Homelessness in the Denver area got significantly worse between the winter of 2022 and 2023, according to a point-in-time count of people living in shelters or on the streets.
On January 30, 9,065 people were counted as homeless in the Denver region, according to the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative. That is a 31.7% increase over the point-in-time count from January 2022 which recorded 6,884 people living in temporary shelters or on the streets across the metro area.
Since January 2020, the number of unhoused people in the seven-county region has spiked more than 48.5%, according to the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative. It’s an increase many service providers saw coming as the COVID-19 pandemic upended the economy, disproportionately impacting low-wage workers while the cost of housing continued to surge in the Denver region.
“With this data, we’re seeing the full impact of the pandemic play out,” said Jamie Rife, the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative’s executive director.
The city of Denver — home to most of the metro area’s homeless shelters and service providers — continues to be the leading community in the metro area for homelessness. Those conducting the count found 5,818 people living unhoused in Denver. The remaining 3,247 people counted were spread across Adams (948), Jefferson (854), Boulder (839), Arapahoe (442), Broomfield (92) and Douglas (72) counties.
A majority of the people accounted for during the point-in-time survey — 6,302— were staying in homeless shelters, transitional housing or safe haven programs for people fleeing abuse. But 2,763 were counted as “unsheltered,” meaning they were sleeping on the streets or other places not meant for human habitation, according to the homeless initiative.
Most of those who were considered unsheltered were also counted in Denver, 1,423.
Those rising figures paint a stark picture of the reality facing the city. Newly sworn Mayor Mike Johnston declared homelessness an emergency last week as his first official act in office.
Johnston won the mayor’s race this year after making a bold campaign promise to end unsheltered homelessness in Denver in his first term in office. To do so, he plans to rely on temporary shelter options like converted hotels and a network of “micro-communities” of tiny homes erected on patches of public land throughout the city. One of the key purposes of the emergency declaration is to knock down administrative barriers to setting up temporary housing more quickly.
Johnston estimated through the campaign that 1,400 units of housing would be needed in Denver for people living unsheltered on the city’s streets. Last week, the new mayor set a goal to make housing available to at least 1,000 unhoused people by the end of this year.
In a statement released by Johnston’s office on Monday, officials called the fact that a majority of the people recorded in the point-in-time count are sleeping in shelters where they have access to supportive services good news. But, the statement went on to say, the point-in-time numbers demonstrate that the mayor’s 1,000-person commitment is only a starting point that must be built upon.
“Mayor Johnston has been clear from Day 1 that the city cannot do this alone, which is why he has met with hundreds of critical stakeholders over the past week to ensure Denver’s approach is comprehensive,” the statement said. “He will continue to expand this outreach including engaging with state and regional partners and through his 78 neighborhood tour in partnership with Denver City Council members which kicks off tomorrow.”
Emergency order extended
The City Council on Monday afternoon voted 11-1 to extend Johnston’s emergency declaration but there was some controversy. Councilwoman Amanda Sawyer sought to delay the extension vote for a week, something that would have allowed the declaration to lapse and required the administration to issue it anew.
Sawyer said she is grateful for Johnston’s “bolder leadership” on homelessness, but she has questions his office has yet to answer. She did not want the council to rubber-stamp the order without more information.
The council, Sawyer said, should “make sure we have a clear understanding of the specifics of the order and consequences on that” before extending it.
Other members, including Councilwoman Stacie Gilmore, expressed similar concerns about a lack of transparency both for the sake of the council and the public, but the remaining councilmembers agreed the issue was too urgent to delay.
“This crisis was the No 1 issue as I spoke with neighborhoods,” new Councilmember Darrell Watson said. “We must take decisive action and this declaration is the right first step.”
The emergency declaration is now in place until Aug. 21 at which point the council will likely be asked to extend it again.
On Monday, Johnston also announced the 10 members of a team he is putting in charge of carrying out the work needed to meet his emergency declaration goals. That group is being helmed by Cole Chandler, the founder of the Colorado Village Collaborative, the nonprofit group that launched tiny home villages and safe outdoor site camps in Denver. After a year-long stint working for Gov. Jared Polis, Chandler now becomes Johnston’s senior adviser for homelessness resolution.
First-time homelessness grows
The Metro Denver Housing Initiative is the Denver area’s federally mandated continuum of care agency around homelessness. It coordinates the annual point-in-time count and tracks other data around homelessness.
While the numbers released Monday are alarming, Rife, the initiative’s executive director, stressed that the point-in-time count has limitations and is very likely understating the problem. Broader tracking of people interacting with the metro area’s homeless services provider network shows there are likely closer to 28,000 people who have experienced at least short-term homelessness over the course of the entire year in the Denver area, according to the organization.
Rife considers Johnston’s emergency declaration a step in the right direction. It can help slash red tape that delays permitting and construction of projects that can provide housing for those who are homeless or facing the risk of becoming homeless. It can also give the city access to more state resources. The order’s ability to catalyze people around the problem should not be overlooked, Rife said.
“One of the few good things we saw in COVID was the level of collaboration and coordination to keep people safe,” Rife said. “And this emergency declaration really again hyperfocuses the region, our service providers and the city government around that emergency that is homelessness.”
Homeless service providers were critical at times of Johnston’s focus on the campaign trail on tiny homes as a solution for unsheltered homelessness. Rife on Monday emphasized that “homelessness ends in a house” meaning giving people access to more permanent supportive housing.
That said, she said now is the time for a “both-and” approach where leaders embrace multiple solutions including temporary shelter options, rapid rehousing and emergency rental assistance, which was a critical crutch that kept more people from slipping into homelessness during the pandemic but has since largely dried up.
In Monday’s release, the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative highlighted that the point-in-time count measured a significant increase in people who were homeless for the first time (3,996, up from 2,634 in 2022). There were 1,316 families counted as experiencing homelessness for the first time up from 597 in 2022, an increase of more than 120%.
The point-in-time count’s limitations include that it happens in the middle of winter when people might be harder to locate and that some unhoused people may refuse to participate, all contributors to the likelihood of a significant undercount, service providers say.
“We’re out on the street every day and the number of folks we have been working the last few years is unimaginable,” said Jess Wiederholt, a volunteer with the Denver-based grassroots homelessness support organization Mutual Aid Monday.
The organization’s volunteers took up their usual position on Monday serving food and handing out supplies to the unhoused in front of Denver’s city hall during the weekly council meeting. Wiederholt is pleased to see Johnston following through on a commitment to focus on homelessness, but is already disappointed in his unwillingness to stop the practice of sweeping homeless encampments and making people move along when the city deems it necessary.
“Just when I feel like I’ve met everybody (living on the street), I’ll meet 50 new people one night. So the number keeps climbing,” Wiederholt said of the scope of the problem. “It feels like a natural disaster.”
