Five years into Mayor Hickenlooper's ten-year plan to end homelessness, the Road Home program has been honored for its success by the El Pomar Foundation. Hick's a penny-pinching genius and found that by doing something rather than nothing, he could reduce Denver's annual cost per homeless person from $40,000 to $15,000.
According to the Road Home website, the program has reduced 16th Street Mall panhandlers by 83 percent, and cut the number of chronically homeless by developing 759 housing units. With a program this successful comes the wish to expand services...
Roadworks: Without raising the budget, this program takes money allocated for street-maintenance-vehicle purchase, repair and fueling and uses it instead to fund a jobs program that encourages the homeless to clean the street corners where they panhandle.
Additional Road-Home-inspired programs for homeless relatives and students are featured below. Roadbeds: By developing housing for the chronically homeless, Denver has made several emergency shelter beds available. Roadbeds would be an inter-city program that allows cities with similar Road Home programs to set aside a specified shelter for the use of out-of-town homeless visitors of local homeless residents.
The Denver Road Home program has the potential to become the most famous thing to come out of our town since the Denver boot. A suggestion to honor it accordingly can be seen below. Road Scholars: With its national reputation for educating non-traditional students, Metro should drop the Roadrunner (which is not indigenous to Denver) and instead adopt a mascot that recognizes Denver's distinct character.
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This comic has featured other Worst-Case Scenarios for helping the homeless.
More from our Kenny Be/Comics archive: "Carmelo Anthony & other CO celebs who should be shot into space: Kenny Be's Fotochop Friday."
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