We are a Boulder County based coalition of advocates and activists seeking to protect the rights and dignities of our neighbors experiencing homelessness, through mutual aid and direct action

We demand that Boulder City Council:

1. Immediately direct the Boulder Police Department to cease enforcing the camping ban, and commit to repealing the ordinances that comprise it (Boulder Municipal Code 5-6-10, 8-6-3, 9-3-3(a)(15))
2. Make existing public restroom facilities open overnight
3. Preserve funding for Severe Weather Sheltering

Evictions of unhoused people (“sweeps”) are cruel, dangerous to the entire Boulder community, and even counterproductive to the stated goals of the anti-homeless lobby, as significant evidence shows that people do not leave the city, and that victims of sweeps typically move only a few blocks away. 

Epidemiologists and public health officials advise against forcing unhoused people to move during the pandemic

• Evictions disconnect people from service providers and disperse them through the community, increasing risk of infectious disease spread.
• Transmission rates are higher in shelters as well, despite social distancing & screening attempts.

A 2018 ruling by the 9th Circuit Court against the city of Boise established that criminalizing people for sleeping outside when there’s insufficient shelter constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

• By conservative city estimates at least 600 unhoused people live in Boulder, with other estimates as high as 900.
• Yet over the past few years the city has aggressively shut down shelters, and following a more than 50% reduction in space this year, only one remains - the North Boulder Shelter for the Homeless (BSH), which due to COVID-19 restrictions has a hard limit of 120 beds.
• City officials include the space in the COVID-19 Recover Center (CRC) to inflate that number by 40 beds, but the CRC is restricted to those that shelter employees determine to be symptomatic and is almost empty on most nights.
• Last winter, even when there was a dedicated Severe Weather Shelter (SWS) with 72 beds, and a total system capacity of 282 beds, people were being turned away.

Many people are explicitly blocked from the shelter and most other city programs for reasons such as:

• Being unable to prove six-month continuous residency
• Drug addictions
• Having children
• Otherwise banned at the arbitrary discretion of shelter staff for alleged violations of policies that are not publicly documented on the poorly maintained BSH website. 

Others are banned implicitly, because:

• The shelter is physically inaccessible to their disabilities.
• Service animals are prohibited.
• They fear the demonstrably higher risk of transmission of COVID-19 and other diseases.
• They have trauma from being assaulted or harassed at shelters in the past.
• Since there is nowhere for people to go during the day, even in temperatures between 10 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and because they may be kicked out suddenly any morning and told they can’t return at night, people are reluctant to give up survival gear like tents and sleeping bags, but there is extremely limited storage at the shelter.
• The shelter does not do a good job of meeting the needs of the unhoused population - it is located 4 miles from the municipal court, and a similar distance from the nearest medical & mental health facilities, food pantries, and other essential services.

These are only a fraction of the reasons why Boulder is providing insufficient resources to shelter those without housing, and an easy, cost-saving solution is to simply cease stopping people from trying to secure shelter for themselves, and allow the community to provide aid. Join us in opposing discriminatory policing, and supporting public health, human dignity, and the right to rest. Stop the sweeps, end the camping ban.