the streets over the past four years. And those numbers often don’t include those who die in the emergency room or hospital. All told, more than a hundred homeless people die on the streets of various causes each year.
Who cares?
A lot of people, it turns out. You probably care. Whether you volunteer at a homeless outreach organization, donate food or clothing, give money directly to people on the street or are a business owner helping to point them in the direction of services — you care! Even if you’ve stopped doing anything other than wanting the problem to go away because you’re tired of seeing other people suffer. Even if you’ve stopped caring because you’re sick of homeless people, and you think they’re lazy and blame them for all their own problems and their failure to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a job, you care.
Everyone cares!
So why does it feel like the problem is getting worse or, at least, not better?
As we’ve recently reported, downtown businesses owners and the public library are losing patience; shoppers are increasingly reluctant to come downtown; and those who care the most are increasingly burnt out. And why does it feel like Mayor Yemi Mobolade’s Homelessness Response Plan 2025 — with all its glossy pages, its bullet points and its “data-driven decisions” that promise “to keep homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring” — can’t deliver anything but the status quo?
A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOMELESSNESS
Though people have experienced what we now call “homelessness” throughout history, “homeless camps have been more or less permanent fixtures within U.S. cities since the rise of modern industrialism in the latter half of the 19th century,” writes Chris Herring, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles in an article called “Tent City, America” published in the online journal Places in 2015.
The beginnings of what we now think of as modern homelessness, writes Herring, coincided with the end of the Civil War, which also coincided with the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The network of rail lines spanning the U.S. allowed workers to travel widely throughout the country.
According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, much of homeless culture arose around the railroads. And by the 1890s, there were three distinct classes of homeless people: there were hobos, who were itinerant workers who had their own distinct language, codes, politics and culture; there were “tramps,” who traveled but drank and didn’t work; and there were “bums” — those who just drank and lived on the streets and who undoubtedly suffered from addiction and other mental health issues.
Hobo “jungles” emerged near train stops as places where itinerant laborers could gather, prepare meals, sleep safely and exchange information about work.
And in the 1930s there were shantytowns called “Hoovervilles” — camps of makeshift shelters named for President Herbert Hoover, who presided over the Great Depression. There were also government tent camps for the migrant farmworkers fleeing the Dust Bowl made famous by John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”
But when the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, writes Herring, there was a 40-year period during which homelessness was almost nonexistent.
“With the entry of the United States into World War II, and with the conscription of military-age men and the vast mobilization of the economy, the homeless colonies faded away.”
In the years following the war, many low-income people who might otherwise have become homeless were buoyed by social welfare programs created by the New Deal and decades-long attempts by the federal government to foster the growth of low-income housing, much of which was consolidated under the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which was created in 1965.
Though many of these programs were deeply flawed, and created new problems with chronic poverty, fewer Americans were unhoused during this period between the end of World War II and 1980 than during any other period in American history.
“Whether the long postwar boom ended because of the oil embargo and recession of the mid-1970s, or because of competition from rebounding European and Asian economies, is open to debate. But few dispute that the contemporary era of chronic homelessness in America began with the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s,” Herring writes.
In Reagan’s campaign to deregulate, privatize, cut taxes and shrink the federal government, he “slashed federal subsidies for low-income housing and psychiatric health centers and deinstitutionalized thousands of mentally ill patients. The all too predictable consequence was a dramatic rise in the ranks of the homeless, and the return of encampments to the streets and open spaces of American cities.”
Reagan wasn’t solely responsible for the much longer process of deinstitutionalization, which began with the creation of Medicaid under Lyndon Johnson, which also moved responsibility for acute psychiatric care out of the state hospitals back into local communities. But Reagan’s final closure of all psychiatric hospitals was the beginning of chronic homelessness — the most visible kind of homelessness — that persists to this day.
The 40-year period of relatively low homelessness in the United States that followed World War II has now been surpassed by 44 years of chronic homelessness and an endless attempt at local fixes that simply haven’t worked.
The United States, which is among the 10 wealthiest nations in the world by GDP, now has the fourth-highest rate of homelessness.
And in Colorado, homelessness continues to rise. According to the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, chronic homelessness rose by 150% in the state between 2013 and 2023. And in 2024, it rose an additional 30%. Whatever we’re doing at the state level isn’t working.
According to the Pikes Peak Continuum of Care’s Point in Time (PIT) Count, chronic homelessness in Colorado Springs declined by 40% in 2024 compared with 2023. But it’s just one year, and because the count takes place on just one day, it’s notoriously suspect. Counting people, especially the chronically homeless, who are transient and have no fixed address is difficult.
