Opinion: Hard-working homeless men stuck at Crossroads shelter in Denver

Salvation Army Crossroads homeless shelter.Photo byGoogle Street VIew

I recently had a reader leave a comment on one of my articles about his own experience with homelessness. Here is what he had to say:

“I am homeless. Here's (a) CliffsNotes version. I was an ASE-certified master automotive technician with three advanced level certifications. I did it for 37 years and was one of the top diagnosticians in the city, if not country. Due to some health issues I had to leave that industry and now work as a building maintenance tech at a high-end Denver hotel. My former roommate passed away and the … landlord basically kicked me out. In the interim … I have had two cars stolen in two years. So, I am now homeless, with no car…. I am a highly skilled and extremely intelligent individual who makes a whopping $21 an hour. I walk and ride the bus all over. I see more and more regular people, with pets, kids, and everything they own living in cars. These are not drug addicts or people with mental health issues.”

The reader goes on to say these people do not receive help. “This city is destroying itself. There's certainly no help for us. The working poor are left to fend for ourselves. The city has become unaffordable.”

Work, shelter, work

This message, from “Ah Clem,” resonated with me. It is true that there is an entire population of working, invisible homeless people. Many of them are invisible because they work all day and stay at the shelter all night. They are in an endless routine of rising before dawn, being taken in a van from Crossroads to their job site, performing back-breaking labor for eight hours, and returning directly to the shelter, where check-in is around 5 p.m. or so. These people work incredibly hard yet remain homeless. Many of them rent beds at Crossroads (those who stay for free sleep on cots on the floor in a stinky room). The beds are in a room with better accommodation and a television. Unlike the stinky warehouse area, the bed area is clean, the beds are spaced apart, and nobody acts foolish. They are working. Hard. Renting a bed is not cheap, although possibly less than renting a room in a house.

How many homeless people work?

In a 2021 paper from the University of Chicago Becker Friedman institute showed that about 39.4% of sheltered homeless adults ages 18-64 reported having worked in the past year between 2011 and 2018, “which is slightly lower than single poor adults (45.5%) and much lower than the broader population (78.4 %),” according to the paper. “The sheltered homeless also reported fewer weeks worked conditional on having worked in the last year, suggesting a more sporadic work history. Mean earnings of the sheltered homeless in 2018 dollars are reported to be $14,200 conditional on having worked, which is higher than the poor single adult comparison group’s mean reported earnings of $8,325.”

More than half of the sheltered population (52.8%) had formal labor market earnings in the year they were observed as homeless, according to the paper. Among the unsheltered, 40.4 percent had at least some formal employment in the year they were observed as homeless. “It is striking that so many individuals experience homelessness despite being employed,” the report notes. “This finding contrasts with stereotypes of people experiencing homelessness as too lazy to work or incapable of doing so.”

Why people do not access services

The people who do not receive assistance while experiencing homelessness likely are not applying for it, according to Cathy Alderman of Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. “There can be some limiting factors in what resources and services are available to different people experiencing homelessness,” Alderman wrote in an email. “For example, some of the housing voucher programs are targeted for people living with a disability – those disabilities can include mental or behavioral health conditions. Additionally, some transitional housing resources are targeted for people with substance use disorders (SUD) because the services available for that type of housing include SUD clinical services. But I haven’t heard of people being turned away from shelters or hotels because they don’t have a SUD or disabling/limiting condition.

“We are aware that there is likely a relatively large population of people experiencing homelessness that may not be accessing services for a variety of reasons. For example, we know that people with children sometimes do not often access services because they might be afraid it could lead to a custody issue. Other folks who may be couch surfing, doubled-up, staying in their cars, etc. may not consider themselves to be homeless and so may not be part of the Point in Time count and officially counted as experiencing homelessness.”

Those not creating eyesore not prioritized for housing

Although Mayor Mike Johnston has moved more than 1,600 people indoors to hotels and tiny home communities as part of his House1000 and All-in Mile High campaigns, all those people were living in street encampments. So, while the visible homeless were whisked into shelters, those you do not see did not receive the same level of attention and were harder to find.

I used to frequently stay at Crossroads during homeless. When I think of the number of men I met there who had been staying there for 10 years or longer, it is hard to imagine how they persevered that long living in a homeless shelter.

I hope those staying at Crossroads homeless shelter also can be funneled into shelter. Just because they are not cluttering Denver’s streets with tents and tarps and creating an eyesore does not mean they do not deserve help.