Denver City Council voted yesterday  in a nine to four decision to pass Governor Hickenlooper’s proposed camping ban, criminalizing sleeping and lingering on the city’s streets.

For the near 12,000 homeless people living in the greater Denver area, this means they must work extra hard to find somewhere other than the streets to sleep, or else they are at risk of being prosecuted and fined.

Supporters of the ban claim that homeless people cause their businesses to lose money and make the city look unpleasant, and the ban will give police an extra opportunity to get homeless people off the streets and into the places they need.

This may be true to some extent, but these kinds of arguments are nothing more than a selfish excuse to rid our streets of the people that make us uncomfortable at times.

I cannot express enough my disappointment in the city council for failing to see that the ban is merely criminalizing poverty and doing nothing to actually help the situation. What else are homeless people supposed to do? Yes, there are shelters, but not nearly enough for everyone. The city council itself estimated that there are 7,000 homeless people in the city and only 1,200 beds in shelters.

What about the leftover 5,800? If there is no room for them, they could end up wandering the streets.

If they end up falling asleep, then they could be stuck with a hefty fine they will unlikely be able to pay back

Many homeless people have no choice but to spend the night at the park or near a store on 16th Street.

While it is important that we do everything we can to help them find somewhere better to stay, jail is not a good alternative.

Most homeless people are good people who would never choose to break the law unless completely necessary.

In this case, the city isn’t giving them a chance to do the right thing. It isn’t just to criminalize people for something they have no control over.

To be fair, Denver’s Road Home project, instigated in 2005 with the goal to end homelessness in Denver within ten years, is going well and has created over 2,600 new affordable housing units. But despite its great success, this still isn’t enough.

In the near future, there will always be at least a few homeless people wandering the streets and settling down for a nap.

Even if the Road Home project’s goal to end homelessness in Denver is successful at some point, many of today’s generation of homeless people will be sent to jail unfairly.

They are doing nothing wrong but walking on the public land that was meant for everyone. It is not their fault that other city policies could not offer them the help they need.

Until there truly is enough housing for everyone, or the camping ban is lifted, the city will continue to treat our homeless unfairly. Homeless people are consistently shut off socially from society.

They don’t need the state working against them even more. Giving them fines for their lifestyle will only plunge them further into debt and hurt the problem even more.

Perhaps a new system could be put in place where a business owner could call in if he truly thinks a homeless person is hurting his business. Someone could then escort the homeless person to a safe shelter.

This seems much more reasonable than telling homeless people they have broken the law, when in reality, the law has broken them.