Republican Mayor Mike Coffman of Aurora, Colorado, has been voluntarily spending his Friday nights sleeping on a cot at the Aurora Regional Navigation Campus, a local homeless shelter, since February. This initiative is part of his effort to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by individuals experiencing homelessness and to observe firsthand how state funds are utilized.
Mentioning his commitment to consistency, Coffman stated on Facebook that his regular presence allows individuals to become more comfortable discussing their struggles and future aspirations. "The experience has enabled me to better understand their unique and complex challenges and it has helped me to see them with compassion, as individuals, and not through a lens of condescension or contempt," he wrote.
The Aurora Regional Navigation Campus, which opened in November 2025 and has a 600-bed capacity, offers a three-step program designed to guide residents toward independence. This program includes support for addiction recovery, mental health services, and job training, eventually leading to transitional housing for those employed full-time.
Coffman, a former Congressman and U.S. Marine veteran who served in Iraq, aims for the program to become a model for other communities. "I will continue to stay with those experiencing homelessness, every Friday night, until the program is everything that I believe that it can be and it is a model, not just for Colorado, but for the country," he wrote.
This current approach follows a more controversial undercover experience Coffman undertook in the winter of 2021. During that period, he disguised himself and spent seven days living in shelters and encampments across Aurora and Denver, enduring sub-freezing temperatures. After this seven-day stint, he described the experience as "incredibly impactful" but also "really hard."
Following his 2021 undercover experiment, Coffman characterized homelessness as largely a "lifestyle choice" influenced by "drug culture." These remarks drew criticism from homeless advocates, though some defended his intentions at the time.
Colorado has seen a significant increase in homelessness, with the homeless population growing by 90% between 2020 and 2024, reaching nearly 18,700 statewide, according to the Common Sense Institute. This marks the fourth-largest increase in homelessness in the nation during that period.