Deborah Self couldn’t stand the sound of her ringtone any longer. She silenced it last week, easing the dread of yet another call from a Coloradan on the verge of eviction. She didn’t need the shrill notification to do her job. Someone in need is always on the other line. Her phone rarely leaves her ear.

Self, a housing navigator at Colorado Housing Connects, works from home answering some 50 calls a day to help people search for affordable housing, rental assistance, or tenant and landlord mediation. The organization has seen a nearly 60% spike in calls from the same time last year.

“There’s a whole range of emotions when people call,” Self said. “A lot of people are crying. There are occasionally people who are angry and they direct it toward us, but it’s nothing to do with us. I’m pretty good at de-escalating. I try to calm them down and see what we can do to help.”

The increase in calls comes amid a broader surge in displacement and evictions in Denver and across the state. For two years, pandemic-driven housing protections and hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid kept evictions at bay. Now, the expiration of those programs has collided with Denver’s high housing costs and sent the city careening toward unprecedented highs: More than 9,200 Denver households have faced an eviction filing already this year, higher than the entirety of last year. City officials say Denver is on track for more than 12,000 filings by year’s end, the most since at least 2008.

Evictions in the rest of Colorado are increasing, too, albeit at less dramatic rates: At just over 29,000 filings, evictions outside of Denver already have outpaced the entirety of 2020 and 2021 and are on track to beat 2022, too. Evictions in Colorado are nearly 8.5% higher than they were in early October 2022, according to state data.

Drew Hamrick, senior vice president for the Colorado Apartment Association, said increasing evictions were a “return to normality” after the acute pandemic emergency “artificially depressed” displacement. He said housing advocates’ fears of “eviction tsunamis” were overblown and that the state typically averages between 3,500 and 4,000 filings a month — as it is now. Landlords, he said, need a way to recover their properties from tenants who can’t or won’t pay.

As Denver’s new mayor scrambles to combat homelessness here, city and state leaders have worked to cobble together money to fill the void left by vanished federal aid. But the funds equal a fraction of what was available during the worst of the pandemic and are less than what advocates say is needed to meet the surge, prompting calls for more money.

What’s more, eviction filings are likely an undercount of the number of displaced Coloradans, meaning thousands of residents are quietly exposed to the traumatic impacts of evictions each month.

“What we’re seeing is the confluence of this out-of-control housing market that we’ve chosen not to address through policy and the ending of all of these federal resources that were keeping people housed” during the pandemic, said Cathy Alderman, the chief communications and public policy officer for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless.

“What is more troubling,” she continued, “is where this impact is being felt the hardest, and that’s for low-income households and fixed-income households.”

“A substantial amount of need”

When emergency pandemic funding was flowing, Denver officials pushed for that money to be spent quickly to avoid “the cliff effect” that the city is experiencing now, said Melissa Thate, the housing stability director of Denver’s Department of Housing Stability.

State officials doled out nearly $400 million in emergency rental aid to Coloradans who needed help staying in their homes since the pandemic began, according to the state Department of Local Affairs. More than a quarter of that money went to tenants in Denver, plus millions more allocated by the city itself.

The aid, coupled with orders preventing many evictions, worked: Evictions in Colorado plummeted by 57% in the first year of the pandemic, according to research by Enterprise Community Partners and the Colorado Futures Center. That matches national research showing COVID-era policies slashed evictions.

But the worst of the pandemic has passed, the money is largely gone, and evictions have jumped. Now, only one Colorado county — Larimer — has money left in its pandemic-era federal assistance program, according to the local affairs department.

“There is a substantial amount of need, and resources are more difficult to come by,” Thate said. “The number of evictions are a very serious issue. We have also seen an increase in first-time homelessness in recent years, and our rent and utility assistance programs are growing year after year.”

Denver didn’t keep eviction data before 2008. Its single-year eviction record since then came in 2010, when it surpassed 10,200 filings. But the city is projecting it will surpass 12,000 evictions this year, roughly 3,500 more than the city’s annual average between 2008 and 2019.

To address the soaring need, Thate’s department focuses on connecting people to rent and utility assistance programs and free eviction legal services, or linking them with a nonprofit or community-based organization.

