True to his word, Mayor Mike Johnston got about 1,100 people off of downtown Denver’s streets and into temporary housing in a remarkable six months. Almost all of those people are still sleeping inside as cold weather descends on the state.

The transformation downtown is palatable.

The transformation in the lives of those individuals who are no longer sleeping in tents crammed between sidewalks and roads gives us hope.

But the work ahead is unquestionably more difficult than this initial House 1,000 push.

The next step is finding permanent, sustainable housing for those individuals. If Johntson’s administration can help people overcome their financial, health, and addiction challenges to get housing, it would create a sustainable cycle for the city.

It’s what Johnston calls House 1,000 2.0.

“We also want to dramatically elevate the expectations of what those services look like,” Johnston said, noting that many of the facility managers are helping people with broad general information. “We want a much higher quality of that, and that takes more rotating specialists than one generalist. I would say the closest we are to this right now is our partnership with (the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless) which has a mobile group of mental health experts … where you’re talking about real therapists.”

The five sites Johnston created in the past six months to house people living in tent cities in downtown Denver are intended as temporary housing. Johnston says the goal is for folks to stay for 60 to 90 days before they are moved to permanent housing.

Then, that temporary housing unit will open up for someone else who is living on the streets or in congregate shelters. This is crucial. While downtown has been emptied of the encampments, the city’s congregate shelters are still full, people living in abject poverty are still spending their days on the streets, and there are scattered encampments outside of the Central Business District.

The city was able to round up 500 housing vouchers using state and federal programs for some of the first crop of House 1,000 residents. The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless has amped up hiring caseworkers to run the temporary housing facilities. Johnston said the next step is to increase the level of services at the facilities so people can get the help they need.

Already, the city has spent about $49 million to acquire the five old hotels and two sites for small pallet homes. Another $40 million will be needed next year to house an additional 1,000 people. Plus the city needs to step up addiction treatment and counseling.

How did Johnston achieve in six months what has alluded the city since encampments started popping up in the early financial chaos of COVID lockdowns and in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests?

Johnston doubled down on the previous administration’s plans: Where it’d taken Mayor Michael Hancock years to site individual safe outdoor spaces that housed 40 tents, Johnston was able to use an emergency declaration to allocate the funds he needed to acquire hotels and get them rezoned quickly to be used as housing for 1,100 people. Two more sites that utilize pallet home structures will house an additional 120 people.

But Johnston also held 60 community meetings in the past six months, where he personally worked to assuage the fears of Denver residents about having a temporary housing facility in their neighborhood. There are still obstacles standing between Johnston and opening enough sites to house a total of 2,000 people, and a lot of that will require the first seven sites to be safe and successful in their neighborhoods.

“It has to be structured so it was a win-win for both the people who are unhoused and the neighbors,” Johnston said. “While well-intentioned, the previous cycle of opening one or two new units and bringing one or two people off the street at a time, you can’t actually digest the amount of volume there is.”

Some of what Johnston wants to accomplish will be achieved with a redeployment of resources — he noted there were 8,000 service calls last year to homeless encampments and that street teams who provided resources to the encampments will be able to spend their time in the shelters instead.

This is a delicate time for Johnston’s plan, for downtown Denver and for 1,100 people who could be on the cusp of regaining housing and building a bright future with endless possibilities.

We’re rooting for everyone to succeed, and if you believe in this effort too, you can help by donating to The Denver Foundation’s House 1,000 fund. Johnston is pulling from Denver taxpayer dollars, federal dollars and state resources.

But he is also battling a second crisis — thousands of refugees, mostly from Venezuela, who have arrived in Denver. As of Tuesday, the mayor told us 4,800 refugees were in temporary shelters and more are arriving every day.

“We want to be a welcoming city,” Johnston said. But the city is on track to spend $180 million in 2024 to care for the refugees, and soon, city departments will have to face cuts, or the refugees will have to be denied services if the federal government doesn’t step up to help.

These pressures on an already tight affordable housing market may prove too much for the system in the next six months if something doesn’t change.

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