And again, regardless of the decline in numbers, there are still a lot of people on the street. As Pam Zubeck asked in a recent column in The Pikes Peak Bulletin, “If the PIT count shows progress, why isn’t downtown feeling it?”
WE KNOW WHAT WORKS
Despite the persistence of homelessness, experts know what works. Not surprisingly, it’s housing and services, including food, basic health care, addiction recovery, job training and, in some cases, ongoing financial and addiction support.
Ten years ago, I reported on a revolutionary experiment at the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless’ newly opened Fort Lyon Recovery Program in Bent County, about a two-hour drive southeast of Colorado Springs.
Originally the outpost from which Col. John Chivington launched the gruesome Sand Creek Massacre, Fort Lyon later became a sanatorium, and then a hospital, and then a low-security prison. When the state decided to close the prison, the campus, which looks like it could be a small liberal arts college just about anywhere in the Midwest, was given over to the coalition by the state of Colorado.
John Parvensky, the president of the coalition at the time, saw an opportunity to help chronically homeless people dealing with extreme addiction issues to recover and rebuild their lives by removing them from the communities where they were struggling and give them “a place where they can focus on themselves, focus on recovery, and provide opportunities for them to learn, get an education, and have vocational opportunities.”
The coalition had been taking a “housing first” approach to homelessness since its founding in Denver in 1984. The idea is simple to the point of being obvious: Housing is the most basic human need, and for anyone to truly get off the street and rebuild their life, it has to start with a safe and secure place to live and sleep.
With Fort Lyon, the idea went further with what they call “trauma-informed care,” which presumes that people dealing with homelessness caused by addiction, and the severe mental health issues and trauma that come with it, needed a complete array of support, or “wraparound” services close at hand right there in their living environment. Ask anyone who’s lived on the streets in a city without centralized services (as Colorado Springs used to be, and still is, depending on your situation) what the most difficult part about it is, and they will tell you that it’s the time and energy it can take to get to the scattered array of services you need. Breakfast might be served in one location, but then you have to walk a mile to get to a job-training service. If you need clothes (especially socks, because your feet get incredibly sweaty with all the walking you do), you have to go another facility half a mile away. If you’re lucky, you might make it to the soup kitchen by lunch at a church a half mile from there. Then, after that, you might have to walk an additional mile for a dentist appointment. Never mind having a job because getting your basic needs met, which most people who have homes take for granted, is your job. If you’re also dealing with mental health issues or addiction, it can be next to impossible.
At Fort Lyon, along with having all these services in one central location, clients are also given two years to fully put their lives back together. They offer dormitory-style living on 552 acres next to the Arkansas River. It has Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous support groups, individual counseling, health care, a cafeteria, and access to education and job training on-site and at the local community college.
If it sounds a lot like college, that’s because it is — it’s a campus approach to treating homelessness and addiction. And like college students, the clients have time not just to get their needs met but to work through their trauma, reflect and think about what they might want to learn and how they could once again contribute to society in a meaningful way.
“It’s person-centered,” said James Ginsburg, who ran the program at Fort Lyon when it began, “which means we are not going to create this model and make you fit into it, and when you don’t fit into it we’re gonna call you noncompliant. That’s been part of the system. It’s been, ‘Well if you don’t fit into our time slots, our process, our procedures for accessing services, then you’re just lazy and noncompliant. Those systems may be intolerable to access. People, especially with mental health issues, can’t tolerate shelters or large waiting areas with masses of people and overstimulation. Part of our attraction to this is the 500 acres and allowing people to spread out and really slow down.”
The only hard and fast rule of Fort Lyon is that there are no illicit drugs, alcohol or weapons allowed on the campus under any circumstances.
After the two years, residents of Fort Lyon are placed in permanent housing in the Colorado communities of their choosing and given transitional support.
Not everyone makes it all the way through the two-year program, which is now in its 12th year. But it’s served roughly 2,500 people since it opened its doors in 2013.
If there’s any disappointment, it’s that the Fort Lyon model hasn’t yet proven to be scalable to serve more people. But it’s not because of cost. In fact, housing and providing services to people at Fort Lyon was less than a third of what it cost the city and state when they were living on the street.
