Mayor Mike Coffman spends every Friday night at a shelter.
71-year-old Mike Coffman, the mayor of Aurora, Colorado, has been following a routine for the last few weeks. On every Friday afternoon, he has been going to the Aurora Regional Navigation Center, where he spends the night with other homeless people. Coffman wants to gain the experience first hand and hence he does not bring anything with him. The shelter provides a blanketr and a cot. He sleeps and the next morning he serves breakfast and then return to his duties.The center offers a tiered system with additional benefits at each level. Tier One offers basic shelter services, Tier Two requires engaging with case managers and peer coaches and Tier Three offers long-term, independent living with additional commitments, including a requirement to hold a full-time job, Sentinel Colorado reported.Coffman said to Sentinel that he started sleeping at the shelter because he wanted to see how the Navigation Center’s services were working and find out where improvements could be made.Coffman said he planned to continue sleeping at the shelter weekly until he felt “the system has adjusted to make sure that we’re meeting the challenges of everybody in Tier One and not forgetting people.”But the photo that went viral from the center drew flak as he was seen sleeping with an industrial ear muff to block outside noise. Social media users commented that the photo proved that he was not experiencing the same thing that others were. He accepted the criticism and acknowledged that initially it was very loud, with dogs barking and dozens of other men. But gradually he got used to the din, he said.
When Mike Coffman called homelessness a choice
The Aurora mayor is known for his love for first-hand experiences. In 2021, he posed as ‘HomelessMike’ for seven days for a CBS4 news segment. For seven days and nights, Coffman stayed in shelters and encampments, sleeping under a tarp. On that program, he called ‘homelessness’ a choice. “It is a lifestyle choice and it is a very dangerous lifestyle choice,” he said but then issued a clarification that he did not mean it the way people interpreted it. He wanted to say that homeless people choose to sleep in either shelters or outdoors.
