Greg Harms, the longtime former director of the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless (now All Roads), often carried with him an illustration of a bathtub with water in it.
In Greg’s illustration, the bathtub represents Boulder, and the water represents the number of homeless people in town. At the bottom of the tub, the plug is out, and the water is draining away, showing that folks are gradually exiting homelessness. But in the illustration, the faucet is wide open, filling the tub with water as fast as it can drain. That simple drawing symbolizes that, so long as there is a constant stream of unhoused people coming into Boulder, the number of homeless people in town will never materially decrease. The tub will never empty.
Given our published rate of exits from homelessness, we should have housed our entire local homeless population long ago. But over the last several years, the number of unhoused people in our community has barely budged, declining far more slowly than the reported homeless exit numbers would imply…