Are homeless people in Colorado Springs just park hopping?
Christian Murdock, the gazette
Dewy grass and rain-freshened walkways at the Bijou Street entrance to Monument Valley Park gave a glimpse last Thursday morning of what Colorado Springs’ founder, Gen. William Jackson Palmer, had in mind when he donated the land and created his city’s signature public green space.
The linear park that hugs Monument Creek opened in 1907, featuring bridged ponds, a tennis court, an arboretum of native trees and wildflowers, paths for strolling, playgrounds and a mineral spring that Palmer restored — all to provide beauty and a recreational destination for residents and visitors.
The 2-mile-long Monument Valley Park west of downtown still draws crowds to enjoy numerous outdoor activities, but Palmer likely did not envision what some sections of the park would become 118 years later.
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Like the main character in the 1976 movie, “Network,” Susan Padlog is mad as hell and doesn’t want to take it anymore.
“It seems to be changing — it’s gotten worse lately with drugs, people sleeping overnight, and police and fire activity,” she said. “The park has been totally damaged, and people who drive off I-25 see it every day. It’s not a good look.”
Garbage overflows from a garbage can in Monument Valley Park Saturday next to Westview Place and Boulder Crescent Street in downtown Colorado Springs.
She’s lived near the southernmost entryway to the historic park for more than a decade and has watched her slice of paradise slowly erode to ruination.
Transients who have turned living on the streets into their livelihood vandalized the once-majestic rock archway and wall, which are scorched with black marks and graffitied with spray paint.
Residents in the neighborhood formerly known as the Near North End and now called Historic Uptown say trash cans repeatedly have been set on fire, so they’re scarce. A downed lamppost was pillaged for copper. Drug dealers often arrive in cars or on bicycles at a dead-end cul-de-sac for transactions.
“I had a needle five months ago in my front yard, and my dog had in his mouth,” Padlog said. “The park gets cleaned up once in a while — and we in the neighborhood help — but the next day the garbage is back.”
Two porta-potties by the pickleball courts recently were set on fire, and a concrete slab they occupied lies empty and charred.
Someone was cooking meth inside, several people reported.
“A big fog was rolling out of the porta-potties,” said Koby Hartzheim, who has been homeless for years.
He and his buddy, Danny Trujillo, are regulars at Monument Valley Park. They like its proximity to the Marian House soup kitchen, across the street.
“It’s a convenience,” Hatzheim said.
“This is a soup kitchen. They feed homeless and poor people,” Trujillo said, gesturing to the complex to the east. “A park is right next door. Automatically, homeless are going to be here.”
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Park hopping
Neighbors have a theory: that homeless people who historically have populated Dorchester Park, almost 2 miles to the south, have migrated to Monument Valley as the park of choice for passing the time.
People hang out on some steps in Monument Valley Park near Bijou Street on Thursday.
To curb illegal activity, the city erected concrete barriers and closed the Dorchester parking lot off South Nevada Avenue in August 2022.
There’s no word on when or if the park — on property that was donated to the city in 1892 by descendants of the local Dorr family — might become fully functional again. No one from city parks was available to provide an update, a spokesperson said.
Amenities such as trash cans, restrooms and a playground also were removed to discourage public use of Dorchester.
But nearly three years later, homeless people continue to congregate in the covered pavilion in the middle of the park and sleep on the grass and illegally camp underneath the nearby Tejon Street bridge.
Monument Valley and Dorchester each had 24 fires reported last year within a 20-yard radius of the parks, according to the Colorado Springs Fire Department, which responded to emergency calls for service.
This year to-date, Colorado Springs Fire Department has extinguished 13 fires in Monument Valley and nine in Dorchester, statistics show.
“The majority of the fires we respond to in that area are categorized as ‘unauthorized burning involving homeless’ or ‘outside fires,’ which could include warming fires and cooking fires,” said Ashley Franco, Fire Department spokeswoman. “It depends on the situation and if the burning falls inside or outside our outdoor burning laws.”
Police have said crime has decreased since vehicles have been banned from parking at Dorchester, a site that authorities had called a “drive-up, open-air drug sales market.”
