PRAGMATIC ISSUES

Denver’s glossy promises of renewal have started to crack and nowhere is that more visible than in the blocks downtown where the city’s “dream team” swore they were bringing change.

KDVR’s recent report peeled back the curtain on what locals have known for a very long time, that the “open-air drug markets” thriving near Colfax, Broadway, and downtown’s transit core never went away, they just grew bolder. Residents describe brazen mid-day use, dealing in plain sight, violence and prostitution and a steady flow of people who seem forgotten by every promise City Hall has ever made.

The Mayor’s office insists the city is “offering help,”  outreach teams, treatment access, temporary shelter. But to the small business owners and tenants living beside the chaos, those words sound like vapor. What they see is a revolving door of users, a city too timid to enforce basic safety, and neighborhoods caught between compassion and collapse.

A Tale of Two Denvers

The city’s leadership talks about empathy and long-term solutions. But in the trenches around the bus stops, alleys, Papa John’s and underpasses, residents and workers are watching people overdose, become violent, act out, walk around like zombies and blatantly ignore the law on the same blocks where families used to walk at dusk.

Community groups told KDVR they’re not against help they’re against hypocrisy. They watch cleanup crews sweep a corner one morning only to see the same group and then some return by sunset. They call for treatment beds that don’t exist, police that don’t respond, and policies that amount to press releases instead of progress.

It’s the familiar Denver cycle, press conference, task force, “pilot program,” photo op.

Then silence.

The “ Denver Dream Team” that vowed to tackle homelessness and addiction has instead delivered a dream deferred, a polite paralysis that pretends management equals compassion.

Help Without Results Isn’t Help

Here’s the truth the city doesn’t want to confront, offering services isn’t the same as delivering change. Outreach without follow-through is just theater. Shelters are being closed, we have zero long-term treatment programs along with housing that cater to addiction and mental illness, we have no state hospitals to which we could send those that are truly so mentally unhealthy they will never be able to reintegrate into society and we refuse to jail the criminals.

When residents no longer feel safe walking home, when local businesses surrender to the chaos, when entire blocks become outdoor drug bazaars, it’s not “progress.”

It’s surrender.

Denver’s leaders have a moral obligation not just to offer help, but to restore accountability. That means measuring outcomes, not headlines, enforcing laws fairly, not selectively like they are with the Papa John’s at 1111 E Colfax, and proving that compassion and safety can coexist. Because right now, the only thing coexisting in Denver is chaos and neglect and that’s not a vision, it’s a failure.

Until City Hall can bridge the canyon between promises and proof, the residents of Denver will continue to live in a city that cares more about optics than outcomes.