Each Friday night time, the Republican mayor of Aurora, Colo. trades his workplace for a cot on the native homeless shelter — and he’s been doing it for months.
Mike Coffman, 71, sleeps on the Aurora Regional Navigation Campus in his city that borders Denver — so he can higher empathize with the challenges homeless individuals face — earlier than serving to serve breakfast on Saturday mornings. His in a single day stays additionally give him a front-row seat to how the state spends $481 million a 12 months on homelessness.
“The expertise has enabled me to higher perceive their distinctive and complicated challenges and it has helped me to see them with compassion, as people, and never by means of a lens of condescension or contempt,” Coffman, a former Congressman and Marine who served in Iraq, wrote on Fb.
“Consistency is essential in order that they know that I shall be there each Friday . . . they’ve develop into extra relaxed and open about speaking to me about their challenges and expectations for his or her future.”
The in a single day stays started in February on the 600-bed transitional housing campus, which Coffman helped launch in November 2025 by means of the nonprofit Superior Pathways after his earlier experiences with homelessness within the metropolis.
This system is designed as a three-step path towards independence, transferring residents from an emergency shelter in to habit restoration, psychological well being providers and job coaching, earlier than finally reaching transitional housing for these working full-time.
“I’ll proceed to stick with these experiencing homelessness, each Friday night time, till this system is all the pieces that I imagine that it may be and it’s a mannequin, not only for Colorado, however for the nation,” Coffman wrote.
The mayor’s newest hands-on strategy follows a way more controversial experiment he carried out 5 years in the past.
Through the winter of 2021, Coffman — who served in Congress from 2009 to 2019 and have become mayor in December 2019 — disguised himself as a homeless veteran and spent seven days and nights residing in shelters and encampments throughout Aurora and neighboring Denver, sleeping beneath a tarp as temperatures dropped into the kids.
After the undercover stint, he advised CBS4 Information, “It wasn’t enjoyable. It was actually laborious . . . however extremely impactful.”
Homelessness, he concluded on the time, was largely a “way of life alternative, and it’s a very harmful way of life alternative,” reported the information station.
He additionally attributed the issue to “drug tradition.”
The remarks sparked instant backlash from homeless advocates.
Aurora Council member Juan Marcano, a progressive who ran unsuccessfully towards Coffman for mayor and left workplace in 2023, known as the undercover effort “essentially the most disgusting factor I’ve ever seen an elected official do,” in accordance with the Colorado Sentinel.
Others defended Coffman’s intentions.
Then-Mayor Professional Tem Francoise Bergan known as the week on the streets “a courageous factor to do.”
Colorado’s homelessness disaster has continued to worsen because the pandemic.
In line with the Widespread Sense Institute, the state’s homeless inhabitants grew 90% between 2020 and 2024 — the fourth-largest enhance within the nation — with practically 18,700 individuals now experiencing homelessness statewide.
