Project 2025 challenges the housing-first approach to homelessness. Boulder leaders weigh in

Alexis Kenyon: Nicole, I want to start with you. Since the Supreme Court case ruling, have you noticed any shift in how conversations are happening regarding homeless encampment sweeps, clearing them, or actual city policies?

Nicole Speer: Thank you for the question. There really hasn’t been an impact on the city’s approach toward homelessness and camping since the court decision.

What I am hearing from some community members, who often write to us with concerns about the encampments they see along the bike paths and around town, is they’re wondering why encampment cleanups have not increased, why we still have the 72-hour notice period.

We do that because there are laws about taking people’s things in this country. Giving notice allows people a bit of time, presumably, to think about that. I don’t think this is related to the Grants Pass case, and I don’t expect it to change anytime soon.

Alexis Kenyon: So to Chad and Spencer, have you heard conversations change, or how do you think it’s affected your work?

Chad Molter: The folks that we serve—and I should say, our pantry is unusual in that we let unhoused people shop and use our pantry, so it’s about 20 percent of who we serve, and a lot of them are unsheltered—haven’t really changed their narrative. It’s a struggle; it’s a somewhat tenuous existence, and this doesn’t really affect that.

It is interesting to me how divisive the subject of encampments is. I ride the Goose Creek path every day to work, and, to me, it’s a mirror. What I see out there is a mirror of where we’re at as a society. I also understand the defensiveness when homelessness is so visible.

Sociologically, it’s fascinating how hard it is for people to think outside their own experience. These are people who are just very unlucky. They’re not different from us in any other way, yet they’re living in this way that most of us would deem kind of unacceptable. I think we need to do better, and I see reminders that we need to do better every day on my way to work.

Alexis Kenyon: I’m curious, how do all of you feel about encampment sweeps? What are your personal takes?

Nicole Speer: I’m happy to start on this one. Personally, I do not like them at all. I think that there is a significant amount of evidence out there that they actively harm the public health of our unhoused populations. I do not feel that they are an effective use of resources. They are quite costly.

This is my personal opinion. My colleague Lauren Folkerts and I on council have repeated these talking points for years, and we do not have a majority of people who feel similarly.

It’s a really hard problem, and I completely understand that no one wants people sleeping outside and living in our public spaces. That’s a terrible situation for everyone in our community and a sign of all the societal failings that we have at this moment in 2024.

But I personally do not feel that they are an effective use of resources. I think that anything that does not take people to housing is not an effective use of resources.

Fundamentally, when I believe that housing is a human right, and when we are not providing sufficient housing—it shouldn’t just be the city’s job, it’s everyone’s job—when we are not providing enough housing for the people in our community, we should not do these traumatic displacements that are removing people from connections to services, from any semblance of stability in their lives, and really creating a lot more trauma for the entire community.

Spencer Downing: You asked how we feel about clearing encampments. I mean, I’m sure there’s got to be somebody out there who feels really good about that, but I’ve never met that person. Even people who support clearing encampments feel like it’s an unfortunate and necessary thing to do.

Where I would disagree with many of those folks is on how effective that tool is. To my mind, even if you don’t care about the human beings, it’s proving to be an ineffective tool.

And at the same time, I work closely with folks who are having to make those decisions, and they are responding to what some people feel is a real pain. Part of that real pain is the society we live in, where we don’t want to see the pain of the choices we’ve made as a society. We don’t want to see poverty. We don’t want to see the results of choices we make as a country—please hide that from us and put it somewhere else.

And at the same time, clearing an encampment does not make the people or the problem actually disappear. It’s a tool that I find ineffective, and it’s painful to watch. And even if it’s painful to watch, it’s really painful if I think about money, that we’re spending money on something that may not be providing what we want it to provide.

Nicole Speer: One of the things that strikes me about the displacements and the harm they do just from a public health perspective, is the rates of homelessness in this country are near somewhere between 500,000 and a million people who are living outside and experiencing homelessness. That is in the similar category as the rates of heart disease and stroke and the number of deaths that we have.

If we had something that was increasing the number of heart attacks or the number of strokes by 15 to 25 percent over the entire population, I have a feeling that many of us would react to that and say, “Wow, no, let’s not do that,” because there may come a time where I have a heart attack or a stroke, and boy, I would rather not have that increased mortality for the population.

I think about that with encampments, that it really is impacting the entire population of homelessness and dramatically reducing their mortality rates.

Thinking about homelessness as we think about other types of public health problems is a really important shift we need to start making as a community. It is something that can impact any of us; we are all one or two emergencies away from losing everything. If we are letting anyone fall through the cracks within our community, we are all at risk.

