Watching the documentary “Denver in Decay” generated several reactions, all of them very upsetting. While Denver is not my home, having lived in Colorado Springs for 60 years, Denver has always been a very special place for a variety of reasons. Denver has been our own version of “the shining city on a hill.” To see Denver and our Capitol Building become war zones, disrespected, desecrated, violated and overrun by troublemakers and squatters operating with impunity seems unimaginable and is painful. But the pain is made worse because so much of it was totally avoidable.

Serving on the Board of Directors of Step 13 (now Step Denver) — a residential recovery program for men suffering from addiction who choose to take the hard road back to sobriety — for over 30 years was a labor of love, inspiration and enlightenment. Step’s founder and icon, Bob Coté, taught me that true compassion is not in the enabling of dependency and self-destructive behavior, but rather in supporting those committed to rebuilding their lives through personal responsibility, hard work and accountability. Many were homeless, but it was their strength and determination to do better by meeting their own and Step’s expectations that allowed them to save themselves and lead a positive and productive life. They will be the first to tell anyone that they themselves — not a shortage of housing — were responsible for their own addictions and that each alone, with appropriate support, is responsible for his own recovery.

Homelessness, as is being experienced in so many communities, is not now, nor has it ever been, caused primarily by a shortage of housing. It is a catchall phrase that has more to do with marketing and politics than facts. While too many living in our streets are suffering issues often beyond their control, and definitely are deserving of special, targeted assistance, it is also true that a much greater number of them have chosen a lifestyle driven by addiction and substance abuse. They are not the same, nor should they be treated the same. Different circumstances call for different solutions.

Providing housing to those suffering serious mental, physical and psychological health problems without first addressing underlying causes is backwards and is neither a humane nor real solution. Are the challenges faced by someone living on the street dealing with serious schizophrenia going to be solved by just placing him or her in an apartment? It makes no sense to treat individuals in need of medical attention as though lack of housing is the cause of their problems. It makes even less sense to let those who choose the street and reject taking responsibility for themselves off the hook by blaming housing for their problems.

When then-Mayor John Hickenlooper implemented Denver’s Road Home in 2005, he promised that homelessness would end in 10 years. In the last 15 years, homelessness in Denver has tripled, while four times as much is being spent on them — an incredible $50,000 per homeless person per year — with that money coming from the pockets of hard-working, taxpaying citizens.

Bob Coté argued that not only was Hickenlooper promoting an ill-conceived, unproven program that would not work but that by doing so, he would grow the numbers of homeless in Denver. Why? Because the “issue was not the issue.” Housing was never the issue, and Hickenlooper always knew that Denver’s Road Home was not the answer. His own words in 2015: “No one’s more disappointed than I am. We always knew that we weren’t going to end homelessness, right? That was a marketing effort to get everyone’s attention.” Well, he sure has my attention, spending tens of millions of dollars a year on “getting everyone’s attention” about his failed program.

On several occasions, Coté tried to convince Hickenlooper that requiring a commitment to a change in behavior should precede, and be a condition of, spending mega-dollars of other people’s money on housing those who choose not to help themselves. Cote wanted them to have “skin in the game” and take ownership of their circumstances. He vehemently opposed rewarding them for making bad choices. Even a politician should understand that doing so simply encourages more of what we claim to want to discourage. While Cote’s common-sense arguments were rejected, his predictions, quite tragically, proved to be prescient. Having personally witnessed many of those encounters, it became increasingly clear that Hickenlooper’s unrelenting advocacy of Denver’s Road Home, while well intended, was more motivated by politics, optics, and “feeling good” than evidence-based experience and logic. Good intentions are no substitute for good policy.

An old public policy maxim applies here: What one subsidizes, one gets more of, and what one taxes, one gets less of. Today’s human tragedies playing out in the streets of Denver and elsewhere were, and are, not inevitable. To the contrary, they were and are predictable.

Clear thinking and tough love were needed then, and maybe more so now.