What comes next in Denver’s strategy for homlessness?
Mayor’s initiative is expected to reach target this weekend; gap in affordable housing remains
Denver is nearing the finish line of Mayor Mike Johnston’s five-month sprint to move 1,000 homeless people off the streets — and with days to go before his self-imposed deadline, he and his team appear poised to pull it off.
Just two months ago, Johnston’s mission was very much at risk of failing. Just 168 people had been brought inside as part of the initiative that has defined his short tenure in the mayor’s office. And neighborhoods were pushing back hard against vacant properties tabbed to host homeless micro-communities.
Local politics have continued to challenge the mayor, forcing his administration to pivot more strongly to hotels to meet the target of his House 1,000 initiative which came with a target set for the last day of 2023, this Sunday. Johnston also has weathered recent controversy over shifting definitions of what counts toward that 1,000-person target, as local media reported that his office was using looser criteria than originally announced.
But now the pieces are coming together. The online dashboard tracking the administration’s progress counted 889 people as being moved inside for at least one day through the program, as of Wednesday evening, with 867 of them still indoors.
Johnston, at a media briefing last week, laid out a schedule that calls for at least 192 more people to be moved out of encampments in the Lower Downtown and Five Points neighborhoods this weekend. By Monday, if all goes as planned, the dashboard’s thermometer graphic should surpass the 1,000-person threshold.
“The number is going to matter. It’s important,” Johnston said Wednesday. “But what’s going to matter more is (that) we know we have 1,000 people in the city who are not out in the freezing cold on a Monday night, worried they are going to freeze to death or get robbed.”
He noted the impact on neighborhoods in and near downtown, where “we also know we’re going to have a city that, for the first time, we’ll have major stretches that have no encampments — that have no outside camping, (with) a downtown that’s reopened and active. Those are things that seemed impossible for many people six months ago.” It hasn’t come easy.
The administration has abandoned a handful of sites it had eyed for potential micro-communities — collections of tiny homes or other temporary shelters on vacant land or parking lots — in the wake of staunch neighborhood opposition and the realities of urban infrastructure. A network of five converted hotels now make up the backbone of the effort.
It also hasn’t come cheap. While a complete budget hasn’t been finalized, the administration estimates it will have spent $48.6 million on House 1,000 work this year. Johnston expects to spend another $40 million next year with aims to move another 1,000 people off the streets.
And the work remains unfinished. While the administration has greatly and rapidly expanded the city’s noncongregate shelter network since July, Johnston knows that creating more affordable housing in ever-expensive Denver will be critical to stemming the tide of homelessness.
The point-in-time survey of Denver’s homeless population in January counted 1,423 people living on the city’s streets, but homelessness takes many forms and doesn’t abide by municipal borders.
Across metro Denver, more than 10,000 people were homeless as of January, according to federal officials, the fifth highest total of any major urban area in the country. The Denver area’s homeless population grew 46% year over year, second only to Chicago in that category. than one city’s online dashboard every could.
And there is an overlapping crisis.
Johnston has sought to distinguish between the local homeless community and newly arrived migrants from the southern border, many of them journeying to the United States from Venezuela. More than 34,000 migrants have arrived in Denver since late last year, sapping the city’s financial resources while leaders call for more federal support.
Johnston said recently that only 400 or so of those new arrivals have ended up homeless on the city’s streets. Efforts are underway to match them with available apartments or other shelter. But they’ve also contributed to visible homelessness.
The migrants might not show up on the House 1,000 dashboard, but City Council President Jamie Torres sees no separation between the two groups when it comes to the urgent need for housing and resources.
“I give (the administration) huge kudos for the 1,000 units,” she said. “That’s going to serve so many more than 1,000 people, but there’s a new bullseye. The numbers we continue to see coming in, we’re not prepared for.”
Advocates for the homeless community as well as critics who have pushed Johnston to come down harder on illegal camping have found some middle ground in assessing the House 1,000 effort so far.
“I absolutely do think that the mayor is doing what he said he was going to do,” Craig Arfsten, a co-founder of the group Citizens for a Safe & Clean Denver, which has been critical of his initiative, said this week of the amount of camping he sees around Denver now. ” There is a noticeable improvement.”
Attorney Andy Mcnulty has been a frequent and forceful critic of city government’s treatment of its homeless population. He negotiated the legal settlement that put limits on how the city can enforce its now more than decade-old camping ban.