Commentary: A Love Letter From East Colfax to the Mayoral Candidates

I love this city.

I want to talk with you about this city I love and some of the people who live here. I want you to meet some of SAME Cafe’s friends who live outside and talk with us about real solutions to homelessness, mental wellness and addiction in a city that offers few authentic routes out of these problems. I want to share with you that when Denver does a “homeless sweep,” we at SAME Cafe see a rise in anxiety and acting out of helplessness among our friends who lose everything they own to a dump truck paid for by the city. When we as a city criminalize poverty, sometimes people break things. (SAME’s windows have been broken four times in the last month — prior to that, it was only once in seventeen years.)

I love this city.

I’ve walked nearly every block of downtown, Uptown, City Park and Cap Hill. I love the dumb broken sidewalks but send prayers for people in wheelchairs or walkers. I love the gritty charm of Colfax but wished we added more bike lanes for my banged-up fixie. I know the best view of Denver is from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science balcony, but that goose shit is nearly a tripping hazard in City Park in the springtime.

I love this city that held me through a seminary degree, excommunication, homelessness, another graduate degree from University of Colorado Denver’s School of Public Affairs, a gay marriage, a gay divorce and another gay marriage. I love this city that gave me healthy food when I was homeless at SAME Cafe and a chance to start my career over at Urban Peak. I love having a drink at the Thin Man on 17th Avenue (where I met my second, and probably final, husband) and marveling at how lucky I am.

I love this city that broke me and gave me a chance to start over.

But there is a problem with my story. My homelessness came at age 31, after I had a graduate degree and knew how to work the system. I knew how to use my queer identity as an asset and leverage my career into nonprofit language and get another chance. But I still couldn’t get a lease in Denver when I had a good job because of the nine-month gap in my rental history. I had to get help from a member of the queer community, who stepped in and gave me a place to sleep until I could use them as a landlord reference.

I love this city, but it would have killed me if I didn’t have the networks of support that were built for me: graduate education, gay community members, a career I could build from the ashes of my past, and a place to stay while I built.

No one can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Not even those of us who have bootstraps.

I love this city and I saw all the signs sprinkled around Denver that said “We can do better” when voters soundly defeated lifting the urban camping ban in 2019.

So, let’s do better. Let’s build a city that leverages the incredible wealth of Denver to give obvious pathways to housing, meaningful mental wellness responses, and addiction care that actually works. WellPower (formerly MHCD) is doing incredible things for mental wellness. Food Bank of the Rockies, Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, MetroCaring, the Gathering Place and Urban Peak are doing incredible things for food access and homelessness. The STAR initiative with the police actually worked!

We said “We can do better,” so let’s make it happen.

Let’s start with a cup of coffee at SAME Cafe and talk about solutions together. I’ll have a fresh pot of Pablo’s coffee brewed and some famous SAME Cafe signature cookies out on Monday, June 5, at 4 p.m.

I love this city. Can we talk about how to make it work for everyone in it?

Brad Allen Reubendale, CEO, So All May Eat

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