Arvada, after nixing homeless facility amid neighborhood outcry, still faces a growing problem. Now what?

Albert Gurule is homeless in Arvada. But the 54-year-old electrician is trying to get housed — and is looking for work.

After being evicted from his apartment a year ago, Gurule slept on the streets of Thornton, Lafayette and Boulder before ending up at Mission Arvada, a homeless services nonprofit that operates out of The Rising Church in Olde Town. With its help, he’s now staying in a motel.

“I wasn’t paying my child support and I got backed up on my rent,” said Gurule, who volunteers with his wife at Mission Arvada in the organization’s clothing bank. “We’re in the process of getting a place through this church.”

But Gurule knows that not everyone without a home is necessarily trying to get back on a straight path.

“I understand that some neighborhoods don’t want a lot of homeless people who don’t want to help themselves — who do drugs or who steal,” he said.

Apprehensions like those, Gurule said, are what helped sink an effort by the suburb of 125,000 to stand up a homeless navigation center at 4905 W. 60th Ave., former home of the Early College of Arvada. The city bought the 44,000-square-foot building, which is just east of Sheridan Boulevard, last summer for $6.3 million.

Last month, the Arvada City Council abandoned its plans after hearing numerous concerns throughout the fall from residents in the nearby Arlington Meadows neighborhood. Complaints about the plan ranged from a lack of communication from the city to potential safety problems that a navigation center — which typically provides mental health, addiction and workforce services on site — could bring to the neighborhood.

On Jan. 27, the council put the building back on the market.

“The neighbors, quite frankly, got upset,” Arvada Mayor Lauren Simpson said. “When you’re the house that abuts it or is across the street from it, you ask, ‘Why are you asking me to do this?’ ”

Arvada’s reversal on the homeless facility on the city’s eastern edge shows how fraught the issue has become for communities in Colorado that are trying to get a handle on the burgeoning problem. Arvada is hardly alone.

In January 2024, Aurora approved the purchase of the 255-room Crowne Plaza Hotel with plans to convert it into a facility that temporarily houses and serves individuals who are homeless. Just weeks later, Denver and Aurora residents living near the hotel voiced concerns about crime that might result from such an operation. But city leaders are pressing forward.

In Englewood, dissatisfaction has grown in the last year among some residents living near The Hub at Movement 5280, a homeless ministry on South Grant Street near the Denver line. The city received 125 calls for service at Movement 5280 in 2024, with 15 of those calls categorized as crimes by Englewood police, according to the city.

And five years ago, resident outcry over a proposed 1,000-person regional campus in Lakewood to accommodate those without housing helped defeat the project.

All the while, homelessness is on the rise in and around Denver. Last year’s point-in-time survey by the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative revealed a 10% pop in homelessness across seven metro counties over the 2023 tally.

At Mission Arvada, the increasing strain on services is evident, said the organization’s executive director, Karen Cowling. Seventy to 90 people a day visit Mission Arvada’s day center, where they can do laundry and take a shower.

The organization served 1,400 unique individuals in 2024 and provided 37,000 meals. The facility has opened its cold-weather overnight shelter inside the church on 45 nights since November — a service that has become all the more critical following the abrupt shutdown of the Severe Weather Shelter Network across Jefferson County in October.

“This is definitely the highest we’ve ever been,” Cowling said of clientele numbers at the eight-year-old ministry. “It’s paramount we get something else. We are not a 24/7 operation — these clients need 24-hour case management to get on their feet.”

Olde Town businesses wary

As in the larger region, the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative’s survey showed an increase in those without a home in Jefferson County — up from 854 people in 2023 to 925 last year.

On West 57th Avenue in Olde Town Arvada, a handful of people with backpacks and belongings gathered in front of the library and soaked in the sun on a recent chilly morning, including one accompanied by a small dog wearing a sporty green jacket.

Across the street at The Rising Church, a dozen or more people waited for a free lunch at Mission Arvada.

“This church is home to a lot of people who need food,” Gurule said. “For a lot of these guys, it’s a second home. But the church is in the middle of Olde Town.”

That fact has caused friction, especially among downtown business owners who have heard from customers and visitors that they don’t always feel safe in Olde Town. Alyssa Rossi, the owner of AdiLuna Boutique, said she has found trash strewn around her business on Olde Wadsworth Boulevard on many occasions.