I think that is part of the emotional reaction that many of us have to seeing people who are homeless. We want to think it can’t happen to us, but the reality is that it can. And until we set up systems that prevent that from happening to anybody, we are all at risk.

Alexis Kenyon: Recently, there was an article in the Denver Gazette about how Douglas County has solved homelessness. It talks about how their point-in-time count had only, I believe, six people during their last count. The Douglas County Sheriff attributed this to supportive services and not a housing-first policy.

I felt like I was reading an article from 25 years ago, honestly. Spencer and I were recently talking about how there’s actually a directed part of the Project 2025 outline that is explicitly anti-housing-first. I felt like that really aligned with that article because it was such a shift away from the way that we’ve been talking about housing and housing-first for the last 10 years, at least.

So I’m curious, what do you all think about this politicization of policy?

Chad Molter: This is something that’s been with us for a long time, and it’s not going to go away. Pathologizing people that are experiencing homelessness and saying that if we just fix them, then this problem will go away.

I mean, this approach, I hear this all the time, and from many years working with people experiencing homelessness, they are living day to day, they are getting their needs met, and this is not—trying to bring mental health care and substance abuse care and physical health care even to folks who are living in kind of fight or flight—it’s very difficult to do.

So, this idea that we just need to fix what’s wrong with these people and then they will become housed is something that I’ve heard for a long time. It’s not going to go away, but it has never worked.

Spencer Downing: Alexis, your question touches on the politics of our society rather than just homelessness. There’s a narrative suggesting that because housing-first has been around for a decade or two and homelessness still exists, it must not be working. This ignores how much we’ve invested in implementing housing-first and how much housing we actually have devoted to solving homelessness, and the answer is not enough.

Here in Boulder County, there’s almost twice as much money going into mortgage support when people get claims on their taxes versus what we support for people who don’t have resources. But what also happens is the narrative of homelessness as an individual choice and individual problem takes away from a narrative that focuses on systemic issues.

The people who wrote Project 2025, in the case of HUD, it’s Ben Carson, who literally says housing-first is a far-left ideology. That is the narrative they embrace, which fits into a larger narrative of personal responsibility rather than societal responsibility.

Nicole Speer: Absolutely. Just to build on that a little more, Project 2025 is essentially a cookbook for white Christian nationalism and authoritarianism. Authoritarianism depends on separating us. It depends on creating this environment of individualism and punishing those who cannot or will not conform, who will not fall in line with that system.

I think about this in regards to homelessness policy and the idea that people should just pick themselves up by their bootstraps and get back to what we’re doing—working like the rest of us and fitting right into this system.

That is why rejecting the housing-first policy is something that the far right is very interested in, because it puts the focus back on the individual. The way you combat authoritarianism is by building community, by coming together. The more they can advance these policies that are focused on trying to separate us to do for us to categorize ourselves into who is good and who is not based on how well they’re conforming, the more you build community, the stronger we all are, and the more effectively we are going to combat rising authoritarianism and everything that is in the Project 2025 playbook.

Alexis Kenyon: I know that all three of you have worked in homelessness for a long time, and some of you for more than a decade. Is that right? I’m curious, how has the conversation shifted since you started working in this area?

Chad Molter: When I started working in homeless services back in 2009, there was more emphasis on sheltering as the solution. The conversation shifted away from emergency services over time. Just looking back to the beginning of the modern era of homelessness in the ’80s, the main tool in our toolbelt was sheltering. What has happened is homelessness has just gotten worse.

Organizations like All Roads, formerly the Boulder Shelter, began to shift to a housing-focused approach, as did many other homeless service organizations. We realized that the one tool that could address mental health, physical health, and substance abuse issues was housing, and we needed to focus on putting more resources into that. That’s the biggest shift I’ve seen.

Spencer Downing: Since Chad mentioned the name change of the organization I work with, I think that exemplifies how the conversation has shifted. We changed from Boulder Shelter for the Homeless to All Roads to reflect an emphasis on solutions. We like to think of All Roads as exemplifying that there are many roads that lead people into homelessness, but there are also multiple roads to get out of homelessness. All roads, for us, really move toward housing.

Last night, we had a full shelter. At the same time, we had more people that our organization supports in housing than we had in the shelter. That’s thanks to the work of the All Roads staff, who help people maintain their housing. We hope to double the number of people housed within the next two years.

I started thinking about homelessness by handing out food and socks on the street, wondering how I could hand out more. Now, we’re thinking about how to ensure a person is in their own home—not more comfortable on the street but comfortable in their own space.

That’s a shift in my thinking and in the thinking of the organizations I work with, and that’s a shift in the kind of organizations that I’m working with now.

