After five months of airing their grievances in public, members of the Colorado Springs Homeless Union, a grassroots initiative that announced its formation on Nov. 3, want a response to their requests for change in how the city is handling homelessness.

“We’re just trying to help people,” said Shane Hood, a leader of the group who has been homeless since 2015.

The coalition sent a letter to Colorado Springs City Council on Saturday as “a final attempt to engage in productive dialogue about the issues” that members say they are facing.

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The letter goes on to state that if no action is taken, “We will be left with no choice but to organize our community into a nonviolent mass movement that will require our city to have the conversations you all have been thus far unwilling to have. The choice is yours.”

The words are not a threat, Hood said, but rather a promise.

“Nonviolent mass movement means we’re going to try to do it in more numbers — more people are going to be out picketing and protesting,” he said. “We are kind of fed up with how the city has been treating us.”

Debra Cain, who was homeless for 10 years before recently getting an apartment and also is a leader of the union, cites as pressing needs more mental health services, low-income housing and respite care for people who exit hospitals requiring further medical assistance but have nowhere to go.

“We have done everything we can, and we don’t feel as if they’re listening to us,” she said of elected officials. “It’s almost like they’re ignoring us.”

The coalition had not heard from City Council members as of Monday afternoon, Cain said. Some city councilors told The Gazette they had not seen the email as of Monday, while others were unavailable for comment.

Some council members have expressed a desire to meet with the group at recent meetings.

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Councilor Nancy Henjum said to presenters in February that the City Council is paying attention and discussing the issues raised.

Councilor David Leinweber agreed the city needs to do a better job with vulnerable populations.

“There is a solution and we do have to work together,” Councilor Yolanda Avila said in February. “We can no longer criminalize homelessness.”

Henjum said the answer “cannot be entirely on the nonprofits. It certainly can’t be entirely on the back of the city and our budget … do we need to do more? Absolutely. We do need to partner to do it.”

Hood said the homeless community’s words and intentions have been misconstrued, particularly regarding an alternative shelter that opened warming centers at local churches and a progressive community center during a 10-day subzero cold snap in January.

“They’re trying to say we encouraged people to have guns and drugs on them because they didn’t check them for those things when they spent the night,” he said, “which isn’t true.”

The situation will continue to worsen if action is not taken, Cain said.

“The letter was designed to get them to listen to us and stop kicking the can down the road,” she said. “They need to put in rent caps and low-income housing.”

The group’s first letter to municipal leaders, issued in October, called for emergency shelter options other than Springs Rescue Mission, the city’s only overnight shelter for single adults. They’d also like trash cans and functioning restrooms in public parks, affordable bus transportation and less punitive police outreach.

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Hood told City Council in February, in conjunction with a rally that the union held, that he’d like to see the city open vacant old motels to the homeless population, particularly during cold weather.

The union, based on the activist model of the National Union of the Homeless, represents what Hood calls the good homeless people.

“Everybody sees the bad homeless out there, but they don’t see the good homeless because they mostly stick to themselves. The good homeless aren’t on drugs generally and aren’t all messed up mentally. They’re respectful of businesses and don’t leave a mess everywhere,” he said Monday.

“We’re trying to help with the image of the city at the same time as helping people who are homeless and people who are on the verge of homelessness.”

For example, paying homeless people to maintain trash receptacles and public bathrooms would solve two problems, Hood said. It would enable homeless people to earn money toward housing and improve the city’s image, he said: “We’d have a cleaner city and less homeless people.” 

Complaints about the Homeless Outreach Team, a program of the Colorado Springs Police Department, have focused on claims that possessions are being unfairly seized. HOT team supervisor Sgt. Olav Chaney has told The Gazette the team posts cleanup dates at illegal urban camps before they are demolished and works to respect items that appear valuable.

Hood disputes that.

“The police HOT team destroys people,” he said. “They come in and take all your stuff, and you went from square one to square zero. Homeless people don’t have that much stuff, so what they do have is extremely precious to them.”

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Cain said the letter to City Council is “a plan, a promise that we will be heard, and it’s nonviolent. We do not believe in violence; it’s what we’re trying to get away from.”

If city leaders listened to the Colorado Springs Homeless Union’s ideas of what they believe would improve the city’s response to homelessness, the homeless population would decrease, members say.

“Granted, there are going to be some people that are willingly homeless because of drug addiction and things like that,” Cain said. “But I think we ought to put our city on notice that they’ve got to get somebody out there to curb the problem and leave the peaceful people alone.

“If they’re not going to help us, then at least quit harassing us.”