Colorado's solution to chronic homelessness

Solid Ground, a 40-unit supportive housing apartment complex, seen June 4, 2024, in Lakewood. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

From The Colorado Sun

When Solid Ground Apartments opens next week in Lakewood, it comes with proof of concept — giving people who are homeless a place to live, no strings attached, not only changes their lives but can save public money.

The new 40-unit complex is the first permanent supportive housing project in Colorado to copy Sanderson Apartments, which welcomed its first residents in 2017 as a national model in solving homelessness.

Both projects are run by community mental health centers and both invite people who are living outside — the ones burning through taxpayer dollars as they cycle in and out of jail, detox and hospital emergency rooms — to move directly into their own apartments.

A third, similar project is also in the works, set to open next spring. At the same time Jefferson Center for Mental Health prepares to welcome its first residents at Solid Ground, Denver’s mental health center, WellPower, announced it is breaking ground on a 60-unit project called Sheridan on 10th.

Solid Ground, as well as WellPower’s Sheridan on 10th, will have on-site mental health services, peer support specialists and case managers, all of which are available to residents but not required. Residents don’t have to have jobs and it’s OK if they have criminal records or are not sober or in recovery. Still, the “low-barrier” apartments have some rules — residents cannot cook illegal drugs on site, or start a fire to keep warm in the courtyard, or commit violent acts.

It’s not a step-up program intended to push people toward jobs and finding their own, independent apartments. The housing is available to them for as long as they want to stay.

“It means that people have a permanent home from the first day they move in,” Kuenzler said.

Both new buildings are designed for people who have grown used to sleeping outdoors, which means light-filled rooms, an abundance of plants, no dark hallways and plenty of outdoor space. At Solid Ground, residents can bring their dogs, and there is a community barbecue for people to use. The laundry room was strategically placed in a corner of the building so it has two walls with windows looking outside, creating a bright, airy feeling uncommon for a typical laundromat.

“We have heard time and again that laundry rooms are triggering areas,” said Taylor Clepper, Jefferson Center’s director of navigation and housing services and project manager for the complex. People who are homeless have been assaulted in laundromats, gotten into altercations about machines and belongings, and had their tent, cart or other belongings stolen outside while they were doing laundry.

The entire building is structured to make people feel comfortable and safe, in the hope that it will lead to recovery from mental health issues and substance use.

“There is a kind of dichotomy on the streets,” Clepper said. “There is safety that is created. There are groups, communities that form and really create safety for individuals and that’s where they feel safest. Conversely, there is a lot of trauma that happens on the streets. It’s a both-and situation, and we are trying to meet people where they are.”

“Trauma-informed” furniture was arriving at Sold Ground this week, including beds made for people accustomed to sleeping on the hard ground. Instead of wooden slats under the mattress, the beds have a wooden platform so people can remove the mattress and sleep directly on the wood.

Sleeping inside “feels very different than not having four walls around you or feeling the sun come up over your head,” Clepper said. The couches are narrow by design, to encourage people to try sleeping in their beds. Sleeping in the courtyard will not be encouraged, but it isn’t a deal-breaker. Overnight guests are allowed, but with restrictions, because it’s typically not the resident but the resident’s friends that lead to evictions, Clepper said.

Case managers will be on site, 24-7.

“We are going to work on housing first and then we will work on the rest,” Clepper said. “The goal is not to kick people out if there is a safe way to work with you. This is low-barrier housing and the intention is to keep them housed.”

There is evidence, based on years of studying and following up with the residents of Sanderson Apartments in Denver, that it works.

The Urban Institute tracked people’s usage of emergency services, hospital stays and the criminal justice system before and after moving into Sanderson.

The national think tank found that the first 250 residents had cost the government a total of $7.3 million per year when they lived outside and in shelters. After they were housed, researchers found a 40% reduction in arrests, a 30% reduction in jail stays, a 65% decrease in detox services and a 40% drop in emergency department visits.

The reductions made up for half of the cost of the program, which was started with $8.6 million from eight private investors as well as local housing resources.

The institute’s research also found that 86% of people in the program were still housed after one year, and 77% were still housed after three years.

The 60 units at Sanderson Apartments were originally filled through Denver’s “social impact bond,” a public-private partnership that included selecting the highest-users of the health care and criminal justice systems and inviting them to move in. Private companies loaned money to the mental health center and the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless to build the complex, and the city paid them back with the savings created through decreased arrests, jail time, detox and emergency room visits.

The Urban Institute said its findings about Sanderson Apartments “disrupt the false narratives that homelessness is an unsolvable problem and that people who experience chronic homelessness choose to live on the street.” Researchers called for expanding supportive housing, arguing it could “end homelessness, break the homelessness-jail cycle.”

All the construction, funded largely by tax credits and grants, would make it seem that Colorado has turned a corner in how it gets its chronically homeless population off the streets. Have the years since the COVID pandemic, when homelessness was more visible and entrenched than ever, convinced people that government-funded, permanent housing is the solution?