Alexis Kenyon: You said double? Can you clarify what you mean?

Spencer Downing: That’s our hope. We’ve got about 190 people that we regularly work with in housing. We hope by October 1st, there’s going to be a leasing up in a new building called Zinnia in Longmont that we’re excited to be partnering with Element as a developer and the city of Longmont, similar to a building called Bluebird here in Boulder.

In Bluebird, there’s 40 people who were homeless a year ago, but since January, that building has been filled with people who used to be homeless and aren’t. We’re hoping to do that with another 55. So that number goes from 190 to 245. We’re hoping that we’re going to be able to actively, thanks to the city of Boulder, have another 30 people come out of homelessness, which is tied to the day service center that started up.

Everything that we do, everything that the city of Boulder is doing, everything that Boulder County is doing is increasingly focused on not how do we help people become more comfortable in homelessness, but how do we help people? What can we do to get people into housing and remain sustainably housed? That’s our emphasis.

So when you talk about how the conversation has shifted in organizations that I worked with, I think where Chad probably worked in 2009, it was, what can we do to meet the immediate needs? Now we’re saying, what can we do to make the sustainable solutions?

Alexis: Nicole, what about you?

Nicole Speer: From my observation, the first time that I really encountered homelessness was when I was a teenager growing up in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. There were places that you would go downtown and see people who were living on the streets and experiencing homelessness.

At that time, it seemed like most of what people were dealing with after prolonged time on the streets was addictions around alcohol and heroin.

In the early 2010s, I was working down at Anschutz for a bit, doing research on people who were using methamphetamine and experiencing homelessness and living on the streets.

There has been this evolution over the years to more and more dangerous and more addictive drugs. The drugs that people are using now feel like they are so much stronger and so much more dangerous than anything that we’ve ever seen before.

It seems like there has been an increase in the number of overdoses. I think the longer that people are out on the street once they fall into homelessness, the more likely it is that they will turn to drugs, and the things that are out there.

As humans, and really all animals, we tend to turn to drugs when we do not have sufficient rewards in our lives and when our basic needs are not being met in other ways, as an escape route. I think about this a lot in some of the research that I was involved in at Anschutz, which was around contingency management and how we can help people overcome addictions through providing different kinds of rewards, like paying people to not use drugs to stay sober. It is a highly effective treatment. It’s taking advantage of a very basic reward system in the brain, and it really does lead to successful outcomes.

But I think the longer we wait, the harder these drugs get to overcome, the more dangerous they get for. The harder the situation is, the harder it is to treat people’s addiction once they get into homelessness.

I just want to emphasize, because I think this point can often get lost, it is not typically mental health issues or addiction that lead to homelessness. It is a lack of ability to afford housing. But the longer that people are in these highly stressful and traumatic situations, the more likely it is they’re going to turn to drugs.

The drugs that are out there right now are, I think, more dangerous than anything we’ve ever seen, and that’s an issue that we really need to address. This is where focusing on prevention, keeping people from falling into homelessness in the first place, doesn’t just help in terms of how many people are living on our streets. It also helps in terms of how many people are then needing addiction treatment and other mental health services.

Alexis Kenyon: I’m curious, everybody says part of the problem with homelessness is that it is hyperlocal, but it’s also a national problem, and these problems cannot be contained in just one or solved within one city.

How does having a city like Aurora right down the road that does not use a housing-first policy and does not believe in this housing-first policy affect Boulder’s ability to accomplish what it’s trying to accomplish when it comes to supporting and solving homelessness within the city?

Nicole Speer: I mean, it makes it challenging, right? But like everything in the community, there are always differing perspectives on how—if we figure out what the problem is, how we can resolve it.

I think this is part of the messiness of city government and local government, figuring out how we work together, how we take people’s perspectives and also take data and also use the values that we hold as a community in order to solve some of those problems.

I think there are so many communities along the Front Range that are trying many different types of solutions. But I think everybody generally agrees that housing-first is the way to go.

I do not believe that services attract people to communities. I don’t think that we have people moving from all over the country to Colorado to take advantage of our homelessness services.

There is a lot of movement along the Front Range, and I think that accounts for some of the entry and exit into our community that we see. But also the last time that I looked at this number, the number of people in Colorado who are experiencing homelessness who come from Colorado is actually larger than the people in the city who are housed.

We have more people moving here who are housed than people who are unhoused. So those—I don’t know if that makes sense as I was explaining it.

I think it is a tricky part of government. But I really appreciate that as a city overall we are moving toward using a more evidence-based perspective in our decision-making and not just reacting to emotions or the loudest voices, regardless of what their perspectives are.