Episode 12: Scott Gilmore

In every community, one of the city agencies most impacted by homelessness are parks departments. For people who don’t have anywhere else to go, parks become refuges of safety within the city, but the impacts of homelessness can also erode the public’s perception of parks as a public place that is safe and welcoming to everyone in the community. To understand how the City of Denver balances these competing perspectives on homelessness, I sat down with Scott Gilmore, Denver’s Deputy Executive Director of Parks and Planning to hear how his agency is addressing the homelessness crisis, and to begin, I started by asking Scott to introduce me to Denver’s park system.