Remembering a Pioneer: Bob Coté

This year I’ve written about what I learned in Colorado Springs at the Springs Rescue Mission. But when I stayed there last year, I also thought of the pioneer who, starting in 1983, built a predecessor of SRM just up the highway in Denver.

His name: Bob Coté, a six-foot-three-inch ex-amateur boxer who in his forties changed his life by not drinking his usual half gallon of vodka for lunch. Instead, he poured out the bottle’s contents and became in 1983 one of the original residents of a new program, Step 13. Bob became Director of Operation and then Executive Director, pouring what he had learned as a homeless alcoholic into a program that challenged rather than coddled men seen as hopeless.

I met Bob in 1995 when his shelter on Larimer Street (two blocks from where the Colorado Rockies’ ballpark now stands) already stood out as a privately funded place where residents made their beds and submitted to random urine screens and breathalyzer tests. Some chose to attend Bible studies. Bob gained support from Denver business leaders and residents who were skeptical of liberal pieties and enjoyed Bob’s straightforward scorn for what he called “suicide on the installment plan” SSI, the federal government’s Supplemental Security Income.

Bob said it wasn’t “compassion to give a street drunk a bed and a meal and some money. He knows how to work the system too well. You’ve got to get him out of his addiction.” Step 13 offered immediate and visible benefits to those willing to change. Residents could move from dormitory barracks on one floor to a semiprivate room on the next and then private rooms. They would acquire furniture and grow bank accounts. When they were ready to leave, they knew what having an apartment required.

They gained money for those accounts first through minimum wage manual labor jobs. They could then move to positions with higher pay at local businesses that had come to trust Bob’s judgment. Those who were alcoholics had to take Antabuse, which produced nausea if they drank.

Bible studies played a big part in stopping the excuse-making but also the sense of guilt and helplessness that many homeless people have. Any religion that totals up our good deeds and bad deeds, and rings up the balance, is not attractive to people aware of their lifetime losing streak. The understanding that we are both more sinful and more loved than we had imagined, and that in Christ we are new creations, animates action.

Bob saw the depravity of man but also knew from experience that even messed-up men could change. Bob was straightforward about the failures: Year after year most of the men who staggered in from Larimer Street flunked out — but more went onward and upward through Step 13 than did so in government programs. One of Bob’s signs at Step 13 proclaimed, “The day you stop making excuses, that’s the day you start a new life.”

Like Springs Rescue Mission, Step 13 provided some material incentives to start a new life. Residents spent their initial night in a military-style dorm. If the residents got along with others and showed a desire to improve their lives, Bob moved them into a single room with a door. If they decided to work, not sink, they could go upstairs to where rooms were a little bigger and nicer.

Step 13 was still far east of Eden. One of every three of the hardcore drunks, druggies, and drifters who came in from Larimer Street came out of Step 13 clean, and able to move on to the building of careers and families. Two-thirds flunked out. But compare a 33 percent success rate with the results of a 1990s study by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. It showed that 99 of 100 alcoholics and addicts who received government benefits failed to recover or get a long-term job.

Bob died in 2013. I haven’t gone back to Step 13 since Bob’s death, but it is still going, now under the name Step Denver, and it apparently still uses the step-by-step approach. The book I’m starting to write will look at many current and past programs designed to aid the homeless. A common denominator among the good ones is their emphasis on developing agency, executive function, and hope for the future among those not only homeless but hopeless.