The Colorado Springs Homeless Union is at a crossroads. Not a labor union, the volunteer initiative endeavors to “present a unified voice” and “call for fair treatment” for our city’s homeless, as noted in a Gazette report last week.

As the two-year-old union announces it’s in the midst of a “regrouping” and “soul-searching” process, it’s a good time to offer some constructive criticism rooted in pragmatism to help the union’s work and, in turn, the local homeless population. 

The totality of the union’s advocacy can’t equate to demanding more services from local government. That not only burdens taxpayers but also enables drug abuse and fails to address mental health and other issues that keep many of the chronically homeless on the streets. Some commit crimes against other homeless people as well as the greater Springs citizenry.

We do concur with Kristy Milligan, chief executive of Westside CARES, a nonprofit organization long serving our homeless: The union should include input from those with experience living on the street. No one knows an issue better than someone who lived it. 

That said, the union would be wise to tap input from former homeless people who have gone from the streets to self-sufficiency and sobriety — who have broken free from the cycle of dependency.

Plaudits to the union for leading what they say was a successful campaign to help conduct the annual census of the city’s homeless. Credit also is due for adopting the stretch of the Legacy Loop trail from Dorchester Park to America the Beautiful Park — a stretch long plagued with homeless activity, encampments and open-air drug use and trade — for trash removal twice a month.

But the “rights” the union advocates, as recapped in The Gazette’s report, amount to no-strings-attached giveaways that will only keep people on the streets and attract more struggling souls to the vagrant lifestyle. Calls for more public restrooms, trash cans, free public transportation, “diversity” in emergency shelter choices and less municipal ticketing for sitting or lying in certain public areas, such as shopping districts — all are sure to backfire. Already, the union lists its few “victories” as “more public restrooms and free bus rides on the city’s metro system for two months in the summer,” according to the Gazette report. 

The backdrop to these goals is the union says its been unsuccessful in reaching its target audience. Kandy Lewis, a union member who now lives in the Greenway Flats permanent housing for chronically homeless, told The Gazette’s news staff that after a couple dozen outreach attempts, “(the homeless) people say they’re going to come and they never do.” Local homeless activist and founding union member Max Kronstadt said “there were not a ton of people who were trying to organize.”

Lewis and Kronstadt say they are thinking through where to best locate union meetings and how to recruit core leaders to spearhead the union’s work. 

But the people of the Springs who live on the street only will reboot their lives if the union’s efforts incentivize mental health treatment, drug addiction counseling and other kinds of intervention to get them off the streets for good. Not amenities that only will keep them there.

Any effort to help the habitually homeless must disincentivize destitution.

It has been said before, and we’ll say it again: True compassion isn’t a handout — but a hand up.