Church sues Colorado city to shelter homeless in trailers

CASTLE ROCK, Colo. — Behind a church surrounded by rolling prairies on the outskirts of this Colorado town sits the donated camper that Joe Ridenour called home for a year after he lost his job during the pandemic.

He claimed that because he could live in the camper, he didn’t have to return to his hometown of Kansas City, where he feared he would start using methamphetamine again.

“Without that trailer and that church, I wouldn’t be alive. Drugs would have consumed me,” said Ridenour, who now works as a maintenance worker at the county fairgrounds and rents a room from a friend he met at The Rock church.

Last year, the city of Castle Rock ordered a nondenominational evangelical church to stop providing shelter in an RV and another mobile home for violating zoning laws. The church responded by suing the city, located between Denver and Colorado Springs.

Like other churches seeking to help the homeless from Oregon to Ohio, the Colorado church says helping those in need is a religious activity protected by the Constitution.

His lawsuit is peppered with biblical admonitions to believers to care for the needy, and notes that surrounding Douglas County, one of the wealthiest in the United States, has no other homeless shelters.

The church property is not zoned for residential use, and zoning regulations prohibit anyone from living in an RV anywhere in Castle Rock.

On Friday, a federal judge ruled that the church can continue to temporarily shelter homeless people in encampments until the lawsuit is resolved.

The city, which said it would “rigorously defend the community’s zoning authority,” declined to comment on Friday’s ruling. In court, the city argued that the church could find other ways to help the homeless, such as by renting out members’ homes or buying property to house them in an area zoned for housing.

Earlier this year, the church had to turn down a request to accommodate a mother and three children under the age of 7 who were living in a car in one of its trailers, said Pastor Mike Polhemus.

“The Word of God actually commands us to love those who are struggling and poor and give them shelter,” Polhemus said. “That’s our mandate. And we believe that goes beyond county codes or city codes or any other codes, that these are things that are commanded by God.”

Nearly a decade ago, the church began sheltering homeless women and children in its gym one night a week as part of a church network that took turns opening doors for them. In 2018, the church began allowing homeless men to stay in the trailers after conducting interviews and background checks. The church network stopped its mission to homeless families last year, and The Rock could only shelter people in the trailers.

After Friday’s ruling, Jeremy Dys, senior counsel for the First Liberty Institute, an organization representing the church, said: “I’m confident they’ll get people back into their campers as quickly as possible.”

The lawsuit is based on both the church’s freedom of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment and a federal law intended to protect places of worship from discrimination in zoning decisions.

The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, passed with bipartisan support in Congress in 2000, prohibits governments from enacting land-use regulations that significantly burden religious practice without a compelling reason. It has helped a wide range of faiths build or expand places of worship, but it has also been invoked in legal battles over efforts to help the homeless.

Before The Rock filed his lawsuit, a church in Bryan, Ohio, filed a similar federal case earlier this year when its pastor was charged with a crime for allowing homeless people to shelter there. The church and city officials are trying to negotiate a resolution to the lawsuit, which also accuses the city of violating a 2000 federal law.

Two other recent lawsuits also alleged violations of this right.

In March, a federal judge ruled that the city of Brookings on the southern Oregon coast could not restrict the church’s meal services for the homeless. A lawsuit by St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church argued that the ordinance, which limits the program to two days a week and requires a permit, also violates the church’s right to freely practice religion.

Last year, a Christian nonprofit that was fined and threatened with legal action in the Southern California city of Santa Ana for providing food to homeless people settled its lawsuit against the city after the Justice Department weighed in.

Lauren Langer, a Los Angeles attorney who represents cities in land-use cases, said lawsuits against municipalities that fight houses of worship over their care for homeless people do happen periodically but can be expensive and lengthy.

“Even if the Church wins, it will still be a long road,” she said.

Some communities and churches in California have taken a different approach — forming partnerships to create spaces where people living in vehicles can park overnight while also providing services such as restrooms, trash pickup and security, she said.

Sonia Moran, who lives with her husband and two sons in a house adjacent to the Castle Rock church property, wasn’t initially concerned when she learned he was sheltering the homeless in a trailer. But that changed when he proposed building an affordable housing development on his 54-acre (22-hectare) plot.

She doesn’t believe the buildings will actually be used by teachers and emergency services, as the church claims, and fears the development will attract residents who could increase crime in her quiet, safe neighborhood.

“How can we trust them when they can’t even follow the applicable zoning and land use laws?” said Moran, who also believes the church may be trying to profit from the project.

Polhemus denies that. A former civil engineer who worked in Houston real estate before taking over as his father’s church pastor, he said providing workforce housing is not the type of project that makes money.

Moran also said she doesn’t believe Castle Rock has a homeless problem and that the church should focus on a place like Denver, which does. The county, for its part, has provided $1.1 million to build a shelter 30 miles away in Aurora that could house at least five county homeless people.

Before moving into the church’s RV, Ridenour slept in his truck in the Target parking lot, staying temporarily in motels or with a friend. He said he lost his job in June 2020 when his truck broke down on his way to Denver.

The church hired an experienced carpenter to work on the woodwork in the lobby. He said the money he earned helped him pay off debts and buy clothes for job interviews, and it gave him a sense of contributing to the community.

“They showed me my worth that I had lost,” Ridenour said.

Now he’s preparing to return to Kansas City, feeling like he’s finally strong enough to come back.

“God made this journey a journey for me so that I could return to my family and my children, completely transforming myself,” he said.