THE URBAN CAMPUS MODEL
Not every person dealing with homelessness needs to be removed to a faraway campus. When the state psychiatric hospitals began downsizing in 1965 before they were finally closed in 1980, mental health professionals moved toward treating and caring for people “in vivo,” or in the communities they lived in.
But as federal funding dried up in the 1980s, local communities didn’t necessarily want to pay to care for the indigent and chronically homeless.
What emerged from that decentralization of funding was a decentralized patchwork of services provided by nonprofits and nonprofit religious groups. And, as mentioned above, scattered services make anything but basic survival difficult for many, especially those with mobility issues.
Springs Rescue Mission (SRM) on East Las Vegas Street downtown near the former Martin Drake power plant has emerged as the leader in providing homelessness services in Colorado Springs over the past three decades. What started out as a homeless street ministry founded by Paul and Marilyn Vyzourek in 1995 has since grown into a nearly 9-acre campus on the south side of downtown. If you haven’t been there, it’s an incredible model for what homelessness services can be in an urban setting.
Travis Williams, the new president and CEO, gave me a tour of the facility on a cold, sunny morning just after the new year, and it’s truly impressive. It has everything from apartments that offer permanent supportive housing to basic overnight shelter, a cafeteria, storage lockers, fenced-in bike racks, day shelter, health services, job training and even a kennel for pets. A variety of nonprofit partner organizations and care providers have offices on the campus or come there to serve clients. And it’s fenced off with a single point of entry to keep drug dealers and other bad actors out. It’s humane, it’s person-centered and, despite rumors that you have to sign a declaration of Christian faith to receive their services, the only actual barrier to entry is any kind of violent or disrespectful behavior.
Williams is proud of the work everyone is doing there but admits it’s frustrating that they often can’t reach the chronically homeless.
“Visible signs of homelessness have increased over the years — trash, tents, etc. But what most people in the community don’t see are the 400 to 450 individuals at SRM who are leaning in to access services and having the success stories.”
There are downsides to SRM’s model. At a basic level, it just doesn’t have enough capacity to serve everyone who needs their services. Williams says they try not to turn anyone away, especially on frigid winter nights, but they only have 450 shelter beds, which is less than half of the 2024 PIT count of 1,146 unhoused people in Colorado Springs (though Kristy Milligan estimates the number is closer to 2,500, and Williams notes that roughly 6,000 unique individuals came through the doors of SRM last year). Additionally, the beds they do have offer no privacy, and SRM’s faith-based approach isn’t for everyone, even if it isn’t obligatory.
But the biggest challenge facing both SRM and the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless is the very thing that their clients need most: affordable housing. Both organizations aim to move their clients into either permanent housing or permanent supportive housing. But the reality right now in Colorado is that there simply isn’t enough inventory.
Multiple sources estimate the state’s shortage of housing at more than 100,000 units.
Kristy Milligan at Westside Cares drove the point home when she told me, “ I’ve got 500 people on the coordinated entry waitlist. We’re placing about two a month. And we’ve got 3,800 people on the Colorado Springs Housing Authority waitlist.”
MOTHER-IN-LAW-COTTAGES
Some relief for the housing shortage could come from House Bill 1152, which Gov. Jared Polis signed into law last year. The bill makes it legal for almost anyone with a single-family detached home to build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU), aka mother-in-law cottage, in their backyard.
The bill is brilliant in a way.
First, it recognizes that housing availability for lower-income people and families is a statewide problem.
Second, it takes the matter out of the hands of local planning boards and commissions, who, under pressure from neighbors, often use existing zoning regulations (think setback and lot coverage restrictions, etc.) to deny permits for this type of construction, thus preventing the addition of affordable housing stock. As Jerusalem Demsas, a writer for The Atlantic, put it in a 2023 piece titled “Colorado’s Ingenious Idea for Solving the Housing Crisis,” “The problem is that the local institutions charged with land-use decisions are attuned to parochial complaints, not large-scale needs.”
Third, in a state where even a whiff of higher taxes can mean instant political death, the bill simply leverages homeowners’ desire to increase their property value. It’s a government tool that doesn’t require government spending.
Finally, if there is a boom in ADUs, they would likely be in middle- and higher-income neighborhoods, where people can afford to build them. And studies have shown that lower-income individuals and families living in higher- or mixed-income neighborhoods have a greater chance of staying out of poverty long term.
But even if this ADU carrot without a stick does significantly increase the state’s housing supply, it could take a long time. Not everyone has $200,000 sitting around to build a new unit on their property, and interest rates are still relatively high.
So what else can we do?
