Opinion: Mayoral Candidate Says Jailing the Unhoused Will Be a ‘Last Resort’ — but Will It?

Denver’s public camping ban is a central concern of the April mayoral election. Although the ban was ratified in 2012 by outgoing Mayor Michael Hancock, his administration has made only half-hearted efforts to enforce it. Meanwhile, many of the seventeen candidates on the ballot are running to more actively enforce the ban (the most recent efforts of Hancock’s so-called “Street Enforcement Team,” though, were allegedly hampered by a lack of available uniforms).

Kelly Brough, who currently holds a nominal lead in the tight campaign, has consistently advocated for full enforcement of CB12-0241. Appearing on a 9News interview on February 21 (see below), she intimated that any unhoused person who refuses a shelter or rehab is likely a criminal. And indeed, all of the publicly unhoused would be criminals by definition. “Last resort,” she insists, but it’s still a promise to jail Denverites who live on the streets.

Other candidates, like Republican Andy Rougeot, promote even more aggressive positions. Along with at least eight other candidates, he defends the current regime of police sweeps, a Hancock approach widely criticized for its secretive budget and ineffectual, violent outcomes. But Rougeot sets himself apart from the field when arguing for rolling back minor progressive gains made during the last administration, including a limited UBI experiment and potential safe injection sites, all while adding 400 police salaries to the city budget.

It is easy to see these candidates as sadistic, greedy elites, more interested in the salability of hastily fabricated “arts” districts than in the well-being of their most vulnerable potential voters. But their failings aren’t only moral. Shelter mandates and brutal sweeps are terrible policies.

There are good reasons that the unhoused prefer to avoid city shelters: In order to accommodate a variety of challenging situations, shelters inevitably become puritanical stopgaps. But one hardly fares better on the streets when confronting the countrywide playbook of camp sweeps that has police chasing the unhoused between shanty towns, destroying property and sowing chaos among people already at rock bottom. The combined inefficiencies of these traditional American persecutions may actually be more expensive than simply building public housing for the victims.

Despite the cruel dysfunction of their policy demands, some sympathy might be due to those contending for the municipal throne. Throughout the country, the problem of homelessness has been foisted on local policy makers who lack the resources and national coordination to pursue effective or humane solutions. The expiration of pandemic emergency measures, like the federal eviction moratorium or the state’s federally funded rental-assistance program, are sure to lead to increases in the Denver homeless population, with little that the city government can do about it.

Further national pressure is put on local government’s homeless response by migration — but not the interstate welfare-seeking often imagined by critics of humane housing policy. (Evidence suggests that moves do not aggregate to a net change in regional homeless populations.) Rather, a strong effect on homelessness is seen from migration of the wealthy, who drive higher rent prices in desirable areas and ultimately displace locals; in Los Angeles, for example, a 5 percent increase in rent corresponds to 2,000 more homeless people in the city.

The only real solution, as everyone knows, is more available housing stock. In the limited and paid-for view of Denver’s administrative caste, this means serving up subsidies to private developers — a strategy that has made the latter wealthy but has patently failed to adequately house the city.

One can hardly blame the Broughs of the race for decades of failed policy. It’s true, as a top aide to Mayor Hickenlooper and longtime head of the Denver business lobby, Brough’s fingerprints are all over our current housing situation. But without a nationwide buildup of housing supply, migrations of citizens (be they evictees or gentrifiers) will hold even the best-intended mayoral candidates hostage. National intervention in the housing market has been capped throughout the 21st century by the Faircloth amendment, and Section 8 vouchers are notoriously incapable of raising more housing stock, or even providing shelter from violent market forces.

Federal action to prohibit rent-seeking cabals or build more public housing being seen as less politically feasible than a local persecution of those forced to live in public, we find ourselves here: a gaggle of would-be mayors climbing over each other to politely assure businesses and campaign donors that the homeless will vanish from the streets — via prison, if necessary.

Determining which uninspiring, cop-happy Democrat will administrate this mess going forward is the wearisome task of the Denver electorate. Perhaps those voters would do well to remember that, at a median income of $41,000 and an average one-bedroom rent around $22,000 a year, they are much closer to being homeless than they are to being former Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce president Kelly Brough.

Native Denverite Bailey Polonsky spent the past five years in Berlin, where those experiencing homelessness receive direct rental funding. He’s back in Denver and working as a technical writer.

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