It didn’t take much to inspire the metro area’s first urban camping ban outside Denver and Boulder. Just an assortment of abandoned items — tents, sleeping bags, drug paraphernalia, clothes and DVDs among them — collected by police during the past year in parks, under bridges and along trails. What the new law in Parker says about how the largely upper-middle-class city and other nearby communities are addressing homelessness is more complicated. Leaders in fast-growing Parker, 23 miles southeast of Denver, passed a measure last week banning camping on public property, while also making it illegal for anyone to “sit, kneel, recline or lie upon the public right of way.” The new measure bears similarities to urban camping laws enacted in Denver and Boulder over the past decade — laws that some people have likened to criminalizing homelessness — and serves as a fresh reminder of the pressures communities in the metro area are under as escalating home prices continue to push people to the margins. “There is a public perception that Parker is only an affluent community,” said Diane Roth, a volunteer with the Parker Task Force, a food bank and social service agency serving nearly 300 families a month from Elizabeth, Franktown and Parker.