“Reducing access has prevented traffic from driving up to the park and limited drug dealing and prostitution — but it hasn’t completely stopped it,” Lt. Brian Steckler told The Gazette last year.
Colorado Springs Police Department did not provide anyone this week to speak about the neighbors’ concerns about Monument Valley Park.
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New safety program
Improvement could come as a new program gets underway. Coverage of a 19-month pilot program called the “Safe and Clean Initiative” from the Downtown Partnership, which launched earlier this month in conjunction with the city, will include a portion of Monument Valley Park, though not near the old rose garden off Bijou Street.
Designed to “drive economic development in downtown Colorado Springs,” according to officials, the program is training and preparing to deploy a larger security team, ambassadors and a dedicated homeless outreach team to “improve safety, cleanliness and the overall experience for businesses, residents and visitors.”
The goal is not to move homeless people from downtown streets to a different area of the community but rather to “get them the services they need for a more permanent solution,” said Pat Rigdon, director of downtown safety and public space management for Downtown Colorado Springs, which is heading the new initiative.
“Many people have expressed they’re afraid to come to downtown,” he said. “We want to make it safer and more welcoming.”
Hours for four security officers are increasing from eight hours every day to 16 hours on weekdays and 18 hours on weekends, Rigdon said.
Six paid ambassadors and volunteers from eight local churches received training last week to perform hospitality, clean-up and light outreach. They learned how to deescalate volatile situations, what services are available for people who are homeless and “how to best approach and interact with people experiencing a wide variety of issues to include mental illness and addiction,” Rigdon said.
“I’ve heard concerns we’re simply trying to drive the homeless population out of downtown, and that’s not true,” he said. “It’s behavior focused, yes, but the idea is about changing the behavior, asking the person to stop doing something, and as a last resort situation to have police involved. We’re not trying to just Band-Aid the issues downtown and put it somewhere else, we’re willing to work with people.”
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Other possible changes
Other changes could be on the way as well. It’s unknown how a new executive order, “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” which President Donald Trump signed last Thursday, will play out for services to the homeless.
The order directs the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to prioritize funding enforcement of local laws that ban urban camping and public loitering, prioritize mental illness treatment, reinstitute involuntary civil commitment for people who are a risk to themselves or others and remove from federal funding recovery programs that use “harm reduction” methods, such as providing needles to drug users.
The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless opposes the ideas, saying in a statement that they contradict the industry’s “best practices and rigorous studies and data” for providing housing first and also lack compassion and protection of health data.
Rigdon said committing people to treatment facilities against their will is complicated and “has to be handled very carefully, so as to not be abused.” But some people who live on the streets clearly aren’t getting the mental assistance they need, he said, and perhaps could benefit from the process.
“I am encouraged by the number of people in this community who work tirelessly every day to make these issues a little better,” he said.
Padlog said other local parks don’t have nearly the amount of activity from the homeless community as Monument Valley. And while neighbors have reached out to city staff, leaders and police about the problems, they say they’ve been told everyone is doing what they can, but there are limitations.
Trujillo, who’s lived on the streets off and on for decades since he was a child and is now 58, said the majority of damage, destruction and other unsavory behavior happening in Monument Valley comes from newly arrived transients who make trouble, not the old hands like himself.
Some newcomers head south in warmer months from Denver, Hatzheim said, which is where he previously lived. Trujillo said the homeless population always burgeons in warmer months, as more vagrants travel and pass through.
Whether the issues attributed to behavior of chronic street people are simply a matter of population growth could be partially answered on Monday, when El Paso County’s annual Point in Time report is released publicly by the Pikes Peak Continuum of Care, which leads the survey.
Required for communities to receive federal funding for homelessness prevention and services, the census counts people living in tents and cars as well as emergency shelters and transitional housing projects on a given night, usually in January.
El Paso County has noted decreases in recent years, bucking state and national trends. But this year could be different.
Trujillo said he doesn’t think there’s any “solution” to homelessness. It’s not a bad lifestyle, he says. It’s just different from the way others live.
“There will always be homeless people,” he said. “We’re not going away. Colorado Springs needs to wake up and realize that.”
Contact the writer: 719-476-1656.
