It remains to be seen whether Aurora’s planned “one-stop shop” for homeless services — a campus to house, feed, employ, heal and ultimately uplift — can provide the most effective alternative to life on the streets. Experts in the human-services field have to sort out the details, which are still in their planning stages as the city moves ahead.
What’s encouraging about the impending program, however, is its practical premise. As envisioned, it endeavors to restore incentive, responsibility and accountability to a population disproportionately bedeviled by addiction and the loss of a work ethic.
That’s a refreshing and overdue approach to rehabilitating the chronically homeless, not only in Colorado’s No. 3 city but also along the populous Front Range and throughout our state. It borrows from some of the effective strategies employed by Colorado Springs, the state’s No. 2 metro area, which has seen success in reducing its habitually homeless population.
And it serves as an example to Denver, the largest city — and an epicenter of homelessness that just seems to keep growing.