“I would love to say yes to that,” said Kiara Kuenzler, president and CEO of Jefferson Center. But “I think there is still a lot of stigma, and sometimes the more visible folks without houses are in communities, the more that people can stigmatize and want to push away what is uncomfortable.”

Bringing neighbors and the public in general around to the idea is “requiring a lot more dialogue — even more dialogue now than when homelessness was less visible.”

Kuenzler often tells skeptics that people without housing are going to live in their neighborhoods anyway, so “whether they are in a tent or whether they are in an apartment with wraparound services really makes a difference.”

Dairy farms still draining the Colorado river dry

[Delia Johnson/Cronkite News]
The report warns that factory farming is not only accelerating our climate crisis,

but the industry will also need 'more and more water' in the future,

 thanks to extreme heat and other weather changes fueled by the climate crisis.

From The Tucson Sentinel

A new report warns that a vital U.S. waterway depended upon by more than 40 million people is facing severe decline, as the Colorado River is being ‘drained dry.’ Agriculture is largely to blame for the “water crisis” in the western U.S., particularly industrial meat and crops raised to feed livestock, says Food and Water Watch, the environmental advocacy group responsible for the new findings.

Factory farming fuels Colorado River crisis

Last year, a study found that the U.S. west was facing the worst drought it had seen in 1,200 years. Since then, the extremely dry conditions have modestly improved — especially after unusually heavy rains hit California — but the problem of water scarcity remains. And the stakes are high — Colorado River provides drinking water to seven U.S. states and two Mexican states, and two reservoirs fed by the Colorado River — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — play an important role in the nation’s power grid.

Despite being the largest drain on the river, factory farming hasn’t been held accountable. “Huge agribusinesses remain unphased by this crisis, continuing to abuse water supplies to feed animals on factory farms that, in turn, worsen the climate crisis and associated drought,” write the authors of the report. The Colorado River Basin is “Ground Zero” for the industry’s water and climate harms, according to the nonprofit, and 218 million gallons of water are used daily from the basin in order to feed and water 2.5 million dairy cows.

Alfalfa also requires a massive amount of water from the river. In 2022, over 2 trillion gallons were used for 2.7 million acres of land for alfalfa crops. For comparison, just .63 trillion represents all of the indoor household water needs for Basin residents, according to the report. And alfalfa is largely grown just to feed meat and dairy farm animals. In April, Vox explored which crops account for the most water from the Colorado River, concluding that 70 percent went to alfalfa, hay, grasses and corn ultimately used in cattle feed on beef and dairy farms. Other crops, such as soy, wheat and barley, may also be grown and used for feeding livestock in the region.

The way we eat creates a disastrous climate cycle

States along the river’s basin exceed the national average for irrigation water usage by 70 percent, finds Food and Water Watch, and this use is creating a vicious cycle. The report warns that factory farming is not only accelerating our climate crisis, but the industry will also need “more and more water” in the future thanks to extreme heat and other weather changes fueled by the climate crisis.

Research published in 2020 estimates that the Colorado River’s flow declines by over 9 percent with every degree Celsius that the Earth’s temperature rises, a loss that is too high to be countered by expected increases in precipitation.

States take action to address water crisis, but is it enough?

Earlier this year, Politico called the uphill battle to reduce usage of the Colorado River “the first climate brawl” faced by President Joe Biden. In May, three river basin states agreed to, in total, reduce their use of water from the river by 13 percent, with Arizona, California and Nevada farmers and communities receiving $1.2 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funding in return for taking steps to conserve water.

Taking action to limit states’ use of the river is complicated, however. For example, Southern California’s Imperial Valley and its approximately 400 farms account for the largest percentage used, reports the Washington Post, and here there are farmers who “have some of the oldest legal rights to that water, dating back more than a century” — older than the Bureau of Reclamation, established in 1902 and now responsible for overseeing the use of the Colorado River.

Indigenous communities are greatly impacted by the river as well and, as the report points out, have inhabited the surrounding land since before the passing of federal and state laws. Despite their senior water rights in some cases, tribes have been largely left out of talks and decisions when it comes to the river. “This has led to a patchwork of rights across the basin, where some tribes have officially quantified water rights while others are still working to achieve them,” reads the report.

‘A history of bad policy’

To Food and Water Watch, though, it is crucial that “a history of bad policy” is now corrected — and the agreement between these states and the Biden administration does not go far enough.

The agreement lasts through the year 2026 and is therefore “not a permanent solution,” write the authors of the report. “The proposal also does not cut nearly enough water to restore the Colorado River — states need to cut four times as much annually for the reservoirs to recover.” Food and Water Watch is calling for both state and federal regulation of water usage, along with aid for small-scale farmers to facilitate their transition to more sustainable practices.

Colorado sues to recover cost of climate crisis

 From The Guardian

More than a decade after the Fourmile Canyon blaze drove even the firefighters out of Gold Hill, blackened hillsides and scorched trees attest to the Colorado mountain town’s close shave with destruction.

“Because of the wind and the dryness, it took off,” said Chris Finn, who volunteers as the town’s fire chief when he’s not running the local inn. “That day in 2010, I felt that my business and my house might not be here any more.”

