Tackling the tragedy of homelessness in the Denver metro area and helping these men and women at the margins of society get on a path to healthy self-sufficiency is again the focus of big promises and plans.

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has embraced an idealistic, historically flawed, strategy popular with bureaucrats and “homeless advocates” that focuses on housing over healing, avoiding a complex required treatment regimen for underlying human problems.

It’s the same tactic that then-Mayor John Hickenlooper used  in his Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, which launched 18 years ago and sputtered into failure.

In contrast, neighboring Aurora is pursuing a diametrically opposed strategy. It’s a new tale of two cities that could provide a valuable and needed experiment on what local government can do most effectively not simply to house, but to help.

The stats released this week crystallized the depths of the challenge, not simply for downtown but for the entire metro area. The annual one-day, point-in-time study showed a nearly one-third increase year over year, with thousands more people on the streets (in fact, some homeless advocates say that this survey likely understates the metro area homeless population).

This is unconscionable – and unsurprising.

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The various problems attendant to the rise in homelessness, including substance abuse, mental illness, public heath and crime have been well documented. Though statistics vary widely, at least 30% of the homeless have mental health conditions and at least half have drug and/or alcohol addictions.

It’s clear throwing tax money at the problem isn’t the answer, with Denver alone spending $152 million in 2022 with another $254 million slated for this year.

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, on day one, declared a city emergency. Though the plan is loaded with talking points, the reality is it’s hardly innovative. In fact, he’s treading an old worn and tired road, walked by many enthusiasts before him.

Johnston’s policy is “Housing First,” acquiring and/or building thousands of housing units, often with a sky-high price tag, and provide them to the homeless, usually cost free, just to get them off the streets – which seems logical, until you dig into the details.

The multi-decade track record of “Housing First” is it puts healing the homeless second. Providing a new home is great but if it comes with no requirements or even incentives that one participate in treatment services, what is the long-term promise?

As a Heritage Foundation study noted, “the tragic flaw of Housing First is that it reduces human beings to housing statistics.” In essence, the metric bureaucrats are looking for is “housing retention” which is bureaucratese for “people are indoors.”

Johnston has said he will provide some degree of “wraparound” social services at the new housing sites but is loudly silent about requiring participation.

It’s a huge flaw to believe people who have deep and lingering addiction and mental health issues will look up at a ceiling instead of the sky and voluntarily jump into recovery. It puts happy hopes ahead of doing the truly hard work of helping people heal.

Aurora has an opposite plan, with much more promise.

Passionately spearheaded by Councilman Dustin Zvonek and Mayor Mike Coffman, Aurora wants to tip Housing First on its head. The alternative is “Treatment First” which logically puts a premium on getting the homeless safely off the streets and into temporary housing where there is an expectation that people will participate in addiction, mental health and other services.

Zvonek, who lost his mother to suicide after her life of periodic housing dependency and substance abuse, recognizes the reality that without strong incentives, most people will continue in the inertia of addiction while avoiding treatment. Only with focused and effective treatment can these men and women ever find a solid path to work, dignity and self-sufficiency.

In fact, Aurora is seeking to create a regional homelessness facility that will include levels of incentives where the more treatment one completes, the more doors open to additional benefits, housing, work and other opportunities.

One city will try to fix a problem by hugging empty hope while ducking decades of failed housing experiments. Aurora, by focusing on shelter with healing, will harness the power of the human spirit to help people stand again in dignity.

My money is on Aurora.

Sean Duffy, a former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Bill Owens, is a communications and media relations strategist and ghostwriter based in the Denver area.