Why Aurora’s mayor spends Friday nights at a homeless shelter

Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman said his first time sleeping at the Aurora Regional Navigation Campus, a homeless shelter, was miserable.

“I was in the military a little over 20 years ago,” Coffman said. “Sleeping on a cot didn’t bother me. It bothers me now. And the noise. People have dogs. Sometimes they start barking in the middle of the night, so it’s not easy.”

Since late February, Coffman has spent his Friday nights at the city-owned homeless shelter, which is housed in a former hotel and convention center at 15500 E. 40th Avenue. Alongside folks in the Navigation Campus, Coffman talks with the guests about their challenges, goals, and whether the shelter has helped them. 

Coffman says his mission is to learn how to improve the shelter by experiencing it firsthand. If that sounds unusual for an elected official, the people inside the shelter were surprised, too.

“I remember the first time that I was there,” Coffman said. “I was serving breakfast in the morning, and a young woman came up to me because she never saw me before, and so she goes, ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘Mike.’ She goes, ‘What’s your story? I mean, how did you become homeless and get here?’ I said, ‘I’m the mayor,’ and she just looked at me. She goes, ‘The mayor of the shelter?’ I said, ‘No, the mayor of the city.'”

Coffman was instrumental in the creation of the city-owned campus, which opened Nov. 17, 2025. The Aurora Regional Navigation Campus provides shelter, meals and supportive services for adults experiencing homelessness in the area. Advance Pathways, a nonprofit, operates the campus through a tiered model designed to move guests from low-barrier shelter toward more privacy, treatment, job training, case management and, eventually, greater self-sufficiency.

“I think too often in trying to help people with homelessness that we warehouse people, and we don’t deal with their challenges and help them,” Coffman said.

Coffman spends his time in Tier One, which works as a typical low-barrier shelter, accessible to adults in urgent need of a place to stay. The Tier One sleeping area features 140 cots, side-by-side in the same room, a few feet apart.

Coffman is there to speak with whoever is interested in talking to him. He’s also planning on working with 10 people at a time that, he says, have the greatest number of challenges to see how the system could better fit their needs.

“I want to find out, number one, is the system working?” Coffman said. “So I always ask them, ‘When have you met with your case manager? What are they doing for you here? What’s your path going forward?’ And obviously I’m finding people with mental health challenges and people with addiction disorders.”

Those conversations have pushed Coffman toward one of the shelter’s central tensions. The campus is built around incentives, but some guests need treatment, stability or medical care before they can respond to those incentives.

Alma Enriquez, a nurse with about 30 patients at the shelter, thinks many of the people cycling through need more help than they are willing to accept.

“One of the biggest barriers is they don’t want the treatment because they want to continue to self-medicate, which means doing crack cocaine, meth,” Enriquez said. “They want to do their drugs.
They don’t want to have any prescription drugs. They just say, ‘It’s not for me; I don’t like it.’”

People struggling with addiction and mental health challenges may have a harder time moving through the shelter’s tiered model, which rewards participation in mental health care, addiction recovery, case management and job-training programs.

But Coffman said the model can work for guests who are ready to take advantage of it. James Ranno’s experience shows what the system is designed to do when those pieces line up.

Ranno arrived at the shelter on the first day it opened on Nov. 17 and was eager to volunteer for the job-training program. He quickly moved through the tiers and now works for Advance Pathways, the nonprofit that operates the shelter.

“It felt great, like exhilarating,” Ranno said. “The weight lifted off my shoulder like, ‘Hey, I made it.
 I can do anything.’”

Coffman believes Ranno’s story is encouraging, but not everyone responds to the incentive-based approach. The more difficult question is how to reach those who are still struggling to get help.

“It’s not simple,” Coffman said. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem.” 

Enriquez said the toll of living on the street only deepens those struggles, driving up guests’ need for medical care. Jim Goebelbecker, CEO of Advance Pathways, said the mental health need among guests already exceeds what the facility can provide.

“There just aren’t enough therapists to be able to work with all the mental health issues that people have,” Goebelbecker said, “and particularly among the homeless population.”

Coffman said that gap is one of the clearest lessons from his Friday nights at the shelter. The city cannot run the campus alone, he said, and will need stronger partnerships with outside organizations to provide mental health care, addiction recovery and other support.

“No one entity can do everything,” Coffman said. “So other entities to help with mental health, other entities to help with addiction recovery.”

Goebelbecker said the goal of the shelter is to decrease homelessness in Aurora by 50%. So far, Coffman said he has seen fewer visible encampments in Aurora.

“We’re not seeing the encampments that we used to see,” Coffman said. “People are still out there, unfortunately, but there are definitely fewer.”

Coffman thinks the Aurora Regional Navigation Campus is going to be a model for Colorado and the whole country. He said he’ll be at the shelter every Friday working out challenges and finding solutions for those yet to fit into the incentive-based system.

“It’s certainly important for me,” Coffman said. “They’re my constituents along with anybody else. They just happen to be homeless and folks that are in need.”