By Roxanne Peterson
There’s an awful lot going on at the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless (BSH) these days, and the long-awaited day center has not even been implemented yet. In addition to the upcoming day center, BSH is coordinating part or all of five additional programs recently created by Homeless Solutions Boulder County (HSBC) over the past year or so.
With all these new activities and demands on BSH, will the needs of the day center be lost in the shuffle? The BSH is still experiencing capacity issues with their existing shelter clients, and their plans for increasing services are rapidly expanding.
Of the six new programs developed through HSBC in the past two years, four have a direct connection to BSH:
1) Building Home: began first quarter 2023; BSH was awarded the contract for the Housing Retention Team
2) Acquisition Program: The shelter recently purchased 12 housing units and is slowly moving ahead with another eight in Longmont. The goal is to have homes for people who otherwise couldn’t be housed due to criminal backgrounds or other challenges.
3) Respite Center: To begin early 2024 at the shelter, the goal is to reduce morbidity and mortality of unhoused individuals discharged from the hospital
4) BSH/Boulder Community Health Partnership: The goal is to connect frequent visitors to the hospital’s emergency department with housing and supportive services.
In addition to these programs, a proposal for a brand new program for “High System Utilizers” (HSU) is laid out in detail in notes to city council from Sept. 28, 2023, and Feb. 8 of this year. It aims to connect HSU with housing and services, reducing their interactions with criminal justice and health care systems.
There are currently about 45 people on the high utilizers baseline list. I assume BSH will be sheltering at least some of them since the proposal stipulates only 30 days of bridge housing in hotels. Another stated goal of the HSU proposal is prioritizing frequent hospital patients for housing, 54 of whom had already been referred to the shelter as of September.
High utilizers have become the focus as more local housing vouchers are being set aside and all voucher funders (city, state and federal) work to find solutions for this hard-to-house population. The problem with this is who is left out.
Boulder City Council directed staff to develop a day services center/shelter that would serve the needs of all the unhoused in Boulder. Above all, it was supposed to be a welcoming environment and provide somewhere to go during the day where they could connect with a variety of services in one place and get some of their basic needs met. The understanding was that it would be in a building specifically designed and designated for this purpose.
It ended up being pushed out to the BSH for a number of reasons. Due to the large number of new projects going on at BSH, will the day center be just an afterthought?
There is a well-established, ongoing space capacity issue at the shelter. According to BSH’s 2023 year-end report, there were 414 capacity turnaways in 2023 — an 11% increase from the 373 times people were turned away in 2022, on top of a 57% increase in capacity turnaways from the year before.
With the day center, will BSH be trying to attract additional people, especially the unsheltered, during the day? If so, they will likely experience even more turnaways at night as a result. Where is the plan for that?
On the other hand, if the day center is mainly intended for use by regular overnight clients of the BSH, maybe they are missing the point of a day center. A March 13 email to council and the community from Kurt Firnhaber, director of Boulder’s housing and human services, raises a red flag: “Staff estimate that between 50-100 individuals will access the center intermittently throughout the day and estimate that most of the center’s clients will be the individuals who utilize the Shelter overnight.”
If this is the situation, all the new services and programs intended for the day center will be mainly used by the existing overnight population of the BSH and the residents of the permanent supportive housing units that BSH manages.
The increased level of case management and coordination through BSH last year and planned for this year is eye-popping. According to their 2023 recap, “Every day in 2023, we provided (permanent supportive housing) services to roughly 140 people. And in the Shelter itself, we restructured our Housing-Focused Shelter case management so that our managers are now seeing more clients than ever before.”
Later in the report, they state that they also have two other projects that will open later in the year, including the new 40-unit Bluebird Apartments. This will raise the total number of clients BSH serves to 260. Both the medical and criminal justice systems will also now be feeding people into the shelter through the aforementioned new programs, with the expectation that they will be housed.
Although I deeply appreciate that the city and county are focusing on the needs of the unsheltered, many questions come up for me:
- Given current constraints and planned additional programs, housing and services, what is the capacity of BSH to successfully manage the day center so it can effectively serve the unhoused population?
- Is the major focus on high utilizers in Boulder’s homelessness policies justified from equity and ethical perspectives? The proposed remedy was developed with a focus on relieving the substantial financial burden on the criminal justice and healthcare systems, but should that be the main responsibility of the city’s homelessness policies and programs?
- What message does this send to those who have languished in the Boulder homelessness system for years and do not meet the definition of high utilizers? Will they be deprioritized for housing?
- Should city council have more input into homelessness policies and programs?
As stated in the Feb. 8 update to city council, a portion of the funding recently obtained from the state for the day shelter will be used to form a second housing retention team. This seems like a bait and switch. What does housing retention have to do with the services a day center is supposed to offer? Very little, I’d say.
It seems reasonable to question whether there will be sufficient resources available at BSH for meeting the needs of the large majority of unhoused residents who are not high utilizers.
It also seems reasonable to consider, given the constraints on BSH capacity and their funding priorities, whether it would be wise to move forward with the original plan for the day center — to open it in a building designated for that purpose and prioritize those services for the entire unhoused population.
It’s still a good move to open the shelter 24/7, because it will be beneficial to the many people already sleeping there, but it does not seem to be sufficient for the majority of unhoused people who avoid BSH already. Those are the folks who need the services of the day center the most and who will likely have the least access to it under the current plan.
Roxanne Peterson lives in Boulder. She previously worked in a transitional housing program for veterans at Volunteers of America.