Property owners file for evictions when they haven’t been paid or they allege a lease has otherwise been violated. Negotiations — made easier in the rare cases when a tenant has a lawyer — can resolve rent issues before a judge weighs in. Otherwise, when tenants lose an eviction case, a judge orders them from the property.

Not all evictions end in displacement, but most do: In the years before the pandemic, roughly 70% of Coloradans who faced eviction filings were ultimately ordered out of their homes, according to Enterprise Community Partners and the Futures Center.

Dwindling rental aid

Legislators, state leaders and Denver officials have sought to fill some of the gaps left by the federal money. Lawmakers set aside $8 million for rental assistance during the state budgeting process earlier this year. Up to $20 million more — roughly what was spent in a month during the pandemic — could be unlocked if voters approve a property tax ballot measure next month. More will be available through Proposition 123 funds.

In Denver, Mayor Mike Johnston has proposed more than $12.6 million for rent and utility assistance — a sharp increase from the city’s past spending, but still short of what advocates say is needed. In an open letter to Johnston this week, a group of advocates called on him to budget another $17.5 million to direct tenant aid, describing it as both effective in keeping people housed and cheaper than providing services to unhoused Denverites.

On Thursday, four members of the City Council advocated for adding the $17.5 million to the budget. Councilmember Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez said eviction rates correlate with homelessness and 41% of unhoused people in Denver this year were newly homeless.

Legislators passed several tenant-protection bills earlier this year, but they killed more sweeping measures intended to curb displacement and rent increases. One policy that did pass — requiring mediation for certain low-income tenants — helped slow evictions in June and July as landlords sorted through the new requirement, Hamrick, of the apartment association, said.

But the system has since caught up, he said, pointing to spikes in filings in August and September.

Housing stability — strategies, like rental assistance, that are used to keep people in their homes — is one of the less-flashy responses to the housing crisis, said Kinsey Hasstedt, the state policy program director for Enterprise Community Partners. It doesn’t lead to ribbon cuttings outside of new buildings or pledges to get unhoused people into permanent homes. But it helps at the root of the crisis.

“I think absolutely we need to serve people in Denver who are experiencing homelessness, she said, “and if we’re also not investing in housing stability funds, like rental assistance and eviction legal defense, we’re just going to have more folks experiencing homelessness that the city needs to respond to.”

Downstream effects

Fundamentally, Hamrick said, increased eviction filings represent a return to normalcy for the state, and he said the process is a necessary part of the rental market.

“If you’re going to encourage people to loan housing units, you have to have a legal method to get the property back,” he said.

Hasstedt rejected that argument and said the lesson of the pandemic was that rental assistance worked for both tenants and landlords.

“I find it incredibly disheartening and frankly offensive to think about the idea that well, now, rates of eviction will just come back to their normal and expected and appropriate rate,” she said. “I fundamentally disagree with the idea that there has to be some certain number of evictions in this state in any given year. We’re talking about people and people’s lives.”

Thate, from Denver’s housing stability department, noted there is a great deal of evidence that shows having an eviction on a renter’s record leads to long-term negative impacts. A Metro Denver Homeless Initiative survey taken in early 2022 found that the top two reasons for respondents’ homelessness were their inability to pay rent, and being evicted or asked to leave.

Even before people lose their homes, those who experience the threat of eviction are more likely to suffer from physical illness, high blood pressure, despair, anxiety and psychological anguish, according to a 2022 article published in the National Library of Medicine. Recent research from Princeton’s Eviction Lab showed that Black renters face higher risks of eviction, as do families with children.

Preventing these hardships drives Self to keep picking up her phone. In August, Colorado Housing Connects received more than 8,000 inquiries from people reaching out for housing help. Between May of 2022 and March of 2023, the organization averaged 5,422 inquiries per month.

Sometimes callers seeking housing help tell Self if they’re going to be evicted, they’d rather not be alive. On rare occasions, Colorado Housing Connects housing navigators have faced callers actively threatening suicide.

Self isn’t trained to deal with mental health crises, but she is trained to refer callers in distress to Colorado Crisis Services.

“We do our best,” Self said. “When people talk about self-harm or are just utterly depressed and they’ve lost their jobs and now they’re going to lose their home, all you can do is do your best to direct them to professionals and help them as best you can.”

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