Safe-Camping Site Resident Mark Montes Finds Permanent Housing

In November 2020, Mark “Shorty” Montes heard about a new sheltering option coming to Denver: a safe-camping site that would be opening at a church in the Uptown neighborhood the next month.

At first, he wasn’t totally sold. For Montes, now fifty, the thought of a uniform ice-fishing tent at a site that offered centralized access to sanitation and services sounded just too different from how he’d been living on the streets since his life had fallen apart a decade earlier. The North High School graduate often spent his days with a beer in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other; he’d tried shelters, but got kicked out of one for using his own cleaning method to ensure that he wouldn’t have to deal with bedbugs, he recalls. That meant he usually slept in a makeshift tent or…