Negotiating a Space to Rest: Denver's Camping Ban and Camping in Denver

On May 14, 2012, camping became illegal in Denver, Colorado.  Over the past 25 years, the development of downtown Denver followed identifiable patterns of neoliberal governance.  Single room occupancy hotels were upgraded into “loft-living” condos, rundown streetscapes were intensely policed then trendified, a major downtown street was pedestrianized.  Urban policies focusing on commercialization and real estate development contributed to Denver’s revitalization while exacerbating the city’s problem with homelessness.  As experienced in other cities, concurrently rising property values and increasing numbers of homeless people have led to various municipal ordinances intended to render homeless people invisible to the consuming public.  In Denver, a sit-lie ordinance was enacted and park curfews were more strictly enforced to keep homelessness from the public’s field of view.  Consequently, for residents without a permanent address, finding a place to rest became increasingly difficult.  Then in 2011, playing off of popular distaste toward the Occupy Denver Movement, conservative politicians and the Downtown Denver Partnership, a business improvement district, sought and succeeded in introducing legislation outlawing camping—sleeping in public with any sort of “protection against the elements”.

Aware that the camping ban did not eliminate homelessness and interested in how Denver’s homeless residents were coping with the ban, we focused on a particularly vulnerable homeless community, injection drug users (IDU).  Conducting participant and unobtrusive observation as well as in-depth interviews with 24 IDU, we learned that their continuing survival depends on a mixture of three interrelated processes:  a complex moral economy of mutual aid and mutual predation within and between homeless communities, acts of often unexpected kindness by agents of the state officially charged with enforcing the camping ban, and the articulation of public and hidden transcripts playing off various tropes of homelessness, helplessness, and self-help.