Denver Union Station: Clinic or Bus Depot?

Since present process a $54 million renovation and grand reopening in 2014, Denver Union Station has served because the bustling coronary heart of downtown journey and commerce. Thirty-thousand guests cross via day by day to go to the luxurious Crawford Resort in addition to high-end eating places and retail outlets positioned beneath the long-lasting neon-red letters illuminating the station’s floor ground. Nonetheless, there’s one other facet to Union Station – a literal underbelly – that conjures up significantly much less awe than the grand construction above.

The underground bus terminals of Union Station positioned beneath the Wewatta and Chestnut Pavilions on the east and west sides of the station, respectively, have change into a sheltering location for lots of the metropolis’s residents fighting homelessness, substance-use dysfunction and untreated psychological sickness. Now, vacationers complain that they’re afraid to traverse down the pavilion escalators into the confined bus depot as a result of they could encounter open-air drug use, untreated mental-health crises and even violence. All of the whereas, the higher degree of Union Station stays a vibrant vacationer vacation spot.

How did these two sides of Union Station — the façade and the truth — come to co-exist?

Of the greater than 10,000 unhoused people residing in Denver, almost 1 / 4 endure the brutal actuality of being unsheltered. Town and native nonprofit organizations function a restricted variety of emergency shelters, which regularly run full, in addition to transitional housing packages, many with waitlists on the order of years. For a mess of causes, together with the financial impression of the COVID-19 pandemic and excessive housing prices, Denver continues to expertise rising charges of homelessness. This, along with the overdose disaster, has created the proper surroundings for a rising public-health disaster that’s straining the already fraying cloth of our metropolis’s social security web and forcing an ever-greater variety of folks to hunt survival in public areas.

In the meantime, Could 2022 marked the ten-year anniversary of Denver’s unauthorized tenting ban. Whereas there was some leniency of this anti-homeless ordinance throughout the preliminary waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, enforcement is now again on in full power. For instance, final yr metropolis officers shuttered Civic Middle Park, which had regularly change into a de facto out of doors tenting area and space for centralization of outreach efforts. In consequence, the neighborhood of individuals gathered there was frequently displaced across the metropolis till they in the end landed at Union Station.

Union Station is a smart place for folks experiencing homelessness to congregate due to all it has to supply — public restrooms, entry to locations to cost telephones and different units and, most vital, safety from the weather and 4 partitions that lend a way of relative security. However over the previous yr, RTD and Denver police have elevated their presence round and inside Union Station in a extensively publicized effort to “clear it up.”

In February, the Denver Police Division carried out a large-scale sweep of Union Station that resulted in 43 arrests, most for low-level drug or paraphernalia possession. Below new management, RTD’s police power has introduced plans to even additional broaden their presence and visibility round Union Station to discourage drug use and restore public order. However this inpouring of high-priced regulation enforcement assets does little to handle the underlying causes of dysfunction affecting Union Station — largely homelessness and untreated substance-use dysfunction — and has solely led to extra traumatization and violence among the many folks sheltering there.

There are those that imagine a distinct method — a public-health method — is important. A bunch of docs, nurses and outreach staff from a number of nonprofit businesses conduct road outreach on a weekly foundation to homeless encampments round Denver. Because the homeless inhabitants sheltering inside Union Station has grown, these suppliers have been taking their medical abilities and gear to the decrease bus terminal, the place they provide look after acute points like pores and skin infections and wounds in addition to power points like coronary heart illness and diabetes. If a basement bus terminal feels like a less-than-ideal surroundings for docs, nurses and volunteers to be offering typically lifesaving medical care — it’s. Certainly, they might somewhat be treating sufferers in well-equipped and personal areas somewhat than out of a backpack. They go see sufferers at Union Station as a result of proper now, that’s the place sufferers want probably the most assist.

Extra regulation enforcement assets is not going to resolve a public-health drawback rooted in homelessness. We have to help efforts to put money into long-term options — reasonably priced transitional housing, strong community-based psychological well being providers and equitable academic and profession alternatives — in order that Union Station, or some other place prefer it, received’t must be the “final cease” for individuals who have fallen via each different crack. Till then, folks experiencing homelessness will live on in public areas, and so will the medical suppliers and volunteers devoted to caring for them.

Whereas Denver officers bear a lot of the duty for taking motion to handle the homelessness disaster, bizarre residents have an vital function to play, too. Residents of Denver should acknowledge that Union Station is a part of a rising public-health drawback in our metropolis. And the factor a couple of public-health drawback is that this: It may not straight have an effect on you. You may not store at Union Station or journey by bus, so that you may suppose what goes on within the decrease terminal doesn’t impression your life a lot in a technique or one other. However, on the very least, every avoidable hospitalization attributable to a scarcity of fresh and secure housing prices the town taxpayer {dollars} — your {dollars}. Each incarceration ensuing from elevated police presence, too.

What is going on within the decrease terminal of Union Station impacts us all, as a result of the “public” in public well being is made up of people like us, and we as people are linked via the shared advantages and obligations of society. Public well being just isn’t solely the duty of well being researchers, medical professionals or metropolis officers; it’s the duty of each one that participates in that shared society. We should all acknowledge homelessness because the public-health disaster that it’s, and advocate for investing in long-term options to alleviate the pressures positioned on Union Station.

Samantha Sills, MPH epidemiology, is a analysis assistant in Common Inside Drugs, Anschutz Medical Campus. She desires to thank Dr. Sarah Axelrath for permitting her the chance to shadow, in addition to for reviewing and modifying this piece.

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