Extra Space in Your Community

It’s not easy to be down on your luck in Colorado these days.

• Yesterday, the Colorado Springs City Council decided to take aim at the homeless, by banning camping within city limits. Knowing that homeless people are not always equipped by REI, they made the language of their resolution nice and broad — too broad, as it turns out. Council member Tim Gallagher (the only council member to vote against the resolution) commented later, “If you throw a blanket out on grass at a park and sit on it, you’re camping.” Colorado Springs city attorneys are looking at ways to revise the language. But the problem is, it’s hard to design a law to target homeless people — and that’s really what the Colorado Springs City Council is trying to do. If you make the language too specific, it ends up not applying to the homeless because they don’t have tents and camp stoves. If you make the language too broad, then suddenly picnicking families, students out studying, and workers taking a quick break to get some fresh air all find themselves in violation of the law. But my point is, you can’t help the homeless by writing new laws. You have to find them housing. The fact is, city officials say there are between 300 and 500 homeless people in Colorado Springs, but homeless services agencies think there are only about 175 beds in Colorado Springs homeless shelters.
• At the same time, the state’s computer system has been having problems turning over money that is supposed to be used to pay unemployment benefits. On Monday, 42,000 Coloradans who were supposed to receive unemployment benefits were told that they would have to wait at least until Tuesday, because a computer glitch had caused Chase to deposit only enough benefits for 8,000 unemployed people. Maybe a day doesn’t seem like a long time to wait. But it is a very long time when you have children to feed, or when you’ve accidentally overdrawn your bank account trying to pay bills, or when you have a family member with a prescription that needs to be filled right away. The whole reason we have unemployment benefits is that people who don’t have jobs are in economically precarious circumstances. They are in danger of becoming homeless at some point. Besides — why should Chase receive the interest from keeping all that money in the bank another day? I think Chase should donate whatever residual income it earned from the glitch to housing programs for the homeless.
• Not only are unemployment benefits delayed, but so are food stamps and Medicaid. In 2008, Colorado’s food stamp program was rated as worst in the nation. Colorado came in 52nd, behind Guam. And Colorado is still out of compliance with federal guidelines that say food stamps must be provided within 30 days after a person applies and that Medicaid has to be provided within 45 days. In October, 19 percent of new food-stamp applications were delayed, and 18 percent of new Medicaid applicants didn’t receive their benefits either. According to a Denver Post article, state officials blamed the delays on their computer system. Again with the computer glitches!

These might not seem like matters that would affect the self-storage industry, but they are. We are not supposed to let people live in self-storage units. It can be heartbreaking to have to tell a tenant that in the middle of winter, though. If we have to tell people they can’t sleep here, then I for one want to know that there are decent programs we can refer them to, programs that will make it possible for families to eat, get needed medical care, and have a roof over their heads at night. I don’t want to think that people are going to have to wander the streets or live in their car on a cold February night. I still say Colorado is the best place in the world to live. But let’s make it livable for those who are less fortunate — people who deserve a safe place to sleep just as much as anyone else, but who, like so many people right now, are just — down on their luck.