In wealthy Colorado ski towns, homeless workers have to fight just to sleep in their cars

Homelessness, as most people picture it, tends to be an affliction of the mentally ill and unemployed, with scores of men and women sleeping on the streets. Those vulnerable people do exist, and need our support, but are far from the full story. Across the nation’s wealthiest cities workers who earn far above the minimum wage live not on the streets or in shelters, but in their cars. As housing costs skyrocket, their earnings, though far higher than the minimum wage, just can’t cover housing. And according to the New York Times, some communities have issues with them sleeping quietly in designated parking lots.

“The American dream of owning a home is dead unless you make a gazillion dollars,” said Kristine Litchfield, 62, who lives in her Ford T250 van. Her neighbors all work serving the local skiers, all homeless, but granted the right to park in the icy landscape because of their local pay stubs. Litchfield earns $24 an hour at the ski shop where she works in Frisco, Colorado, nearly $10 more than the state’s minimum wage. Studios in the city cost $2,500 per month, according to Zillow, nearly 90% of her $2,874 monthly pay. The median home sold in the area costs around $1 million. A spot in a parking lot, however, costs $75 a month.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Litchfield has plenty of company, including an ice fishing and a dog sledding guide, two snow plow drivers, several servers at local restaurants and two ER nurses. 

“We cannot afford to buy a home, and so people started to think, well, screw it. Why should I put myself in that much debt just to live in a house? And so that’s how come people are here,” Litchfield said from the icy lot. “This is the American dream. Living in a van. Living in your car.” 

Even that bleak desire is getting even harder to realize. Frisco does not allow people without local pay stubs to use the parking lot. And lots like the one in Friso are often in extremely wealthy areas – local residents’ stigma around the homeless makes keeping them open a challenge. An overnight lot in Salida, Colorado, ran for 2 years before closing in 2024, after the list of rules grew to the point that people felt unwelcome. In Sedona, Arizona, residents didn’t even let a single worker park in a public lot – the City Council approved a zoning change, but had to shut down the lot after a referendum. 

Organizers from a group called Unsheltered in Summit have worked hard to blend the  Frisco lot  into the wealthy landscape. going as far as to prepare a presentation for officials and local rotary club members justifying the lots. Residents have a portable toilet to use, and access to a colourful dumpster is protected with a padlock. It’s not only useful for the homeless. Neat and tidy, one section hosts the town’s utility vehicles, so passersby would have a hard time knowing which cars double as shelter. 

Affordable housing activists are working to establish more lots for people who live in their cars, finding allies in local business owners who say it’s becoming more difficult to hire and retain workers without them. “We sit around and have constant conversations about work force housing,” said Andrew Aerenson, a former board member of the Frisco Town Council. It costs the town years and $150,000 in subsidies to build a single unit of affordable housing, but these lots can become shelters with just a few small changes. “This is a no-brainer for me.” (See the NYT’s “In a Snow Paradise, They Sleep In a Parking Lot” for a video of a car resident looking out the window during a snowstorm.)

Obviously, cars in a parking lot are not a permanent or ideal solution to housing problems – temperatures in Colorado can reach -75 F in the winter and 115 degrees F in the summer. But in the US of today, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, a safe parking lot may be a stepping stone to permanent housing.

Sleeplessness adds to the psychological toll of war in Ukraine

It’s been more than 3 years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – killing thousands, and wounding many more, both physically and psychologically. When the war first began, Sofia Tsarenko managed to sleep with the help of a bottle of wine, but as the onslaught continued, that stopped working, and she became more irritable and anxious. Eventually, she found relief in sleeping pills and antidepressants for relief. “I felt like angels were taking me to sleep,” Tsarenko told the New York Times. 

Sleep deprivation is a national health crisis in Ukraine, mental health experts said, in large part because of constant night-time drone attacks. “In towns and cities across the country each night, Ukrainians lie awake in bed, listening and waiting for the sounds of Russian drones buzzing like lawn mowers in the sky, then for the explosions,” wrote Times reporter Maria Varenikova from her post in Kyiv. Officials say that nightmare interruptions have only gotten worse since US-led peace talks began.

Prolonged sleep deprivation builds up into long term harm, according to experts, worsening anxiety, depression and more severe mental health issues. Nearly half of Ukrainians struggle with their mental health, according to the World Health Organization, and skyrocketing sales of antidepressants add to the pattern. Experts say it’s impossible to know how large a role sleep deprivation plays, but it certainly won’t help.“The very first thing a person loses under stress is sleep,” said Davyd Shcherbyna, a psychiatrist in Kyiv. Half of his patients have sleep disorders, he said, with mothers notably tough to treat. Some refuse medication, fearing they’ll sleep through air-raid alarms, and therefore put their children at risk.

Tetyana Horobchenko, lives with her husband near a frequently-targeted Ukrainian air base. Woken up by fear, she stays up scrolling, even after an attack has passed.. “Sometimes it feels like the lack of sleep doesn’t affect me, but when I compare myself to the other version of myself that had enough sleep, I see that we are different people,” she said.

