New safe outdoor space for people experiencing homelessness to open in Park Hill
William Peterson
and last updated 2021-04-07 20:28:17-04
DENVER â For many people in the Park Hill neighborhood, theyâre just starting to hear word that a safe outdoor space is on its way. I believe it was disbelief. It just didnât seem logical that they would put a homeless camp on a paved parking lot of the church, said David Smith who has lived in the neighborhood since 1979.
Understandably, thereâs a million questions of what it will look like. At the same time, thereâs also frustration with the lack of communication from Park Hill United Methodist Church that this was in the works.
Now, some neighborhood advocates are pushing to ensure that when the pandemic subsides, the safe-camping concept doesn t disappear in Denver, which has at least 1,000 people sleeping on the streets every night.
In March, a collective of representatives from neighborhood organizations that cover Capitol Hill, Uptown, City Park West, RiNo and Curtis Park, among other areas, signed on to a letter sent to Mayor Michael Hancock and Denver City Council members pitching the idea of keeping safe-camping sites as a tool going forward. The two existing Safe Outdoor Space (SOS) sites.have had some remarkable success in their short tenure and it is time to scale them to provide temporary, yet sustained support to our most vulnerable, Frank Locantore, executive director of the Colfax Ave Business Improvement District, wrote to the elected officials in the March 10 letter. Proponents of the safe-camping site model say that it helps homeless individuals connect more easily with services whil
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