Denver business owners have been spending millions on private security groups to keep their properties safe as crime and theft by homeless people has run rampant in the Democrat led city.
Though the city has banned camping on the streets and sunk $250million into mitigating homelessness, many business owners feel those restrictions are loosely enforced and expenses are doing nothing to keep their properties safe.
Walter Isenberg, whose Sage Hospitality Group manages a number of prominent downtown Denver developments, told the Denver Post he spends $3million per year on armed security to protect his properties. Ten years ago his security budget was $250,000.
Business owner Chris Waggett manages 70 acres of properties around Denver, and said he’s lost numerous tenants because employees don’t come to work over fears for their safety from crime. He spends $500,000 for security at a property in the Union Station of Denver.
Denver is just the latest city to be plagued by crime and theft. Business owners have been fleeing from Portland, Oregon as crime has skyrocketed, and downtown San Francisco has been left deserted by workers and employees who fear for their safety.
A camp of homeless people set up on a street in Denver. The city has done little to fight the problem
Homeless people camped out on a Denver sidewalk. The city has a budget of $250million to fight homelessness, but many residents feel it is not going to good use
In the past two years crime in Denver has soared, with car break-ins doubling from 2020 to 2022, car theft tripling, assaults spiking 30 percent, and murder and arson rising, according to the Denver Post.
Homelessness has also skyrocketed, with the city spending its budget to buy hotels to house the homeless in, while camps pop up across city sidewalks in defiance of laws.
Waggett said when the city does break up camps, the problem merely gets pushed to another place.
‘The big issue I’ve got is that when we do sweeps downtown or do pushes at Union Station, all it causes are people to push down the light rail corridors,’ he told the Denver Post. ‘All we’re doing is playing Whack-A-Mole.’
He said he’s lost at least three tenants directly to vagrancy and local crime, and that he regularly sees open drug use, prostitution, and excrement downtown. He added that his own security guards are sometimes unwilling to contend with drug dealers operating near his properties.
‘We’ve had a very laissez-faire, permissive attitude and people don’t understand the economic consequence to the city,’ he said. ‘We need leadership with a capital L: We need leadership not only in enforcing the law and addressing the three-pronged problem of homeless and drug use and mental health.’
Isenberg complained that the city was not using its resources to take care of business owners, and that private security was costing him big because he can only pass so many expenses on his tenants.
‘The tenants can only absorb so much rent,’ he said. ‘We pay a lot of taxes and we’re not getting services.’
Walter Isenberg (left) spends $3million per year on private security. Chris Waggett (right) spends $500,000 at just one of his properties
A homeless person sprawled out on a Denver street. Police have done little to remove camps
A homeless encampment on a Denver street in December 2022
Construction companies have been employing security groups at night to keep homeless people from breaking onto sites and destroying property or harming themselves in the dangerous conditions, and banks have had to keep homeless people from doing drugs in their bathrooms.
Shopping center owner Jamie Harris said his tenants call him at least three times a week to complain about crime and homelessness.
‘At some centers it leads to theft,’ he said. ‘At others it’s just a nuisance with trash and drug paraphernalia, or people sleeping on doorsteps. It’s unbelievable.’
‘Our tenants are so frustrated,’ he said, recalling an incident where a man had broken into and was living in a utility closet at a property. Harris told the Denver Post the man was found after he started grilling food inside and maintenance workers saw the smoke.
Harris spends $160,000 on his private security, and passes the price on to the tenants. He gives them the option not to use it, but he said they all opt to keep it.
‘If I ever ask if they want it taken away, they say no. They are willing to pay to keep property cleaner and fewer vagrants,’ he said.
Fearing that police are unable to do anything about the problem, Harris has taken to guarding properties himself with a can of bear spray.
‘The police can’t really do anything except push people off my property and have them leave,’ he said.
‘For a while I really tried to have a conversation and say, ‘hey, this is private property you need to move out,’ but the nice-guy approach didn’t work. It does not work … A lot of these people are very, very troubled, addicted to drugs or mentally ill.’
‘When you look at San Francisco or Portland, the method of being nice and trying to be helpful is not working.’
A homeless man sleeps on a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk in downtown Denver
A group of homeless people camped out on a sidewalk in downtown Denver
Public data from Portland showed that since the pandemic, more than 2,600 downtown businesses have filed changes of address with the U.S. Postal Service to leave their downtown ZIP codes.
Several big-name employers, such Umpqua Bank, have been among the mass exodus, carried out by owners who have taken issue with the rising crime levels and homelessness – and the city’s failure to address it.
Once hailed as the ‘crown jewel of the West Coast’ for its trendy art and food scenes, The City of Roses has been in peril since 2020, largely due to efforts to defund police and lax bail reform laws that leave little to no deterrent for increasingly brazen criminals.
And in San Francisco homelessness is at a nearly 20 year high, and local businesses have threatened to stop paying taxes unless the city cleans up the colonies of tents and tarps that have grown along neighborhood streets.
Major crimes in San Francisco are up 7.4 percent so far last year from the same period in 2021, with assault up 11.1 percent and robbery up 5.2 percent.
A recent poll found that a majority of San Franciscans believe their city is going down hill, and a third plan to leave the city within three years.
Some residents blame Mayor Breed, whose earlier popularity for steering the city through the pandemic appears to have waned amid rising crime, the fentanyl epidemic and other woes.
One specific harm reduction policy that failed was the opening of the Tenderloin Center last year that was meant to help alleviate the city’s drug and homelessness crisis.
It cost taxpayers a whopping $22million and was meant to be a ‘safe place’ for addicts to ‘get high without getting robbed’ and without fear of fatally overdosing.
DailyMail