Related: See MindSite News’ special photo-essay series in May 2022 on the war in Ukraine from correspondent Jeremy Bigwood in “This Was Not a Dream.” 

Chicago claims to provide housing based on need, but does it?

Chicago officials point to their use of a “Coordinated Entry System” to determine which unhoused residents will receive permanent housing, considering need above all in a process developed in part by people who have experienced homelessness. Hank Sartin, a spokesperson for the nonprofit All Chicago Making Homelessness History, was hired by the city to lead efforts helping the unhoused. “It is not like taking a number in a bakery; it is more like the triage process in an emergency room, in which the urgency of someone’s need can outweigh the order in which they came in,” he says. 

The average wait for housing is 4 years, and people on the waitlist are told to check in every 90 days. Some people who are unhoused answer every Chicago-based call on the chance it might be related to housing. But some city workers say people are likely to receive housing more quickly if they admit to sleeping on the CTA (subway) or if they are in an encampment that is cleared out, which the city calls “an accelerated moving event.”

The trouble is that the entire process is opaque, as an investigation by Block Club Chicago discovered. This prompted homeless advocates like Doug Fraser, executive director of the Chicago Help Initiative, to question how much politics, rather than need, determines who gets helped. Calling for encampment clear-outs, he said, “is an optimal tool for people to skip the line.”

In other news…

Trump chronicles and mental health: Everywhere, Everything, All at Once

Last week’s May Day was marked by national and international protests of Trump’s attacks on immigrants, judges, workers, civil rights and the federal government, including rallies in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., San Francisco, and 1,000 other locations across the US. The first major “Hands Off” protest against Trump this year took place on February 5, and on April 5 an estimated 5.2 million Americans protested Trump’s policies. The weekly protests – along with demonstrations at Tesla dealerships focusing on Elon Musk – continue to spread, according to the 50501 Movement, which is organizing the national protests.

Meanwhile, this last week, more than ever, Trump resembled Jobu Tupaki in the multiverse in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. You couldn’t turn on the computer without seeing him cosplaying as the new Pope, after having remarked earlier that he “would love to be the next Pope.” In a stunning move, the White House had posted an AI-generated image of Trump-as-Pope on X during the mourning period only days after Pope Francis’s death, enraging a number of the 1.4 billion Catholics around the globe. 

“By publishing a picture of himself masquerading as the Pope, President Trump mocks God, the Catholic Church, and the Papacy,” wrote Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois on X.

Others pointed out the stark contrast between the two men: Trump mass-deporting migrants without due process at the same time that Pope Francis reminded his followers that Jesus was an immigrant and refugee who believed in the “infinite and transcendent dignity” of every human being. In February 2025, Pope Francis had sent a 10-point letter to American bishops expressing his support for their advocacy work to protect the rights and dignity of migrants and obliquely criticizing Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

“I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters,” Pope Francis wrote in his letter. “With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all.” (You can read his entire letter here.)

But with more guardrails shattered each day, it’s hard to keep up with the pillage. In an essay in The New Yorker called “My Brain Finally Broke,” Jia Tolentino laments her pervasive sense of unreality. “I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor,” she writes. “Much of what we see now is fake, and the reality we face is full of horrors. More and more of the world is slipping beyond my comprehension.”

“I suspect that the opaque feeling in my head can also be traced to a craven instinct: it’s easier to retreat from the concept of reality than to acknowledge that the things in the news are real. The deadly dismantling of a global public-health infrastructure. The deportation of Venezuelan men to a hellish mega-prison in El Salvador, on the questionable suspicion of gang affiliations, based on the presence of tattoos: flowers, a soccer logo, an autism-awareness ribbon. A ten-year-old citizen, in the midst of treatment for brain cancer, deported, with her undocumented parents. Cancer research effectively reclassified as bureaucratic inefficiency and funding slashed away. The cuts made to the National Park Service, the most righteous government agency in existence…The—how else do we put this—state-sponsored abductions: the disappearance to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana of a green-card-holding grad student, for the non-crime of supporting a pro-Palestine encampment at Columbia; the same thing happening to a Turkish Fulbright scholar on a student visa—masked men accosting her on the street, handcuffing her, taking her phone away—for the non-crime of co-writing an op-ed. The plans for the five-million-dollar “gold card” visa. The million-dollars-a-plate campaign fund-raising dinners for a President who is not legally allowed to run again…” –– Diana Hembree (You can read the whole essay here.)

Canada has NOT launched a mental crisis hotline for LGBTQ+ Americans: One of the best things about social media is its ability to facilitate connection – bringing people together, helping information spread. One of the worst is that anyone can post anything, so ‘facts’ can spread despite not being true. That’s what happened last week, reports the Advocate, after an anonymous user on X posted that Canada expanded its national suicide hotline to include a toll-free version for Americans. The post is false, but was viewed 2.5 million times in just a few days, and shared across other platforms, including Facebook. There is, however, some support available on both sides of the border – the number in the post actually connects to the nonprofit Trans Lifeline, a peer-led hotline that serves transgender people in both the US and Canada.