Gold Hill’s few hundred residents fled as the fire moved along the ridge above a town that began life as a mining camp during the 1859 gold rush. The firefighters followed when they could not stop the flames swallowing scores of homes.

By the time it was extinguished, the Fourmile blaze had destroyed 169 houses, the most by any wildfire in Colorado history. But that record was broken less than two years later, and then again within days, as the pace of fires picked up.

Gold Hill was once again surrounded by flames last year, which saw a record number of wildfires in Colorado. Now, Finn is bracing for another season of record-breaking fires.

“I’ve lived up here my whole life. You can see the change in the weather,” said Finn.

The 65-year-old fire chief paused in the garden of his modest wooden house.

“I hope that my grandson can be sitting here when he’s my age,” he said.

Finn’s nagging fear that Gold Hill is living on borrowed time is replicated across western states ravaged by some of the most intense wildfires in modern American history. But angst about the immediate threat is accompanied by increasingly urgent questions for communities on the frontline of the climate crisis about the long-term financial cost of survival – who should foot the bill?

Gold Hill has received a state grant to thin out the forest around the town in the hope of slowing if not stopping future fires. But that is a fraction of the cost that the surrounding county says it will take to deal with the impact of global heating.

Boulder county estimates it will cost taxpayers $100m over the next three decades just to adapt transport and drainage systems to the climate crisis, and reduce the risk from wildfires.

The county government says the bill should be paid by those who drove the crisis – the oil companies that spent decades covering up and misrepresenting the warnings from climate scientists. It is suing the US’s largest oil firm, ExxonMobil, and Suncor, a Canadian company with its US headquarters in Colorado, to require that they “use their vast profits to pay their fair share of what it will cost a community to deal with the problem the companies created”.

Boulder county, alongside similar lawsuits by the city of Boulder and San Miguel county in the south-west of the state, accuse the companies of deceptive trade practices and consumer fraud because their own scientists warned them of the dangers of burning of fossil fuels but the firms suppressed evidence of a growing climate crisis. The lawsuits also claim that as the climate emergency escalated, companies funded front groups to question the science in order to keep selling oil.

“It is far more difficult to change it now than it would have been if the companies had been honest about what they knew 30 or 50 years ago,” said Marco Simons, general counsel for Earth Rights International, which is handling the lawsuit for the county. “That is probably the biggest tragedy here. Communities in this country and around the world were essentially robbed of their options.”

Boulder county’s lawsuit contends that annual temperatures in Colorado will rise between 3.5F and 6.5F by 2050 and imperil the state’s economy, including farming and the ski industry.

Extremes of weather are already melting the mountain snowpack, causing increased evaporation and a shortfall in the amount of water flowing down the region’s most important river, the Colorado, which supplies drinking water to the state’s largest cities and irrigation all the way to California and Arizona.

Micah Parkin, founder of an environmental coalition, 350 Colorado, moved to Boulder from New Orleans after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

“We decided to move to higher ground knowing hurricanes are getting more intense, sea levels are rising,” she said.

That criticism stings in climate-conscious Boulder and other high-income communities that are susceptible to charges of hypocrisy in part because areas of Colorado have some of the highest carbon footprints in the country from heating and cooling larger than average homes.

Max Boykoff, a professor in the environmental studies department at the University of Colorado Boulder, acknowledged the problem, alongside the popularity of high fuel consumption vehicles. But he said that should not be used by the oil companies to absolve themselves of responsibility for a crisis they have played a leading part in creating.

“These lawsuits are one of the tools to hold both these companies accountable,” he said.

Finn said there was no doubt that people moving into the mountains have contributed to the damage from wildfires in part by stopping the natural processes of thinning out the forest.

But the Gold Hill fire chief said the climate crisis was “a big part” of the surging heat and number of fires, and that corporate campaigns to deny the warnings from scientists played an important role.

“The science has been there for years. The problem is that you have half the population who don’t want to believe in science because it means they couldn’t make as much money,” he said.

This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.

Burned buses at the Colorado Mountain Ranch in the historic town of Gold Hill in the Fourmile Canyon fire area in Boulder, Colorado, attest to the effects of a devastating wildfire, Photograph: Craig F Walker/Denver Post/Getty Images

Aside from moral reasons, it would be extremely unwise to invest in or lend to oil/coal businesses (mines, power stations, refineries, oil wells .... ), because

• They are going to be sued for the lies they told about climate change, how they funded climate-denialist "think tanks".
• They have lost the social licence to operate.  No one is going to care that they disappear.  No one is going to feel sorry for them.
• Renewables are far cheaper than coal, and in gas-importing countries, than gas too.  This will inexorably and inevitably shrink the market for fossil fuels.
• EV sales are doubling and tripling every year.  As EVs increase in world vehicle fleets, oil demand is going to plummet.
• EVs will provide so much storage that they will stabilise the grid, reducing the demand for peaking gas.
• Even air travel is starting to shift, with electric aeroplanes enter the mainstream and green jetfuel just around the corner.

They will go bankrupt.  Good.