Denver was my home for most of my adult life while I made a career in law. It wasn’t exactly Paris, but even Paris isn’t exactly Paris anymore. Denver was at least pleasant, clean and fairly safe.
Cheapskate that I am, I made a practice of parking about eight blocks away from my downtown office, in the direction of the “bad” part of town. (The parking rate was 10 cents a day – really!) I never had any problems.
As many of you know, I then retired and moved to Aspen. About six years ago, I bought a second home in Denver, in a downtown high-rise condo. I get around.
But now I’m done with my downtown Denver condo. What’s happened to downtown Denver in just the last three years is disgraceful and disgusting.
It’s simply overrun with vagrants. You know, the people we used to call “bums” until “bums” developed a connotation of aimlessness, thieving, voluntarily unemployed, substance-abusing beggars; and then called “homeless” until “homeless” developed a connotation of aimlessness, thieving, voluntarily unemployed, substance-abusing beggars; and then called … well, you get the idea.
So, I’ll simply call these feral humans by their scientific name, “vagrants.” I mean no disrespect in calling them vagrants. To be clear, I do passionately disrespect the vagrants, but calling them vagrants is not my means for expressing that disrespect. This blog is.
“Vagrant” is simply a timeless and accurate term that saves me the trouble and correctness of looking up the latest woke jargon on the subject, for fear of offending someone who – let’s be honest – is not very likely to read this anyway.
Denver now boasts the fourth worst vagrancy problem outside of California, and the tenth worse in the country. This is for a city of modest size compared to San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Atlanta and New York. In vagrancy, Denver is playing big.
That’s partly because the old mayor loved vagrants. He did what he could to attract more, right up until the time his term expired last summer and he fled to Miami. (I’m not making that up.)
That mayor presided over a 300% increase in vagrancy over the past three years – a quadrupling. At this exponentially increasing rate, I calculate that all 700,000 residents of Denver will be vagrants in another nine years. Seriously, do the math (ah, the miracle of exponential growth).
That mayor wasn’t alone. Virtually the entire Denver city council are leftist Democrats. The leftist group-think on this issue is that the vagrants are victims of a bad economy, probably the one George W. Bush brought on 20 years ago, and Ronald Reagan before him, and John Kennedy before him, by greedily refusing to take wealth from those who earn it to give it to those who want it.
And so, the lefty group-thinking goes, it would be cruel to insist that these people stop camping on the street, pooping in the gutters, shooting up on the sidewalks, and panhandling in the parks.
They simply have no choice!
OK, there are the underused shelters. But many of those shelters don’t allow drug use. How cruel is that?!?
And in the shelters, they can’t accost a passerby with begging, shouting, assault, and the other general weirdness that gives them the attention they crave in the toilet of a life they’ve engineered for themselves.
The new mayor elected last summer says he wants to do something about the vagrants (though he doesn’t call them by that scientific name). He doesn’t want to enforce the laws against vagrancy, however.
He instead wants to spend more money. He wants to spend $50 million to house about 1,000 of them. That’s out of the 7,000 or so that are here, a number sure to grow when word gets out about the fabulous deal for them in Denver.
Do the math again. That’s $50,000 per person – over $4,000/month in rent per person. Does he plan to house them downtown in the Four Seasons?
And why does he think they’ll go to the $50,000/person new housing when they currently don’t go to the shelters? Maybe he’ll entice them into the housing with room service or, more likely, drug deliveries. He did specifically say that the housing won’t prohibit drug dealing and usage.
This is on top of the $40-100,000 per vagrant that the city already spends yearly. To put that in perspective, it’s several times what they spend per student in the Denver public schools. And it’s on top of the $1,000 per person per month that they outright gift to vagrants (but only if the vagrant is a woman, a transgender, or a “gender non-conforming” person).
In the old days, we had special places for these sorts of people. They were called mental institutions. But maybe the institutions are all filled up now by Ultra-MAGAs incarcerated there for deprogramming.
Why, you might ask, do the voters of Denver continue to elect and re-elect city politicians who enable this destructive vagrancy? Why don’t they elect politicians who enforce the laws already on the books against camping in the street, panhandling on the sidewalk, shooting up in the park and pooping in the gutter?
That’s an important question. I have a theory.
The answer is that Denver, like most other cites, is overwhelmingly Democrat. Denver has elected Democrat Congresswomen for the last 50 years (first Pat Schoeder, and then the current mini-Pat whose name I’ve forgotten because she’s utterly absent from the news). Denver voted 80% for Joe Biden in 2020.
But, you ask, don’t even Democrats dislike street camping, sidewalk pooping, gutter panhandling and park shoot-ups?
Yes, even Democrats dislike those things.
But nearly all that camping, pooping, shooting up and panhandling takes place in less than the one square mile of downtown. That’s less than 1% of the 155 square miles of Denver. Measured by population, it might be even less than that, since, understandably these days, not many people live downtown.
And so, dim Denver Democrats – the dimDenDems – get the best of both worlds. They get to signal their virtue by enabling, encouraging and pandering to the vagrants without any cost to those dimDenDems personally. The cost is instead borne by (1) the vagrants themselves whose lives continue in Democrat-enabled misery and (2) the few residents of downtown who endure the presence of those miserable and immiserating vagrants.
Of course, the dimDenDems don’t feel guilty about that. No, they feel innocent – virtuous even – as they drive around in their Prius EVs with COEXIST bumper stickers. They’ll continue their destructive feel-goodery until downtown is a hellhole that even the vagrants will flee from – and toward the surrounding neighborhoods where those preening virtue signalers reside.
Before all of Denver descends into that Mad Max post-apocalypse, I’m out of here. See ya in the mountains.
My book is out — “How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen” — on AMAZON and BARNES AND NOBLE.
And don’t forget, those dindenDems also support Hamas and their murderous ways in Israel. At this point, how could [any] Jew in America vote for a Democrat?! Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
I spent almost 25 years living in LoDo... moved there in 1998 after college, got to experience the "booming" Denver of the early 2000s in my twenties, with clean and safe streets, an active downtown with shops galore and Coors Field, a bustling nightlife, and tons of friendly and welcoming people packing the sidewalks.
Things started noticeably deteriorating around 2010-2012. The community "vibe" where everyone had each other's back started to disappear. The general friendliness began to fade. Millions of people moved in. Traffic increased dramatically. Road rage and crime skyrocketed, and that community vibe was replaced with an "every man for themself" mentality. And now you can't even get to the mountains unless you wake up at 4am on a Saturday to beat that insane I70 rush. Then came all the homeless camps, tweakers, sidewalk shitters, and catalytic converter thefts.
The last straw was when some tweaker broke into my wife's car in Five Points in broad daylight, smashed up the dashboard, and tried to hotwire it. Fuck all that... we sold our place in 2021 and left for greener pastures. You couldn't pay me to move back to that shithole at this point.