THE PROBLEM WITH THE PROBLEM
As Aimee Cox, chief housing and homelessness officer for Colorado Springs, will tell you, one of the biggest problems in solving the problem of homelessness is understanding the problem. And one of the most difficult parts of the problem is calculating the actual cost of homelessness to taxpayers.
Officially, the city of Colorado Springs allocates $500,000 for shelter beds and funds both the Homeless Outreach Team (HOT) and Homeless Outreach Program (HOP).
But the actual cost to taxpayers is likely much higher when emergency services and public safety are factored in. And the problem with that is those costs are hidden in the budgets of emergency services and public safety, not to mention the costs to businesses and other public resources like the library.
Though Cox and her team are currently working on an accurate number, Mayor Mobolade himself has estimated the total average cost of an unhoused person living on the street to be around $50,000 per year. It doesn’t take advanced math to figure out that $500,000 won’t cover the costs of 1,146 unhoused people in the community.
Obviously, organizations like Springs Rescue Mission are picking up a big slice of those costs through donations and grants. But that doesn’t mean that taxpayers aren’t still footing the bill for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in invisible costs like emergency services every time the Colorado Springs Fire Department gets called and hauls someone to the emergency room. If those costs can be identified, perhaps taxpayers would be more amenable to spending that money on housing and services that prevent those far more expensive emergency responses.
Keep in mind that the cost of housing a person has been shown to cost less than a third of what it costs for them to live on the streets. For example, Travis Williams at Springs Rescue Mission says it costs around $12,000 to house a person in their residential addiction program for a year.
Once voters are able to see how much chronic homelessness on the streets is costing them, it’s hard to imagine that a community with the highest number of churches and religious nonprofits per capita anywhere in the United States — that pays 5.7 cents in sales tax for every 10 dollars to fill its potholes and repave its streets to the tune of $50 million per year — couldn’t be persuaded to pay a few more pennies in taxes to help our chronically homeless population at the very least, especially if it would free up emergency-services money that could be better spent elsewhere.
If Mobolade, who arrived here as an aspiring Christian minister, got elected by an unaffiliated, independent voter base in Colorado Springs that’s moving to the left after years of holding down the far right at a time when the far right is ascendant nationwide, isn’t it possible that something just as bold and unlikely could be sold to the voters who just re-upped 2C?
Who among us wouldn’t give a nickel of sales tax out of every $10 to end homelessness in Colorado Springs? How about just a penny?
And, I’m sorry, but if charity alone in a town with this many churches can’t solve the homeless problem, I doubt it can be done anywhere.
What if that money could be used to build more affordable-housing campuses in conjunction with organizations like Springs Rescue Mission or Colorado Coalition for the Homeless? What if it could be used to subsidize the construction of rent-controlled ADUs? What if it could be used to help homeless people build their own homes or ADUs? What if the old St. Francis hospital building at Pikes Peak Avenue and Prospect Street east of downtown that’s sat dormant for more than a decade now after Nor’wood Development Group purchased it for $50,000 could be turned into a new housing and services facility?
Why think small?
THE RIGHT THING TO DO
I’ve known Brian Gravestock for more than 20 years, and he’s always been one of the clearest thinkers about homelessness I’ve ever known.
He fixes up bikes for anyone in need and gives them away at the Bike Clinic Too, a garage that he uses as a bike shop on the west side. He’s in his 60s now, and mostly retired, but he still puts in two days a week at the clinic because he has a waiting list about three months long.
His customers, most of them homeless, can be ungrateful, picky, demanding, impatient and dissatisfied with what he has for them. They often want nicer bikes than the ones he gives them, which are the bikes that have been donated to him and the bikes that are ready to ride when that person’s number comes up. Still, he does his best to indulge their requests.
He’s not a Christian, and he doesn’t consider his work charity. He doesn’t get a special feeling from it, and he’s not looking for pats on the back. He just does the work. And when you ask why he keeps building and fixing bikes and giving them away to people who often don’t even see him or his work, he says:
“Because it’s the right thing to do.”
What if instead of “keeping homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring,” we just end it altogether?
No more hand-wringing.
No more cardboard signs.
No more feces in the doorways of downtown businesses.
No more wishing we could do more.
No more hoping it’ll go away.
No more wondering if we’re next.
No more articles on homelessness.
No more Denise Kings.
All of us. Because it’s the right thing to do.
The post Another Homelessness Story: We know what works. Why don’t we do it? appeared first on Colorado Springs Independent.