After years of political drama, consternation among city lawmakers and homeless advocates, Aurora this month unveiled the region’s newest and most ambitious response to a problem vexing the region, and the nation: the Aurora Regional Navigation Campus.
Creating the $40 million campus is a laudable milestone. Ensuring it serves its purpose of substantially reducing homelessness in the region, and especially reducing the number of people who live and sleep on the streets or in their cars, promises to be elusive.
The project is a sprawling, multifunctional shelter-and-services hub created from a former hotel near I-70 and Chambers Road.
The facility is impressive by any measure, boasting a variety of spaces for about 600 people, on-site medical and dental care, job training, a detox center, recovery mentors and even a dog-sitting program so people are not forced to abandon their pets in exchange for safety.
It wasn’t cheap. Built from a mix of federal and regional funds, primarily made available by the past Biden administration and Congress, the $40 million project will cost Aurora about $2 million a year to operate.
The center has room for 600 people across three tiers of accommodation. Open to nearly anyone without a place to sleep are “compassion” cots in massive halls. For those willing to commit to center staff that they will work to address addiction and employment issues, there are dorm-style pods. For those clients making a bigger commitment to full-time work and drug-addiction and mental-health treatment, there are about 200 private rooms available.
It’s the culmination of years of effort among city council conservatives to push back against research and expertise showing that so-called “housing first” programs are more successful at rehabilitating homeless people, and especially chronically homeless people, than so-called “work-first” programs.
While city officials say the Aurora Navigation Center is a “hybrid” project, it’s not. It’s a large overnight shelter open to just about anyone, like thousands across the nation. The shelter is on the same site where a program bestows select clients with housing accommodations if they agree to work and stay drug-free or face getting kicked out of their private rooms.
While the notion that a “hand-up” inspires people to pull themselves out of their misery by their own bootstraps appeals to a wide range of people, it’s largely fantasy when it comes to the complex and pervasive problem of homelessness in America and Aurora.
Everyone agrees that chronic homelessness is often tied to either mental illness and drug addiction. Decades of research is consistent and compelling that managing and conquering those critical problems is more likely to succeed if you house people first, to provide stability, and address getting jobs and treatment after.
While that reality is discouraging for many people, it’s no less reality.
It doesn’t mean that there aren’t 250 people living on Aurora-area streets who will step up, get clean, get a job and enjoy paying 30% of their income on private room and board. It just means that there will still be about 1,000 people living on Aurora streets, behind buildings and in their cars, and most of them will continue to do just that.
Last week, the Sentinel published an Associated Press story about an extensive investigation into how Honolulu, Hawaii, handled that city’s struggle with the same problem afflicting cities like Aurora across the nation.
Honolulu created a “no-tolerance” policy of not allowing homeless people to camp in public, lie down in public or even sit in public. Rather than pushing people into rehab programs and vastly expanded shelters, and ending misery inflicted on themselves and the public, police simply pushed homeless people from one public place to another, to another.
“People are kind of trapped in a system, you know, that doesn’t really guide them to maybe what they need,” one Honolulu homeless advocate said, “but also they won’t accept what is really needed.”
As homelessness experts have noted for years, this refusal for help is often a symptom of the very conditions that make someone vulnerable in the first place. A person in the grip of mental illness or dependency is not refusing shelter because they prefer life under an overpass. They are refusing it because their illness fundamentally disrupts decision-making, trust and stability.
Aurora must decide whether we simply accept that and overlook their homelessness, or work to integrate into this new center a way to help those who are hardest struck and most vulnerable by their dire circumstances.
And no matter how successful and at-capacity the Aurora program becomes, it does not address the problems that continue to make the nation’s homeless population larger every year.
The indisputable primary driver of homelessness everywhere is the cost of living. Even with Colorado’s incremental minimum-wage increases, a 40-hour job simply does not pay enough to afford even the cheapest market rents in Aurora or the broader metro area.
The wage-to-rent gap is not something a navigation campus can fix. It demands sustained investment in deeply affordable housing, rental assistance and policies that address the structural shortage of homes. Without that, the center risks becoming a revolving door as a place where people stabilize briefly, only to exit into an economy that makes independent living chronically out of reach.
