Colorado mayor is homeless every Friday night

Every Friday night, the Republican mayor of Aurora, Colo.trades his office for a cot at the local homeless shelter — and he’s been doing it for months.Mike Coffman, 71, sleeps at the Aurora Regional Navigation Campus in his town that borders Denver — so he can better empathize with the challenges homeless people face — before helping serve breakfast on Saturday mornings.

His overnight stays also give him a front-row seat to how the state spends $481 million a year on homelessness.“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,” Coffman, a former Congressman and Marine who served in Iraq, wrote on Facebook.“Consistency is important so that they know that I will be there every Friday ..

.they have become more relaxed and open about talking to me about their challenges and expectations for their future.”The overnight stays began in February at the 600-bed transitional housing campus, which Coffman helped launch in November 2025 through the nonprofit Advanced Pathways after his earlier experiences with homelessness in the city.The program is designed as a three-step path toward independence, moving residents from an emergency shelter in to addiction recovery, mental health services and job training, before eventually reaching transitional housing for those working full-time.“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,” Coffman wrote.The mayor’s latest hands-on approach follows a much more controversial experiment he conducted five years ago.During the winter of 2021, Coffman — who served in Congress from 2009 to 2019 and became mayor in December 2019 — disguised himself as a homeless veteran and spent seven days and nights li...