Catch 22 in the People's Republic

“I have to sleep. I go where no one sees me. I get up before it’s light. I do the best I can not to be a violator. But if I choose to stay here, I have to break the law.”

 —Mike Fitzgerald, homeless recipient of six camping tickets

By Tom deMers

When you ask Boulder city councilwoman KC Becker about the tickets given to Boulder’s outdoor residents, aka rough sleepers, she mentions the 10-year plan to end homelessness. It’s a kind of mantra for city officials. Becker calls it a “systemic solution for the long term.”  Okay, but what about years 1-9? How about tonight? “We have a camping ordinance because we have to decide on the best use of our resources,” she says, “in order to keep the city successful. You can be led by your compassionate part or you can focus on permanent housing solutions like Housing First.”

Listening to Becker at the University of Colorado’s law school one evening in April, I wondered why we couldn’t do both. Why we insist on waking rough sleepers with a flashlight and a $100 ticket, all the while planning for Nirvana down the road? Some strange disconnect between the punitive present and the redemptive future. Why not, I wondered, phase the 10-year plan in now as Boulder shelters are closing for the season and a few hundred men and women are forced to sleep rough and break the law? In total, according to the most recent Point in Time survey conducted in Boulder, there are 914 homeless men, women and children in Boulder county on any given night. Where are they all supposed to go?

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Unavoidable Acts of Survival

By Tom deMers

The headline on the morning paper read, “Man [with] panties on his head picked up for begging nude” (Daily Camera 5/14/10). 

Impressive. BP spends millions to punch a hole in the ocean floor and gets big publicity from an oil spill, but here is a homeless guy making a splash of his own with nothing but a pair of women’s thong underwear, earning a buck. In Boulder, even the homeless share in the creativity and entrepreneurial zing.

And they do it on very little sleep. That’s the reason I was heading to Boulder that same day, joining a homeless sleep out smack in the middle of town on May 15, right next to city council headquarters, the same headquarters that had outlawed sleep on city property. Sleep during the day, okay. Sleep at night, no way.

City officials would disagree. Sleep is fine, they say; camping is the problem. Camping with tents, sleeping bags, blankets, ground cloths, anything that could be construed as “shelter;” shelter defined in the municipal ordinance to include, “without limitation, any cover or protection from elements other than clothing.”

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