The seemingly intractable dilemma of the growing homelessness in Colorado Springs may be at a crossroads. A Gazette news report last week confirmed the New Promise Family Shelter on South Nevada Avenue will shutter its “low-barrier” doors at the end of July. It will transition to become a “high-barrier” operation requiring sobriety instead of permitting drug intemperance.

Though not nearly as pervasive as softer-on-crime cities like Denver, Colorado Springs’ homeless situation is more prevalent than many expect from a city in favor of stronger law-and-order policies — namely hard street drugs and the deadly poison fentanyl — which are coddled at the state and national level.

The grim homeless reality on the ground people see daily is somber and infuriating. Donations to the shelter declined by a staggering $150,000 last year, ultimately leading to the low-barrier shelter’s closure. Covid economics probably played a role in this. It’s also possible that donors saw the Springs’ homeless problem getting worse and voiced their displeasure by holding back handouts. After all, in Old Colorado City it’s routine to see homeless addicts “nodding out” — losing consciousness due to dangerous bodily reactions to ingesting lethal drugs — seemingly asleep in broad daylight on park tables next to families. Elsewhere, taxpayer-funded oases for urbanites, such as Monument Valley and America the Beautiful parks, are littered with drug-using-and-trading vagrants who treat patches of grass and recreation-path underpasses like personal living rooms, kitchens and drug lairs. That is when they’re not begging for money at highway ramps, putting themselves and vehicles in obvious danger of accidents. Further, this demographic uses our creeks as bathrooms and laundromats.

As explained in The Gazette’s news report, some residents are uncomfortable and don’t feel safe in the South Nevada Avenue neighborhood that is home to the New Promise Family Shelter. An international coffee chain at the heart of the thoroughfare, less than a quarter mile north of the shelter, indefinitely closed its indoor counter service and seating because of the crime-and-drug environment posed by the population of vagrant drug users.

The disastrous opioid epidemic has devastated parts of South Nevada — negatively affecting businesses, the homeless and the housed. To move past this drug epidemic, it is crucial to pivot away from low-barrier shelters — which New Promise has been since opening in February 2020. The low-barrier experiment has not worked, so it’s time to return to the old high-barrier model that provided carrot-and-stick incentives to escape the bonds of substance abuse.

Want to have a place to stay for you and your loved ones? Kick the dependence — which we’ll help you do — and you get a path to and plan for a long-term solution to homelessness and substance addiction. A handout enables dysfunction, while a hand up heals. Though it may sound crass, funding and building that strategy is much more compassionate than letting homeless addicts continue to get high, either slowly or quickly killing themselves, while putting a roof over their family’s head.

Whether out of naïve kindness or misguided empathetic philosophical beliefs and political principles, Family Promise of Colorado Springs operated as a low-barrier facility with “trauma-informed care” rooted in the idea “to serve the most vulnerable families and children in the Colorado Springs area.” The approach failed most clients. Only 36% have moved into permanent stable housing. It is clear the low-barrier approach did little to deter the city’s homeless drug problem due to enablement and a lack of standards and consequences.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. Dennis Culhane, a social science researcher with primary expertise in homelessness and assisted housing policy, is adamant that addicts and people with mental illnesses respond best to housing as a reward, rather than an entitlement. This conclusion flies in the face of the progressive claim that science supports a “housing-first” policy of giving housing to homeless addicts without requiring sobriety.

We concur with Culhane. Homeless addicts benefit from recovery-oriented, sobriety-contingent housing. It saves the lives of those willing to accept it. We should never enable self-destruction. With the homeless, let’s never give assistance that enables a deadly trip. Let’s always offer a generous, non-judgmental, and compassionate hand of help to those willing to accept it.

Colorado Springs Gazette editorial board