The late, great Downtown Denver
Three decades ago, Downtown Denver was becoming one of America’s urban bright spots. Downtown Denver was on the cusp of sporting a Major League Baseball Team, a Stanley Cup-winning Hockey Team, a new stadium for the Denver Broncos, a new downtown Convention Center, and the 16th Mall Project’s MallRide® provided free trolley service back and forth over its one-mile length. Then, disaster struck.
Downtown Denver became a Sanctuary City for the Homeless and for illegal migrants. Consequently, Downtown Denver is an area to be avoided unless you like to step in human feces, and being badgered by the drunk and/or drugged-up homeless panhandlers. Or, God forbid, being mugged. Mind you, this warning is only about Downtown Denver.
Ironically, the history of New York City should have been an object lesson for Downtown Denver and for other urban centers. There was a time when the tidal estuary composed of the Hudson River, the East River, and New York Harbor provided enough oysters that the rich and poor alike had plenty of premium oysters to eat. New York City became a major exporter of oysters, even to Europe.
The rich could have oysters on the half shell at fancy places like Delmonico’s, the poor could wade out in the shallows or row a small boat out to gather enough oysters for a day’s sustenance. For free! But then, the New Yorkers literally crapped in their own mess kit.
By 1927, so much raw sewage flooded into the waters surrounding New York’s boroughs that the oysters became too toxic for human consumption. Eventually, the eating of New York City’s oysters had to be forbidden. While the rich could pay to import oysters from distant, unpolluted waters, the poor simply lost their source of free food. A classic case of big-city government failing to act in the interest of the entire public. Especially, the poor.
Other than welcoming the Homeless to the streets and city parks of downtown Denver, very little has been done to try to solve the problems of Downtown Denver’s Homeless. But, alternatively, the current Mayor of Denver is spending lavish amounts of taxpayer money to "re-settle" thousands of illegal migrants.
So, why spend so much money on illegal migrants and so relatively little on the Homeless? Simple. The Homeless rarely try to vote. They don’t have a home where Colorado’s all mail-in ballot system can deliver their ballots. And that assumes the oblivion-seeking Homeless might rise from a drunken or doped-up stupor to want to vote.
But what about the illegal migrants? The illegal migrants, by hook or crook, are likely to become voters who will gratefully vote to keep the super-woke Denver Mayor and his cohorts in power. Stone simple.
Suggested reading: The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky,2006.
©2023. William Hamilton.
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