Denver's Crackdown on Being Homeless.

• Author: Nathanson, Rebecca
• Position: Denver, Colorado

The temperature in Denver's River North Art District has topped ninety degrees on a blistering July afternoon, but Jerry Burton keeps sweeping the sidewalk in front of a fenced-in lot. It's something he's good at; during his two years of homelessness, he kept his spot on the street tidy.

Burton, fifty-five, a tall man dressed in a light brown shirt and matching pants, was born in Alabama and arrived in Colorado twenty-six years ago. He's lived mostly in nearby Aurora--best known as the site of a mass shooting during a 2012 screening of The Dark Knight Rises--but personal issues and rent hikes pushed him out onto the streets of the state capital in November of 2014.

At first he stayed in the Samaritan House homeless shelter in downtown Denver, where he also worked as a cook. But then he made the curious decision to leave the shelter and live on the street.

"I'd seen this police officer taking away people's blankets outside," he explains. "It was cold as hell. And that kind of hurt. I said a prayer. Me and the Lord talked. I talked to him and I was about ready to quit anyway and come out here and live on the street to bring attention to it."

Burton lived on the street in two locations until February, when he received an apartment from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Denver ranks in the nation's top ten major cities in its numbers of homeless families with children, unaccompanied homeless youth, and homeless veterans. But this is happening amidst an economic boom. Both Colorado and the Denver metro area have record-low unemployment rates of about 2.4 percent. Boosted by its proximity to the Rocky Mountains, Denver frequently finds itself near the top of "Best Places to Live" lists. But that acclaim and popularity have driven up housing prices so high that many people can no longer afford a place to live.

On one Monday night in January, there were more than 5,100 homeless people counted in the Denver metro area. About 18 percent were unsheltered, with the rest staying in emergency shelters or transitional housing. Almost one-fifth would be considered "newly homeless," meaning they are in the first year of their first episode of homelessness; more than 1,000 were deemed "chronically homeless."

In 2012, the same year that the Colorado state legislature legalized marijuana, Denver's city government passed a law trying to address the city's ever-more visible homeless population. This increased the number of people using--being pushed into--shelters. It also spurred a federal class-action lawsuit and a trial, bringing local fame to Jerry Burton.

Cities across the country have passed laws meant to crack down not on homelessness but on its visibility.

"Cities are under a lot of pressure to 'do something' about homelessness and visible poverty in their midst, and they have responded through a misguided attempt to simply outlaw the presence of visibly poor people," says Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

Out of 187 cities surveyed by the law center last year, half prohibit camping in certain public spaces and one-third do so in public spaces citywide. Since 2006, laws prohibiting camping on public land citywide have increased 69 percent in those communities. That same report specifically names three cities to its "Hall of Shame," recognizing their "particularly bad laws or practices." Denver is one of them.

In 2005, the City of Denver forbade sitting or lying on any public right-of-way in the downtown business district from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. An ordinance passed in 2012 went further, banning "unauthorized camping" on public or private property. "Camping" is defined broadly: "to reside or dwell temporarily in a place, with shelter." "Shelter" is defined as "any tent, tarpaulin...