Venezuelan migrants are flooding to a posh Colorado ski resort town with no homeless shelter after hearing rumors that there are plenty of jobs to be offered.
Major U.S. cities are seeing huge influxes of migrant arrivals and Denver – with 2,600 migrants in the city’s shelter system and 200 on the streets – isn’t the only Colorado hotbed affected by the crisis.
Carbondale is a home rule municipality in Garfield County, Colorado, with a population of around 6,434. The town is a 30-minute drive away from the high-end ski resort town of Aspen – located in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.
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However, the town is known for luxury ski chalet homes and is already facing a housing crisis – so the new arrivals have been left with no choice but to sleep outside in their cars.
The cheapest property currently on the market in the small town is $720,000 – with most houses valued at roughly $2 million, according to Zillow.
While there are small homeless shelters nearby in Aspen, they’re usually overrun and have long waitlists.
Even as the weather drops to lows of 10 degrees at night, migrants are piling up to sleep in the vehicles they drove to the mountain town.
Edgar Hernandez told 9news that he’s living in the back of his Honda with four of his other friends, and said there’s another car with five more.
Hernandez and his brother bought the car using several weeks’ worth of salaries each, but they decided it was worth it to travel from Denver to the mountains to where they heard that there were more jobs on offer.
‘If you need me to clean a bathroom, I’ll do it,’ Hernandez said. ‘If you want me to wash your car, tell me and I’ll go wash it quickly. What we want is to work.’
The arrival of 125 migrants have raised the city’s homeless by 500 percent, which has put a significant strain on the town’s resources.
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Bohmfalk said that last week he asked the state for more than $200,000 to help house and feed the migrants and insisted that the town did not have the facilities to take them on.
‘We don’t want people to see these stories and think, oh, Carbondale is the place to go. They’re really welcoming,’ Bohmfalk said. ‘We are absolutely not equipped to take more people.’
The town opened up an emergency shelter that holds up to 60 people inside a building that had extra space, the rest of the homeless population are sleeping in the parking lot.
The Mayor is worried that the new arrivals are not going to survive in the freezing weather: ‘It’s below 10 degrees at night most nights, and it will be for the next few months,’ Bohmfalk said. ‘If people sleep outside in those conditions, they might not make it.’
Even despite the challenging conditions that Carbondale’s new migrant population is facing – it is apparently better than their previous lives. ‘Life is already much better here than Venezuela,’ said Hernandez. ‘A thousand times better.’
The migrants began pouring in a month ago and, at the time, Bohmfalk said: ‘We have a long history of absorbing immigrants into our communities and they’re a critical part of our workforce.’
However, as more and more newcomers arrive the Mayor is insisting that the town cannot handle this rise in homelessness. ‘We’re trying to be human beings. At the same time, we have to maintain some guardrails and some limits on what we commit to because we just cannot be the destination for more people.’
Bohmfalk told CBS he is disappointed by the lack of support coming from state and federal agencies.
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In October, Denver’s liberal government asked officials at border towns to distribute fliers telling asylum seekers to stay away from the Colorado capital, after 21,000 new migrants arrived this year.
The fliers included messages such as: ‘Denver’s resources have been exhausted,’ ‘the city cannot provide shelter long-term’ and ‘housing in Denver is very expensive and there aren’t many affordable housing options available.’
In its attempt to mitigate the crisis, Denver’s local government plans to limit the length of time individual migrants can stay in temporary shelters, while extending the time limit for families.
* Original Article:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12860891/amp/Colorado-ski-resort-Carbondale-Venezuelan-migrants.html?ito=smartnews
