Safe Zones would divert resources from effective solutions

The three of us each served on the City of Boulder Human Relations Commission. Two of us also participated in working groups researching interventions available to unhoused people waiting for housing, including shelter alternatives, day services, alternative sentencing programs and treatment and rehab facilities. Meanwhile, Boulder’s sheltering budget shrunk and consolidated, freeing money for housing but leaving fewer interim options for the people waiting for housing or for people newly displaced by pandemic disruptions and rising housing costs.

We understand the desire for the city to do more to curtail unsheltered homelessness. Our shared frustrations can be used to demand real solutions. Unfortunately, Ballot Question 302, advertised as Safe Zones 4 Kids, would divert finite City resources away from more effective, better-evidenced measures to support our community’s overall safety and wellbeing.

Despite slogans, Question 302 does not prioritize schools or kids. As written, it prioritizes essentially all of Boulder. When everything is made a priority, nothing, in effect, is a priority. The city, however, already prioritizes schools in its Safe and Managed Public Spaces plan. The only factors given higher priority than an encampment’s proximity to a school are reports of crime or threats of violence. The sweeping language of Question 302 effectively removes that priority and makes schools equal to every sidewalk and multi-use path in Boulder. What is actually prioritized in a measure calling for the geographic prioritization of everything?

Question 302 would amend the City Charter and prioritize and codify a displacement approach to homelessness. If passed, a change of course could only occur with another ballot measure despite changing circumstances and special needs including actual school prioritization.

Removals don’t just fail to house people, provide support services or advance public safety, they also divert resources that could otherwise support these goals. Proponents of 302 may suggest that we can lock in such approaches without sacrificing our ability to house people or provide services. Unfortunately, 302 calls on voters to choose: Are we, as a community, committed to (literally) buying into a failed removal policy at the expense of betterevidenced priorities?

We can lose ourselves in the details of which city departments absorb what costs of the encampment displacements at the heart of this ballot measure, but this distracts us from more pressing realities and more salient questions. The way we vote is a public expression of our values: How will we choose to respond to increasing housing insecurity, increasing precarity, increasing homelessness? How do we keep one another safe in those conditions? What need is a person trying to fill, for example, with a propane tank at an encampment? And what are we going to do about it?

Budgets are what become of these values. Budgets are finite. Budgets mean choices. For example, when the City Council designated an additional $3 million to increase enforcement of the camping ban in April 2021, they framed it as an 18-month pilot program. As Shay Castle pointed out in Boulder Beat at the time, “The city is using excess revenue to pay for it — money that hasn’t yet been claimed by any one department, that could be allocated anywhere, to any purpose that council desired.”

As we’ve continued to invest in displacement and dispersion, we’ve failed to explore and invest in alternatives that could have a positive effect. For this choice, the city displaces nearly two encampments per day, which reduces homelessness not at all. And while there is no research to support that encampment displacements make communities safer, there is a growing body of research to suggest that the resulting destabilization and loss of personal property exacerbates drug use and mental health issues, increases precarity and drug overdoses, and makes it more difficult for individuals to get housed. In other words, these displacements make us all less safe.

If you agree that the best way to support public safety is to assure that basic needs are met through housing, food, shelter and health care, then the choice that reflects your values is to vote “no” on 302.