By Lindy Browning | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Downtown residents and businesses continue to be frustrated by the Grand Junction City Council’s efforts to find a way to meet the needs of vulnerable homeless people while saying they want to protect the homeowners and businesses from the darker element that lives within the homeless population.
In a recent turn of events, the Council, in an effort to address the violence, crime and exploitation of the area’s approximately 2,000 homeless people, created a buffer zone that extends from curb to curb at the property on 261 Ute Avenue.
The buffer zone was an attempt to stop the criminal element from dealing drugs and prostitution at the address where the Homeless Resource Center is located. The idea was to give the center more authority to manage the area outside the tent shelter.
What the Council intended and what actually happened are two different things. The homeless campers just moved across the street onto 2nd Street and over into the Two Rivers Convention Center parking lot and set up a camp at the entrance to the True Hotel that is often patronized by AMTRAC travelers as they come to and through Grand Junction.
Shane Burton told the Council on Dec. 4 that the west side encampment has now moved to 2nd Street in front of the construction zone.
“It’s getting worse daily in front of my house on 2nd Street. Different tribes (among the homeless) have problems with each other and it’s really getting scary,” he said. “I invite the members of the Council to come out after the meeting tonight to see how interesting it is.”
Burton told the Councilmembers that the homeless are using the bathroom in the Two Rivers Convention Center parking lot.
“You might want to consider getting a shuttle bus for people coming in on AMTRAC to get them to their hotel; it’s quite scary to walk through that area in the evenings,” he said.
One man, who did not give his name to Council, said that he thinks that the city needs to pass an ordinance that prohibits encampments on public sidewalks and other inappropriate public spaces. He told them that there needs to be more shelter capacity, as the current shelter capacity is at its limits nightly.
Ben Van Dyke perhaps spoke the most eloquently and told the hardest truth to the Council when he said, “We’re not seeing a lot of solutions after talking about this for almost a year. (The problem) it just keeps moving around the area, and now they are over on 2nd Street and Two Rivers. The entrance of True Hotel is now a homeless encampment.”
“I question what we could have done with the million we have spent in the last year on this,” he continued. “How many beds could we have provided? It’s funny how people’s attitudes can change when they don’t have a warm bed. The fact of the matter is when you are just surviving and you don’t have a safe place to sleep at night, a person can never concentrate on fixing any other part of your life. The fact that we focused so many resources on a band-aid in the Resource Center is frankly disrespectful to the whole community.”
Van Dyke said that “we” could have done so much better and that he believes that there is time to still accomplish what needs to be done.
“Instead of creating this space where people stay homeless their whole lives, we can find a way to bring them out of the system and raise them above it. I’m really concerned that we’re creating a problem on 2nd Street that we may not be able to clean up without drastic measures. I worry that there is so much strength in those numbers that it’s not going to be easy to move them,” predicted Van Dyke.
He suggested that the homeless all be moved to Lincoln Park Barn where the building is heated and the surrounding property is owned by the city, making the area easier to manage and control.
After the public comment period, the Council voted to approve a lease amendment with Homeward Bound Homeless Center, reducing the lease time from expiring in 2026 to April of 2025, with the hope that the efforts by city staff to locate a more appropriate long-term facility would be successful.