If only a little more money — say, the 0.25% sales tax hike proposed in Question 2B on Denver’s local ballot this fall — really could end homelessness. But given our community’s extensive — and unsuccessful — history of spending on homelessness without tackling its underlying causes, we’re skeptical, to say the least. And we urge a “no” vote on 2B.

Just visit downtown Denver if you haven’t done so in a while. You are likely to find a patchwork of ad hoc campsites; roving panhandlers working the 16th Street Mall, street corners and intersections; street people, mostly men, reclined along storefronts and in alleys — some resting, some sleeping, some passed out. In other words, the usual inner-urban street scenes familiar to denizens of every large city in the country.

None of it is for lack of effort by Denver’s civic leadership. Nor does homelessness persist for lack of generosity by our community’s extensive nonprofit network — or by the city’s taxpayers. Both groups have in fact opened their hearts and checkbooks and indulged the city’s perennial homeless population extensively over the years.

According to a comprehensive report last year by Denver’s city auditor on City Hall’s wide-ranging homeless services, the city budgeted $37 million toward the effort in 2018 and, last year, expanded the budget for homeless services to more than $51 million.

Assorted agencies spend the money on various services, comprising a cottage bureaucracy within the broader bureaucracy at City Hall. City government’s Human Services Division oversees much of the effort. Denver’s Road Home also plays a big role. The signature entity is charged with, as the audit describes it, “implementing strategic initiatives and coordinating the cost- effective delivery of health, employment, and housing services in response to specific community needs.”

All of it is arguably laudable — if mostly for its good intentions — but largely futile. The most authoritative data on the number of homelessness in the area — compiled by the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — suggests the homeless population has at best plateaued in recent years.

And now, the Denver City Council is asking us to earmark a sales tax “to fund housing, shelter, and services for persons experiencing or having exited homelessness” — i.e., for more of the same old policies that have gotten us nowhere.

In all fairness and respect to the many dedicated public servants and nonprofit staffers who earnestly devote much of their productive lives to helping the homeless, few if any claim they are about to end it anytime soon. Many of them no doubt recall the ambitiously named Commission to End Homelessness, established in 2003 by then-Mayor John Hickenlooper and charged with no less than living up to its own name — in 10 years. It didn’t, and four years after missing its deadline, it was disbanded.

Meanwhile, Denverites have grown weary of the squalor and unruliness that are inevitable side-effects of homelessness. Voters overwhelmingly rejected a local ballot initiative last year that would have overturned the city’s “camping ban” that prevents the homeless from spending their nights on public property.

Maybe, then, Denver taxpayers as well as those in other metro Denver communities are ready to ask what they have been getting for their money. Has homelessness in the metro area been mitigated or simply enabled? Has the labyrinth of public agencies and programs that fight the good fight created a deterrent to homelessness — or a magnet for it?

That’s not to say the situation is hopeless, but it requires fresh thinking and a new approach. As anyone familiar with the issue will acknowledge, substance abuse and / or mental illness are recurring themes among the chronically homeless. Why not start there, as do some nonprofits that work with the homeless?

Homelessness is a complex and timeless problem that eludes simplistic solutions. We’ll return to the topic often enough to suggest alternatives. What’s clear now is more public funding isn’t the answer — especially amid an economy that has many other Denverites on the ropes.

The homeless deserve a break, but another publicly funded handout like 2B isn’t the break they need.