Part I: The Life
At 11 a.m. on a brisk November morning, a woman sits on the sidewalk with her back against the Colorado Bookstore on the Hill. She has books sprawled around her, but she is not a customer. She draws intently in a notebook; a set of bags sits to her left. She politely greets the pedestrians walking by.
Her name is Gina Marinelli, and she is homeless. I watch her from the window of the Starbucks across the street, preparing to go and speak to her. I walk out the door and a little ways up the sidewalk, trying not to look conspicuous. I cross the street toward her; before I can say hello, she greets me. I tell her I’m a student journalist, and she doesn’t flinch.
“Well sit down! So we can speak to you down here,” Gina says. Further to her left sits a young man named Alex, who recently got out of college. Their dog walks contently around them. Alex looks like any other 20-something man you might see walking around the hill or campus, save for his bare feet; Gina, 55, is thoroughly tanned and wearing faded eyeshadow. I sit down next to Gina, who carries the air of someone who doesn’t shy from talking to strangers.
“I’ve been in Boulder since the spring of 2011,” says Gina, “And primarily homeless since November 2013. But I was already in a homeless state of mind.
“I got married and the guy told me to leave,” Gina tells me. She says she chose homelessness over the “violence” she experienced in her marriage, both physical and spiritual. As the books lying around her suggest (one by 19th century poet William Blake, others on Indian spiritual teachings), Gina focuses heavily on her inner, spiritual life to maintain an inner peace amidst the daily struggle of having no home.
“The cubicles don’t present any security,” Gina says, explaining her negative view of living an employed life. She says the “nurturance of the human spirit” is what’s important in life.
I ask her how she gets by without working.
“I’m at the mercy of you. Amen,” she responds — she punctuates her strong statements with “Amens,” as if keeping track of them to herself. “We’re all brilliant. I get by on beautiful people.”
She is clearly not a stranger on this street — I hear Alex refer to her as “Mama” at one point, the way you might call someone a nickname. During the middle of our conversation, three other young adults around Alex’s age come to say hello and discuss amounts of marijuana they have. Gina marvels at a pipe Alex’s friend has, and takes a puff. She offers me the pipe, and a cigarette, as if I had been part of the group for months. I politely decline; there is no sense of judgement in the group.
Once the three kids, and later Alex, leave, I ask Gina what she sees as the most prevalent cause of homelessness around Boulder.
“Everyone falls into it their own unique way. But I want to wish this away.” Despite her comfort in her life’s spiritual aspect, she would prefer having a home. “I found the least I need is really great. A lovely bed. A washing place….what I want would be to have a kitchen, feeding people all day, always open, never closed. Amen.”
“I don’t wanna sleep under the tunnel, but I like it,” she says, optimistic. “But I see that the better nature of me would be in a bed.”
During her time of homelessness, Gina has had to endure extremely harsh conditions; more than sleeping in a tunnel and eating out of garbage cans, Gina had to go through the winter months out on the cold hard concrete. She endured a staph infection of her larynx and upper teeth (homelessness is an “incubator for a lot of disease,” she says) — all on top of the brutal cold of outdoor life.
“The fear of winter for people is real — it takes the life right out of you,” she tells me.
When people with homes hear about the conditions homeless people face, there is often a tendency to say that if they would just get jobs, none of these problems would exist. I asked Gina about such sentiments.
“When you’re a child, you’re taught to work,” she says. “One of the requirements is to look clean, and to be able to think clearly. If I don’t have any kind of home security, it’s hard for me to want to go to work, for me to pack up my bags and my clothes every night and walk. Come the snow and hail and rain, it changes you, real fast. Or being chronically ill.”
Without a place to stay in the first place, the mental and physical strain of having to trudge along on the street — worn-out, unwashed, hungry, perhaps in withdrawals from a substance abuse habit — can make it difficult to find, or keep, a job. Longer bouts of homelessness are associated more heavily with older people, who may be less able to handle the conditions.
“[Having a home] gives you the ability to feel more restorative — you communicate more when you’re stable,” Gina says.
What compounds the struggles for the transient community are the sometimes counterproductive messages and actions of institutions that are supposed to help them, such as police, hospitals, and churches.
“The people of the streets are beaten, violated, abused and misfed information about their value by the people supposed to protect them,” says Gina of some police officers. She tells me some homeless people haven’t gotten adequate care from hospitals, and that churches and shelters, while being supportive of homeless people in general, could do more to foster positivity and minimize conflict.
“The church says ‘I’m gonna take care of you,’ but if you go there, the doors are closed, there’s a schedule, they don’t like your clothes, they don’t like how you look, they don’t like your dogs. They say you’re trespassing. It’s not all-inclusive; there’s too much psychoanalysis, too much asking ‘why you’re on the street.’ I’m on the street. I’m here,” she says, matter-of-factly. “The more I go, the more I don’t like it.”
“We need social communities, not punishment-bound. See people as another ‘yourself.’ Take the punishment out of all things and see what happens. Can people do it? Yes. And do it well. I believe it.”
When it’s time for me to go, I stand up and shake Gina’s hand, and we say goodbye. As I turn and walk away, she says an “I love you” — a sincere one.
Part II: The Plan
Homelessness is no secret — we’ve all walked past the man with a sign on the street, the woman sitting on the corner with a cup outstretched, the group of people huddled together in the night, asleep, for warmth. Boulder County has responded to its homelessness problem by implementing a Ten Year Plan (TYP, first published in 2010) to address homelessness, focusing on prevention, temporary shelter and support and moving people toward permanent housing situations. The county is making progress, but it may take more effort from both local governments and individuals to fully address the problem of homelessness in Boulder county.
