Boulder City Council talks homelessness policy, learns of location for day services center

Apr. 13—The Boulder City Council spent the bulk of its Thursday evening study session discussing city and county homelessness policies and programs, including successes, challenges, and possible future actions.

One of the major announcements of the evening centered around a new homeless day services center that will likely be opened in the city later this year. Kurt Firnhaber, director of Boulder Housing and Human Services, announced that the city has found a location for the new center in a vacant one-story office building at 1844 Folsom St.

According to a city news release, the city plans to use the location for the day services center for the next 18-24 months, then later redevelop the center into a larger facility with approximately 50 apartments for permanent supportive housing. However, Firnhaber said at the meeting that the project will likely be expensive.

"We at the department are used to making such investments in the community around affordable housing," Firnhaber stated. "We will likely be requesting from council about $4 to $5 million of general fund money" in the 2024 budget to fund the new facility.

Council members heard presentations on three different topics: single adult homelessness, family homelessness strategy, and Boulder's Safe and Managed Public Spaces (SAMPS) program.

Firnhaber opened the first presentation on adult homelessness with a discussion of some of the city's and county's successes — more than 1,800 individuals have exited homelessness since 2017; and in 2023 alone, more than $12 million in state grant funding has been solicited.

The presentation outlined some of the essential components of Boulder's homelessness strategy. The city's strategy has six key pillars: expanding pathways to permanent housing, supporting access to public information, supporting access to basic services, creating safe and welcoming public spaces, supporting best practices and data-driven results, and expanding access to programs to reduce or prevent homelessness.

Countywide, the Homeless Solutions for Boulder County (HSBC) program is a collaboration between government entities and nonprofits to provide services and support to unhoused individuals. The program, which includes a Coordinated Entry (CE) process for individuals seeking services, aims to "assist people in moving out of homelessness and into housing in the most efficient ways possible," according to the program website. Of the 1,108 individuals screened through CE in Boulder County in 2022, 339 of them exited homelessness, leading to a 30% success rate which, according to a memo, "compares favorably to most other counties."

Heidi Grove, systems manager for HSBC, said HSBC is "very much in alignment" with a federal plan to end homelessness. This federal plan, proposed by the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) in December of last year, aims to reduce homelessness by 25% by the end of 2025.

The presentation also discussed gaps in care, such as the lack of behavioral health services for people who need them. A Behavioral Health Roadmap team has identified several focus areas to prioritize going forward, including suicide prevention and response, harm reduction, substance use and recovery, criminal justice and equitable access.

In addition, the county plans to implement a new Building Home program to provide peer support and housing retention support and conduct a July 2023 point-in-time (PIT) count to assess the number of unhoused residents in Boulder.

The biggest challenge ahead, several of those present at the meeting acknowledged, is the sheer scope of homelessness in Boulder County.

"We do have so many initiatives underway and so many positive things going on," Mayor Aaron Brockett said during the meeting. "But with a walk or bike ride through town, we know that the resources and options available are not meeting the need of unsheltered homelessness in our community right now."

Firnhaber responded by saying the city doesn't have the resources needed to support all these individuals, saying that even if all of the available housing in Boulder were devoted to housing unhoused people, it still wouldn't be enough.

"I don't think any city can actually solve the homelessness challenge," Firnhaber said, adding that national and regional strategies are especially important for that reason.

But some on council disagreed that the city lacks the resources to address homelessness and poverty.

"We are doing so much, but there are still so many people who are experiencing homelessness and living on the edge," Councilmember Nicole Speer said during the meeting. "I really disagree that we don't have the resources that we need to solve the homelessness and poverty challenges that we're facing. ... We have the wealth, we have the ability to do better."

A second presentation discussed how family homelessness can be less visible than adult individual homelessness, so there may be less public awareness of the issue compared to adult homelessness. Julie Van Domelen, executive director of Emergency Family Assistance Association (EFAA), noted that compared to single adult homelessness, family homelessness can have different causes, such as domestic violence, separation, divorce or death of a family member. Family homelessness also tends to be episodic rather than chronic, Van Domelen said, and most unhoused families in Boulder were people already living here.

In Boulder, according to a chart during the presentation, Boulder's self-sufficiency standard for a family — the amount of money needed to cover basic expenses — is nearly $100,000 per year. One parent working full-time at minimum wage would not come close to that number.

Another chart showed that 749 BVSD students from September 2022 to the present date have experienced homelessness. Children also face additional physical, behavioral and mental health problems when they're unhoused, and the additional stress from living in an unstable situation can lead to them becoming isolated from community and support networks as well as making it harder for them to break out of the cycle of poverty.

There are strategies and resources available for families, such as hoteling — believed to be a safer option for children than shelters — transitional housing, and financial assistance. But some of these aids lack the resources to help people in need. According to a memo, Boulder's Eviction Prevention and Rental Assistance Services program (EPRAS), launched in 2021, has given out $160,000 in assistance to 241 unique clients in 2023 alone. Resources that have been allocated for the whole year are rapidly dwindling.

Elizabeth Crowe, deputy director of Housing and Human Services, said the need for the program is "vastly outpacing the resources we have available" and that the problem of family homelessness "is getting far worse very quickly," particularly in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Finally, a presentation on the SAMPS program began by acknowledging that SAMPS is not a strategy to resolve the underlying issue of homelessness, but addresses some of the "symptoms" or impacts of homelessness in the community, such as ensuring that public spaces are accessible to all and that unhoused people are connected with needed services.

The SAMPS team, which was established in 2021, includes internal operations and clean-up crews, urban park rangers, downtown ambassadors, BTHERE outreach, dedicated Boulder police support, data, analytics, legal and communications.

Boulder Police Chief Maris Herold pointed to trends in crime rates, saying that while encampment areas encompass 10% of Boulder's geography, these areas account for 30% of city's crime, though it's not clear how much of this crime is made up of camping violations. Herold also said individuals in encampment clusters "responsible for approximately 50% of all warrants" in Boulder.

Joe Taddeucci, City of Boulder Utilities Director, spoke about how encampment cleanups have been trending upward over time and that cleanup efforts are prioritized according to certain criteria, such as reports of crime or violence and proximity to schools.

The council also planned to devote some time to talking about topics of interest for a joint meeting with the Boulder County Commissioners scheduled for Tuesday, but council members had not yet begun discussing the matter before the Camera's publishing deadline.