Mention the homeless and some may think of someone holding a witty sign at a busy intersection.
What many don’t realize is that more than 1,200 children in 2017 were registered as homeless in the Boulder Valley and St. Vrain Valley Schools. Add in the 0-5 population not picked up in those numbers, and the estimate grows to 1,500 Boulder County kids going through an episode of homelessness each year.
“This is what people don’t understand about family homelessness,” said Julie Van Domelen, Executive Director of Emergency Family Assistance Association. “They think of the homeless as sleeping in parks.”
The less visible truth is that these families are typically doubled up, couch surfing with friends, living in cars or sleeping in tents in the mountains.
“They burn through relationships, bouncing around,” said Van Domelen. “This creates a lot of instability for the kids. You see this in their outcomes. They’re at higher risk for truancy, developmental delays, learning problems, behavior issues.”
Edwina Salazar, executive director of the Our Center in Longmont, said her basic needs organization, which helps people move toward self-sufficiency, is also serving more and more homeless families.
“We are finding for the first time several families from our community living in their cars with small children,” she said. “I’ve been here 18 years, and we have never seen the preponderance of homeless families having to live in their cars. Usually, we are able to find options quickly, but there are so many, we are out of options.”
The numbers sound small – five or six families at a given time – but Salazar said in the past, Our Center would go periods of time seeing no families in such dire straits or possibly one or two.
“When you think of the weight on the children and the vulnerability of children, it’s a significant number,” she said. “We are not an urban area. It’s unusual for families to be living in their cars.”
In the city of Boulder, 80 percent of the 4,800 clients who have received services for homelessness used them less than 10 times, for a shelter bed or a meal, for example, said Isabel McDevitt, executive director of Bridge House, a nonprofit offering a range of opportunities for homeless men and women to improve their lives.
“They resolve (the issue) very quickly,” McDevitt said. “On the flipside is the hard core group. They’ve been around the community a very long time.”
This 20 percent of people uses about 80 percent of the services, she said.
In addition, Boulder has experienced a national trend toward more “transitionage” youth homelessness. Youth aging out of foster care, the fact that Colorado is a Medicaid expansion state and the legalization of marijuana have put our state on the radar for young adults seeking a better life.
“Boulder County seems like a place to try to get a foothold,” said McDevitt. “It’s not just the use of marijuana that attracted people. (They thought) they could get a job in the industry and arrived with no plan.”
Salazar said the same trend is evident in Longmont.
“We are seeing increased numbers of single homeless people coming from outside our community,” she said. “Many are from outside Colorado. A significant amount are from states like Florida and Texas, which is unusual because those are warm states. They’re coming to a colder climate.”
In addition to transient young people and families, more seniors are becoming homeless. Some have aged within the system, but many seniors in Boulder are very housing insecure, and can no longer afford to live there.
“All it takes is a death or a family break-up, being on a fixed income when rent keeps going up,” McDevitt said.
Longmont, once considered an affordable alternative for housing, is also seeing seniors pushed out by high rent, including increased numbers living in their cars. As many as 10 seniors, many of them women, are now living in their cars in Longmont, Salazar said.
“They were stable two or three years ago, but rents have increased so significantly, that the rent is higher than their incomes,” she said.
“They weren’t living large,” Salazar added. “If you have a $1,200 (a month) income from Social Security, and you’re paying $800 (in rent), you’re paying too much. If your rent goes up to $1,200, you can’t live in that unit.”
