Homelessness in America reached a record high number in 2024, at 771,480, according to a recent release from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
However, the official count here in El Paso County, conducted in early 2024, was lower than in 2023: 1,146 people were homeless, with 259 considered unsheltered, a 31% drop from the previous year. The rest were found in emergency and transitional shelters.
But to Richard Skorman, it doesn’t feel like fewer unhoused people occupy spots on our streets these days.
“It’s getting worse,” he says during a lunch break at his Poor Richard’s restaurant on Jan. 3. Over a rice bowl, Skorman shared his thoughts of what seems like an onslaught of unsheltered people who are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or both, and/or suffer from mental illness.
During the holiday shopping season, his four stores on Tejon Street – a restaurant, bookstore, café and toy store – saw a half-dozen episodes of homeless people screaming at customers, or at nobody in particular, he says. Five windows were shattered. One woman attacked him on the sidewalk out front, injuring his arm and breaking his glasses. She tried to throw a chair through the front window.
A member of the Downtown Area Response Team (DART), a project of the Colorado Springs Police Department, arrested her.
The detritus that homeless people leave behind also has increased, he reports. The 20 to 35 volunteers who take part in his Rubbish Roundups once, twice or even three times a week gather up to 100 33-gallon trash bags each time.
Skorman isn’t new to the homeless problem. It’s unlikely that anyone has done more to investigate and address the issue over time. The former Colorado Springs City Council member has spent hours and hours researching what can be done.
Fort Worth, Texas, for example, issues badges to homeless people who must present the badge to gain free meals at soup kitchens or free lodging at shelters. The badges help authorities track the homeless, he says, and shed light on their comings and goings and what efforts they make, or don’t make, toward leaving the streets.
Austin, Texas, created a community of hundreds of tiny homes where residents must contribute through doing chores and governing the community. Skorman reports that it’s working. So much so, in fact, that Colorado Springs put together a similar plan for a site on the city’s east side. All the dominoes were lined up, and then the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, and that was that. I wonder if that initiative has been revived by our current elected officials?
Heroin used to be the biggest problem, Skorman says. Now it’s fentanyl, and methamphetamine is making a comeback.
“The easy answers are not there,” he acknowledges.
But it’s gotten to the point where he and other merchants downtown are concerned for their customers’ and employees’ safety. They’ve been accosted and harassed by homeless people, and they’re scared, he says.
I decided to take a stroll down Tejon to see what I could see. At about 1:45 that afternoon, I headed south from Skorman’s place. Within a half block I spotted a woman slowly pushing a shopping cart of her belongings westbound on Platte Avenue. At that same intersection, I noticed a man, rigged with a huge backpack and other bags, perched on a concrete bench.
A little farther south, I saw an ambulance parked on Bijou Street, just off Tejon, lights flashing. Two DART cops lingered near the curb, so I asked what was going on. A homeless person, one reported, was “drugged out of his mind.”
Do we have more homeless than before, I asked? Seems that way, the officer offered, noting that the Bustang brings homeless people to town from Denver where they’ve run up rap sheets of dozens of offenses, so they flee. He said he’s heard a church in Denver graciously pays their fares of $14 each. But he couldn’t say how many have arrived that way or whether the story is true, though he says he’s observed homeless people getting off Bustang buses.
Farther down Tejon, two cop cars are parked in the street, and DART officers are talking with a merchant. In other words, there’s no shortage of police presence.
On the return trip, I see a man with a pillow sitting on the curb next to Acacia Park, and I notice a wooden sign sitting nearby: “Mayor Yemi, You failed downtown small business.”
So what is Mayor Yemi Mobolade doing about this? Skorman says the Homeless Response Action Plan for 2025 to 2030, issued in November, contains a lot of “platitudes” but not many concrete steps to ending the problem.
The plan’s “action” verbs include “assess,” “collaborate,” “encourage,” “partner” and “explore.” I’m wondering if that’s enough. I’d imagine many downtown merchants share such skepticism.
And where’s the City Council on all this? One often-cited solution for homelessness is called “housing first,” which promotes the concept that homeless people are more apt to achieve success in finding a job and getting off drugs if they’re housed first. Yet, it seems there’s little or no progress toward creating transitional or low-income housing beyond what’s already been accomplished, such as with Greenway Flats. (The Launchpad, a 50-unit permanent supportive apartment home community for young adults aged 18 to 24 overseen by the nonprofit the PLACE, is under construction at 19th and Uintah streets.)
Maybe there has been progress, but the downtown community isn’t feeling it.
As I wind up my stroll, I encounter an unshaven and long-haired man in a dirty sweatshirt, standing on the sidewalk, his jeans pulled down to his thighs with sweatpants underneath, smoking a cigarette and muttering to no one in particular.
I am not feeling the progress, either.
