Following the April 5 Hands Off protest at Colorado Springs City Hall, the Colorado Springs Homeless Union held a rally and protest against the city’s sit-lie ordinance and camping ban.
“The sit-lie ordinance is a piece of city law that prohibits sitting or lying down on the sidewalk in an area downtown and around downtown,” explained Max Kronstadt, an organizer with the Homeless Union. “It was first passed in 2016, which is around the same time that we started to see a large growth in our local unhoused population. This is a law that specifically targets the unhoused community. If I’m sitting downtown and I don’t look unhoused, we know that a police officer is not going to come up to me and tell me to stop sitting on the sidewalk. This is specifically targeted at our unhoused community. It’s one of a series of pieces of laws and local ordinances that are targeting the ability of homeless people in our community to survive and to exist.”
Under the sit-lie ordinance, offenders can be punished by up to a $500 fine on first offense and up to 90 days in jail on second offense if they sit on curbs and sidewalks downtown. In January, Colorado Springs City Council expanded the area where the ordinance is enforced, the second time since the original ordinance passed in 2016 that the city has expanded the area’s boundaries. The new boundaries extend south from I-25 to Cheyenne Boulevard and east from South Nevada Avenue to South Wasatch Avenue.
When the ordinance was initially passed, advocacy groups spoke out against it.
“The ACLU of Colorado opposes any new laws that make it a crime to use public spaces, especially those that disproportionately target people who are homeless or living in poverty,” said the ACLU of Colorado in a 2016 statement. “While the Council has responded to resounding public rejection of the ‘sit-lie’ concept by attempting to rebrand the proposal and to soften some of its more absurd elements, there is still no public safety justification for making it a crime to sit. The Council, the police, and the courts should focus their time and resources on actual crimes with actual victims, not rounding up and harassing people who are doing nothing more than sitting.”
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that outdoor sleeping bans don’t violate the Eighth Amendment. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, noted that punishing people for something they can’t control, like homelessness, is cruel and unusual.
This is a law that specifically targets the unhoused community. – Max Kronstadt
“As a human, I sleep pretty much just about every night, and I don’t always have a place inside to sleep, but I still have to sleep,” said Don Briggs, a member of the Homeless Union. “We have constitutionally a God-given right to life, so we have to live somewhere. We have to decide, is the homeless problem that people don’t have a place to live or is the homeless problem that they don’t like seeing people like me sleeping outside, sitting down?”
Earlier this month, the Colorado Springs Police Department engaged in a two-day homeless camp cleanup operation. According to reporting from KRDO, CSPD made 60 misdemeanor warrant arrests, five felony warrant arrests, and three misdemeanor drug arrests and issued five water tickets, nine trespassing tickets, and two camping in parks tickets.
“They think that if they make it hard enough to exist on the streets that people will either go to our only shelter in town for most people — which is the Springs Rescue Mission — or leave,” said Kronstadt. “The Springs Rescue Mission has 450 beds and even with undercounts, we know that there’s at least 1,400 to 1,500 people who are unsheltered in our community. It’s likely more like 6,000, so even if everyone decided they wanted to go to Springs Rescue Mission tomorrow, they wouldn’t have the capacity, which makes these laws cruel, unjust, and ineffective.”
Briggs said a lack of public amenities, like bathrooms, exacerbates problems for residents and business owners. “In Manitou, they actually close the bathrooms at 10 o’clock at night,” he said. “I heard it was someone … that would go up to the bathroom and when the door was locked, they’d just leave [their waste] right there. Because, you know, it has got to go somewhere. If you’d let me go in and use the bathroom, I’d do that.”
Following the rally in Acacia Park, members of the Homeless Union – housed and unhoused alike – took part in a civil disobedience action, sitting on sidewalks downtown with signs to raise awareness of the ordinance. According to Kronstadt, no citations were issued.
“I don’t care how many tickets I get, it’s never convinced me to not be homeless,” said Briggs. “I have to be somewhere. If we were rats or pigeons, they could just put out some poison food and send public works to pick up the corpses, but we’re not. We’re people.”
People experiencing homelessness lead successful, humane cleanup initiatives
COURTESY OF WESTSIDE CARES
In the wake of the large-scale municipal sweeps of homeless camps last week, people experiencing homelessness are redoubling their efforts to help keep the community clean. While the sweeps were a one-time effort to mitigate the visibility of camps, the commitment of houseless neighbors to ensuring a safe, healthy environment has been ongoing for years.
The Colorado Springs Homeless Union hosts monthly cleanup events on the second Saturday at 1 p.m. at Dorchester Park. The next event is Saturday, April 12.
And Westside CARES collaborates with the OCC Trash Fairies to conduct quarterly creek cleanup events with the next event happening Saturday, May 3, at 9 a.m. at Vermijo Park.
These ongoing events are an alternative to aggressive “sweeps” by the City of Colorado Springs, which displace people and deprive them of the belongings they need to survive.
“The criminalization of being homeless is not only inhumane but also ineffective. Instead of providing support and resources to help individuals get back on their feet, laws that punish being unhoused only perpetuate the cycle of poverty and despair,” says Colorado Springs Homeless Union leader Kandy Lewis.
While questions of humanity and efficacy are important, leaders within the houseless community also understand that people experiencing homelessness experience unfair and debilitating stigma that is perpetuated by municipal “sweeps.”
“Our houseless neighbors are deeply concerned about public health and safety,” Westside CARES’ CEO Kristy Milligan says. “We initiated our clean-up program at their request for the dual purposes of creating community synergy around environmental cleanliness and undermining pernicious stereotypes about people experiencing homelessness.”
Engaging the impacted communities, including local residents and their houseless neighbors, has been critical to the success of both programs. To date, the cleanups have connected dozens of neighbors, collected literal tons of trash, and engendered ongoing investment in keeping trash out of community spaces.