On a single night in January 2013, there were approximately 610,042 homeless people in the United States. This represents slight progress from 2007, when that single-day number was 671,888. Based on data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the amount of homeless people the entire U.S. population has dropped by nearly nine percent.
And while measuring the amount of homelessness in any population is a difficult and imprecise science — differing accounts from 1999 put the year-round count anywhere between 2.3 and 3.5 million people — the trend seems to be a decline in homelessness over the past few years.
In Boulder County, there were about 1,779 homeless people in a single day in 2011, out of 10,151 in the entire Metro Denver area of Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas and Jefferson counties. In 2014, the Boulder county number was 850, and the metro area number was 5,812.
Before you jump out of your seat, that doesn’t necessarily mean metro area homelessness was slashed in half — the data depends on how many people answer surveys, and less surveys were answered in 2014. Just how much that skews the data is unclear, but it is possible that the national trend toward slowly decreasing homelessness is also occurring in Boulder County.
The main reason why homelessness is so difficult to fight is that the root causes of homelessness widely vary: being unable to pay mortgage or rent, losing a job, developing a substance abuse problem, going through a relationship breakup or having a mental illness can all contribute to becoming homeless. In the Metro Denver area in 2009, 31 percent of homeless people surveyed reported having a serious mental illness; 17 percent reported a physical one.
Veterans and people who have previously lived in foster homes are also at a higher risk for homelessness. And the list goes on still: domestic violence is a common reason that women or families are forced out of homes, and evidence suggests that cutting federal social programs like employment training and food stamps also exacerbate the issue.
So with such a set of diverse problems, what do you tackle? Karen Rahn, the director of Human Services for the City of Boulder, emphasizes the importance of first making sure that we get homeless people, well, homes.
Rahn, who was one of the main players in the TYP’s 2009 planning process, says that “the foundational element for anyone who’s homeless is that they don’t have a home. It’s very hard to take care of other issues in your life if you don’t have a place to live. Many people lost jobs, medical care or couldn’t pay their mortgage or rent after the financial crisis of 2009.”
Wendy Schwartz, planning manager for the City of Boulder’s Human Services Department, says that the most important part of the TYP is its “Housing First” approach.
“The old approach was to say you need to get your mental and health problems in order first — and what they’ve found is that it’s more beneficial and cost-effective to get [homeless people] into housing first,” said Schwartz.
Schwartz says there are higher success rates with individuals who are put in homes before their other problems are tackled.
As of August 2014, Boulder County, whose main cities include Lafayette, Louisville, Longmont and Boulder, has achieved varying progress under the TYP. Anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 people have received assistance with “basic needs” to prevent homelessness through the City of Boulder’s Human Services Fund, the Boulder County Medicaid enrollment has increased, 47 transitional housing units (places usually meant for a stay of up to two years) have been built countywide and around 144 new housing units (homes for individuals and families) have been built or prepared throughout the county — among many other small, but constructive steps taken.
One of the most important achievements is the building of the Boulder housing development called 1175 Lee Hill, an apartment complex with 31 housing units for the homeless. But the TYP’s estimate is that 100 of these kinds of developments need to be added to sufficiently give everyone a home, and that number is subject to change as more studies are done.
The TYP also aims to emulate what Longmont did on its own back in 2000 with a group called LHOT: the Longmont Housing Opportunities Group. LHOT consists of 50 members from all over the city — everyone from government officials and police officers to housing providers and bankers — who put together their resources and ideas to work together to decrease homelessness.
“We have representatives in Longmont, from businesses, health providers, churches, you name it….it’s helpful for these leaders to meet. It’s an ongoing process of education,” says director of Longmont Community Services Karen Roney, who was also a leading force in the TYP planning process. “It’s to provide the most caring response that we can.”
To foster communities county-wide that are responsive to the needs of the homeless, the TYP aims to promote public awareness the way LHOT has, but as of the August 2014 report, aside from housing providers and landlords, other segments of the community have not been tapped in the county as a whole. The TYP does have plans to improve public education on the subject of homelessness, but the details have not been specifically outlined as of the August 2014 report.
Longmont’s LHOT program and the TYP both acknowledge that a change in public consciousness is imperative to solving homelessness, and that is especially true for people like Gina who are concerned about homeless people being viewed adversarially or apathetically. The TYP recognizes that non-governmental institutions have to play a part in assisting the county in ending homelessness, which will require a more sympathetic and knowledgeable view of the challenges that homeless people face; the chronic disabilities, hunger and harsh outdoor conditions that the homeless often endure make them less able to participate in the job market or to maintain relationships with family or friends, if those relationships exist at all — the idea of the homeless person as a freeloader is at odds with a more aware view of the challenges they face.
Gina, who attended the initial Boulder City Council meetings regarding the TYP, characterizes the TYP as a “sham,” saying, “We gotta look at the linear time. If I had to wait 10 years, I’d be 65….the purpose of securing a home for somebody is the first movement you should make. You give people a year within a home — not waiting for one.”
And while there has been progress in building some permanent housing in the county, the TYP’s first estimate says that we would need around 100 “Lee Hill”-type of developments to get everyone into a home. As the first four years have passed since the TYP’s drafting, the county is nowhere close to half of that goal.
Gina says that a more sympathetic view of the challenges homeless people face could help speed the progress. As Gina stresses, there’s money out there — money going to wars, money being spent every day. “You have great aspirations, but you won’t even give someone a bus ticket.”
“One gesture of beauty and one gesture of comfort can change someone’s life, in a good way,” Gina says, explaining the importance of kindness in both the individual’s and the government’s approach.
“Address people honestly,” Gina says. “Take the conflict out of it. Me and you. It’s not me against you — it’s me for you. Together. Then all the answers come to play.”
Contact Opinion Editor Ellis Arnold at ellis.arnold@colorado.edu.
