City crews on Friday morning carried out the first homeless encampment sweep authorized by Denver Mayor Mike Johnston.

With a trash truck at the ready, city workers and contractors clad in neon safety vests began erecting fencing around the dozens of tents and makeshift shelters clustered along the 2200 block of Stout Street just after 7 a.m.  It was a departure from sweeps that regularly started before the sun was up under the previous administration.

Residents there like James Lewis II said they were given much more time to break down their tents and pack their possessions into carts and onto dollies than they had been in previous sweeps. But with the city unable to offer the residents in the encampment housing options outside the existing homeless shelter system, the outcome is likely to be the same — dozens of people with nowhere else to go will simply move to another area of the city.

Lewis didn’t know where he and his girlfriend were headed next on Friday morning but if it’s like other times the city has forced him to pack up and move the answer will likely be “just wherever.”

“We would just take off in a certain direction and be like ‘Well, this looks good,’” Lewis said of his past experiences. “We’ve just got to land somewhere basically. You usually try to find somewhere that is kind of tucked or out of the way.”

Another resident who refused to give his name estimated he had been forced to move by city sweeps at least 20 times. He said he didn’t know where he was headed as he tried to balance a wooden chair on top of one of the three carts that contained everything he owned.

“It changes everything,” he said of being swept. “I can’t go to day labor. I have to find a new place to be scrutinized and criticized. There are a very select few who care. I need a hand-up, not a handout. That’s how I look at it.”

Still, it was a step up from the cruelty of the sweeps under previous Mayor Michael Hancock’s administration, Lewis said.

“I mean, it was very rare if you ever even got notice,” Lewis said. “Usually, they would come through and they would just start chucking your stuff. Some of the city workers would be compassionate but there would be some hotheads.”

Johnston, elected in June after campaigning on a promise of ending unsheltered homelessness in his first term in office, has said that his policy toward sweeps is to avoid them until more stable housing like hotel rooms, tiny homes or Safe Outdoor Space tents can be secured for all the inhabitants of an encampment.

He said he knows sweeps without housing are not a solution to homelessness  “because it means you’re chasing people off one block and then end up on another block.”

Unsheltered homelessness rose by 8% in Denver in 2023 over 2022, according to a recently released point-in-time count. That despite the Hancock administration conducting sweeps on a regular basis and expanding shelter capacity and hours. The city is not alone in Colorado or across the country in seeing more unhoused people on its streets.

Some residents have criticized Johnston’s approach, arguing the sweeps are the only enforcement tool the city has that gives them relief from people illegally camping in front of their homes and businesses. The encampments are often inhabited by people with addiction issues and suffering from mental health challenges, issues that the city does little to address, those critics say.

In this case, cleanup was necessary even without that housing available because a rodent infestation was found in the encampment, Johnston said at a news conference Wednesday. The mayor had previously outlined that under his administration’s approach, encampments would only be swept without housing to offer if they present a threat to public health or safety, are blocking a public right of way or the encampment is infringing on private property.

Johnston emphasized that the health and safety of the people living in encampments are also part of his calculus when considering sweeps. He said Wednesday that the administration has heard proposals to clear other camps but has so far declined to take that step. He did not identify the locations of those encampments.

“What is the impact on the displacement of these individuals in terms of their physical and mental health and our ability to get them access to services?” Johnston said of his thought process. “I think we’re trying to look at the balance of the circumstances and make sure the benefit of public health and safety outweighs the impact of dislocation on people who are at risk.”

The Stout Street camp spanned an entire block with tents pitched on both sides of the street, even between large rocks and among fences apparently put in place to deter camping. The area is near many of the city’s homeless shelters and homeless service providers. City officials estimated that 40 to 50 people were displaced by Friday’s sweep.

Johnston personally visited the camp Thursday asking residents about any help they might need and making sure city officials had residents’ information so they could attempt to reach them when more housing becomes available. The city last week announced that it will be leasing a 194-room hotel from the Denver Housing Authority to open as a homeless shelter before the end of the year.

“We’ve been really focusing on how we engage them in a conversation on what the long-term housing options are,” Johnston said at his press conference Wednesday.

The day after Johnston was sworn in, he declared homelessness an emergency in the city, a step meant to open up more state and possibly federal resources and cut through red tape that may slow down housing acquisition. As part of that declaration, he committed to a goal of offering shelter to 1,000 people living on the city’s streets by the end of the year.

Johnston said his administration asked the nonprofit public health organization Headwaters Protectors to visit the Stout Street encampment and help with outreach efforts ahead of the sweep.

Ean Thomas Tafoya, the former mayoral candidate who founded that group, said his organization likely would have visited the encampment last weekend anyway. The group is focused on improving health conditions in encampments. Volunteers provide water, sanitary products like soap and toothbrushes, tools like rakes and shovels that help residents take care of their spaces, drug testing strips and other items and services aimed at making living on the street more humane. Volunteers regularly visit large encampments on Sundays.

Tafoya said encampments have existed in and around the 2200 block of Stout Street for years and his organization has offered its services to people there many times. He’s heartened by the fact that the Johnston administration recently launched trash collection services for two encampments. He would like to see that expanded. Oftentimes, encampments have excess trash because people who think they are helping bring food items that require refrigeration and residents have no way to preserve or dispose of those items, Tafoya said.

“It’s unfortunate that this situation exists with the rats but it’s because public health wasn’t being provided for,” Tafoya said of the Stout Street camp.

Tafoya emphasized he did not support the sweep on Stout Street or any sweep. He calls them traumatic displacements.

Not far from the Stout Street encampment, Warren Olsen said he and the employees of his small investment firm SGB Global Capital have been watching an encampment outside their office building at the corner of East 16th Avenue and Grant Street grow since Johnston took his oath of office. During that time, human waste has been found outside the building and some of his female employees have reported being harassed by people living in the camp, he said.

Olsen said the firm moved from an office near Colorado Boulevard into a revamped space near downtown because they wanted to be part of the city’s post-pandemic comeback. The encampment and inaction from the city to clean it up despite numerous complaints has him thinking twice.

“We made a bet — maybe a bad bet– that the city would care enough to get a handle on this issue and try to get downtown revived,” Olsen said this week. “I do think (Mayor Johnston) is a compassionate guy and I do think he’s well-intentioned but he’s got a city to protect. He’s got to protect the people that go to work and spend money in restaurants because if he doesn’t, he’s not going to have the resources to fix any of this.”

City Councilwoman Sarah Parady attended Friday’s sweep. A progressive who has previously described sweeps as wasteful and inhumane, she expressed frustration that Friday action was taking place but said she heard from some residents in the camp that they appreciated the extra outreach and warning they got. She thinks the unhoused community wants to give the new city government a chance to do better.

“I feel like maybe there’s a slight loss of hope today because they’re being asked to move one more time without housing on the other end,” Parady said. “Now, I’m really hopeful that we as a new city government are about to change that. I believe in what the mayor is attempting. But this just doesn’t feel good. It never feels good.”

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