7 JUNE 8-14, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | Driving Change CARLON MANUEL ONCE LIVED IN HIS CAR. NOW HE HEADS DENVER’S NEW ASSESSMENT, INTAKE, AND DIVERSION CENTER. BY BENJAMIN NEUFELD Carlon Manuel heard that homeless people were getting shot in their cars on the streets of Los Angeles —and that’s where he was living after being laid off from his job as a college recruiter during the 2008 economic downturn. Despite being a Marine Corps veteran with a master’s degree in community psychology, Manuel found himself calling his two-door blue 280Z home. “Back during that time, I would do some- thing we call a circuit. If you’re homeless, you fi nd resources,” he says, describing a daily rou- tine that involved locating one place to take care of personal hygiene needs and another place with wi-fi so that he could look for jobs. 24 Hour Fitness became where he show- ered. “Veterans — we had a pretty good deal,” Manuel recalls. “Twenty bucks a month would get you full services at that time.” He spent his days at Starbucks. “I’d go to Starbucks really early in the morning, and I would kind of sit in the parking lot and make sure the young people who were coming in there to open the Starbucks...were safe,” Manuel says. “I built up a rapport with a lot of the folks who worked there. They knew what was up, they knew I was homeless, but they never were mean to me or anything like that. “We had a little bit of a deal going on,” he adds. “There were a lot of young ladies who were opening up the Starbucks at 4:30 in the morning.” After the employees got to know Manuel, they felt comfortable with him sitting in the parking lot, keeping an eye on things. In return for his security services, they’d give him a free cup of coffee when he came inside to spend the day job-hunting, fi lling out applications and doing interviews between the occasional errands. At night, though, his routine was less stable. “You’re really not fully asleep ever when you’re homeless,” Manuel says. After hearing about the shootings, safety was his fi rst priority — fi nding a safe place to settle in for the night. He found one particular street where he’d try to park “because it was well lit, and it was highly patrolled, and it was safe.” Around midnight, after taking a shower at his gym, he’d head “back over to that area, because that’s when it settles down — less traffi c, less foot traffi c,” Manuel says. “I’d park somewhere under a tree with a little bit of shade so [people] can’t look directly into the car and see me there, as opposed to parking under a light.” The people who lived on the block didn’t always appreciate his presence, though, and sometimes called the police — “enough that I kind of fi gured out the patrol patterns,” he says. One tap on the win- dow was enough to jolt him awake. Fortunately, the police didn’t give him too hard of a time. “I used the veteran card,” Manuel says, add- ing that often, “I saw the pin on their lapel, and I saw they were Army or Marine Corps, and I would kind of throw it out there that, ‘Hey, I’m a veteran,’ and then I would get the courtesy. “Some of the cops I bumped into were veter- ans themselves, so they’d be like, ‘Hey, come on buddy, you know you have to roll out.’ Then they’d dis- appear. I think sometimes the cops might have not come back because they knew I was going to come back. So I just would wait until they circled the block, and then I would act like I was driving away the other way and give it about ten minutes and then go back.” Manuel’s life became a blur. “Once you’re homeless, you honestly lose track of time,” he says. “There’s pretty much this cloud around you, and the only things you think about are food, sleep, basic necessities.” The circuit continued: Starbucks, gym, sleep (when and where he could), repeat. “I thought I was only out there for six months. I was out there for two years,” he says. At the end of those two years, he recalls, “I was at Starbucks, reading, going through newspapers and just jumping on the internet looking for jobs,” when he happened to pick up a local newspaper and saw an ad for a job for a program manager working for the L.A. mayor’s Gang Reduction Youth Development offi ce. He applied, interviewed, and got the job in March 2010. “I remember the minute I got the job, I went to my car and slept for like twelve hours,” he says. “I just parked under a tree in the park and just crashed.” A few months into his new job, Manuel was interviewing candidates for a position as a program lead with a GRYD initiative called Summer Night Lights, which was designed to pour resources into city parks during the hot summer evenings, when violence rates tended to increase. One of the questions that the hiring team would ask: “What are some things that hap- pen in communities that you would like to help with?” In her answer, one candidate “was talking about homeless people in [her] neighbor- hood sleeping in their cars,” Manuel recalls, and she said that “I just remember there was one time where we were calling the police on this one guy and he was in a blue car.’” “When she mentioned the area she lived in, I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s the block I slept on,’” he says. He didn’t tell the woman that he was the homeless person who inspired her to call the cops. Instead, he ended up giving her the job. “It’s one of those things in my mind that just helped me realize where I was and where I am,” Manuel says. “I just said, ‘Oh, snap, I was homeless six months ago, and now I’m interviewing this person for a job, and I was sleeping in front of their house.’ It just kind of made it all clear to me. Like, yeah, I’m on the right path.” While Manuel was getting back on the right path, Denver was dealing with a growing homelessness problem. Under Denver’s Road Home, the program introduced by then-Mayor John Hickenlooper in 2005, the city’s homeless population had dropped from 10,157 to 4,809 by 2011, according to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. But in 2012, the year after Mayor Michael Hancock took offi ce, the number shot up to 6,358. And while it stayed level for the next several years, the homeless population began to grow again in 2020, during the pandemic. That was the year that Hancock oversaw the launch of the STAR program — a widely lauded alternative emergency response initiative that sent mental health professionals, rather than members of the Denver Police Department, to low-risk incidents involving people in crisis. But while STAR could deal with many situ- ations related to people experiencing home- lessness, a DPD response remained necessary for incidents involving a low-level crime. According to DPD division chief Aaron Sanchez, while many of these low-level crimes couldn’t be shrugged off, many of- fi cers didn’t feel right about taking the per- petrators to jail. As the former commander of District 6 — which includes downtown Denver — Sanchez decided Denver needed a third option. “This would happen almost every night,” he recalls. “A person who’s experiencing homelessness goes into a 7-Eleven...goes to the nacho machine and gets a scoop of cheese and chili, walks over, opens up a can of Coke, and sits down in the 7-Eleven and just eats it.” Describing that example as a “crime of need,” Sanchez says, “we were looking for a place where we can remove the individual from 7-Eleven without necessarily taking them to jail.” Along with Armando Saldate, then the assistant deputy executive director of Den- ver’s Department of NEWS continued on page 8 KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS Carlon Manuel outside of the Assessment, Intake, and Diversion Center on Elati Street. BENJAMIN NEUFELD