Some people have passed out on the bench in front of her shop. Worse still is the human waste she has had to pick up in the alley next to her store.

“No one should have to clean up feces outside their business,” Rossi said.

She’s given thought to leaving Olde Town, where AdiLuna has been selling women’s clothing, jewelry and gift items for five years.

“I’ve had fellow business owners say they’ve had employees quit because they don’t feel safe walking to their cars at night,” Rossi said. “If you’re not familiar with this area and you think you’re visiting this vibrant community to have dinner and you come across a group of people outside the library doing drugs, it’s different.”

Two years ago, the Arvada Library was closed for days after it was contaminated by meth smoked in the bathrooms, though the culprits were never found. Joe Hengstler, executive director of the Olde Town Business Improvement District, said he hears frequently from business owners who struggle to deal with Arvada’s growing homeless population.

He said the police department’s Community Outreach, Resource and Enforcement Team, or CORE, which sends staff members out to interact with those who need housing in the city, does vital work in this area. Last October, CORE members disassembled an encampment that had popped up in Olde Town and put in a request to replace lights embedded in stone steps that had been broken out by people who used the wiring to charge their cell phones.

“How can we mitigate the effect that this is having on our community?” Hengstler asked.

“Zero tolerance” is what Rossi hopes will be enforced downtown. And a navigation center like the one proposed for the Arlington Meadows neighborhood, she said, would help alleviate the impacts of homelessness on Olde Town.

But it has to be in the right location, said Lily Allish, an Arlington Meadows resident for the better part of a year. Allish started a Change.org petition last fall to oppose the conversion of the Early College of Arvada building to a homeless navigation center.

The petition amassed more than 1,500 signatures as of Thursday.

“The petition was created to advocate for transparency and community input in the decision-making process,” Allish told The Denver Post in an email. “Many residents felt there was a lack of public engagement and unanswered questions about how the center would operate and its long-term effectiveness.”

Some of the “serious consequences” neighbors feared from having a navigation center nearby were “decreased property values, increased crime and the disruption of neighborhood safety,” according to the online petition.

“Neighbors supported services but wanted them implemented effectively,” Allish said. “With Mission Arvada already providing navigation services in Olde Town, residents questioned why existing resources weren’t expanded there instead.”

“Keep doing what we do”

Councilman John Marriott said Arvada shouldn’t be responsible for establishing a homeless navigation center in the first place. He cast the lone vote last year against buying the Early College of Arvada building, which is just under two miles east of Olde Town.

“It’s not our role,” he said. “That’s a human services function that belongs to the county, not the city.”

Arvada has created a plan to deal with homelessness as part of its City Council Strategic Plan 2024-2030. One goal is to “work with community partners to find a suitable location for the provision of homeless services outside of Olde Town.”

But it matters where, Marriott said.

“The distribution of homeless services is a very difficult thing to do,” he said. “There’s no ideal spot for it, but some places are worse than others.”

The launch of several regional navigation centers is underway in metro Denver to help bring a more comprehensive response to the problem.

RecoveryWorks on West Colfax Avenue in Lakewood operates a one-stop shop for people without a home who are in need of a myriad of resources and services. Bridge House in Englewood is scheduled to open a facility in March, with 20 beds for temporary overnight stays and another 47 to 50 beds for those looking for work or undergoing job training.

Conversion of the hotel in Aurora to a homeless navigation center is expected to be completed by the end of this year, though there is no hard date for an opening just yet.

Simpson, Arvada’s mayor, said that despite the city’s scuttled plans for a navigation center, it’s still committed to doing what it can to address a problem that shows no signs of disappearing — especially as home prices and apartment rents along the Front Range remain burdensome to many.

To that end, the city recently reserved 30 to 35 rooms at a hotel in the city to provide shelter to those in need. Harnessing state grant money, Arvada is giving vouchers to people for overnight stays.

“We’re going to catch these folks before they start on that downward spiral,” Simpson said.

Cowling, the head of Mission Arvada, said whatever objections there may be to visible homelessness in the community, the need is not going to go away. And neither will her organization.

“We are going to keep doing what we do. There have to be places where we can do this work,” she said. “We will be here but there are still going to be folks we can’t reach because of mental health and criminal behaviors — that’s going to continue to grow.”

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