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 non-congregate 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.

Migrants are an overlapping homeless crisis

The 2024 point-in-time count will be conducted next month. What it shows for Denver will say more about homelessness across the region than one city’s online dashboard ever 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.

“House 1,000 has been a success at getting people off of the street,” McNulty said. “There is no doubt that this administration’s approach to homelessness has been a welcome change compared to the last administration’s … but that doesn’t mean that approach hasn’t been flawed in some ways.”

Shelter is a start

December has been far and away the busiest month for what Johnston and his team have dubbed “encampment closures.”

Those are the enforcement actions in which city crews come and fence off sidewalks and tree lawns occupied by tents. Instead of shuffling people off the next block, as was a common practice under former Mayor Michael Hancock, city officials increasingly have offered the occupants space in a hotel shelter or other housing resources.

The clustering of encampment closures and move-in days at the end of the year was expected, according to Cole Chandler, Johnston’s top homelessness advisor.

The City Council didn’t approve contracts to rent — or in the case of the formerly Embassy Suites hotel on East Hampden Avenue, to rent with the intention to buy — the final two hotels until Dec. 18, its final meeting of the year. 

The administration’s schedule called for seven encampment closures this month. The last one, focused on the camp near 35th Street and Arkins Court in the River North Art District, is expected to relocate people to a collection of temporary shelters in the parking lot of a former Stay Inn hotel on Sunday. 

Johnston has been a visible presence at encampment closures. Late last week, some residents greeted him when he arrived at a large encampment near the corner of East 18th Avenue and Marion Street.

“He’s a great man,” 66-year-old Mike Scarlett said. “Best mayor in the country. This is how you run a city. This is how you treat the homeless.” 

Scarlett is on Social Security, but with the rising cost of housing, it’s not enough for him to pay for rent, eat and buy other essentials, he said. In the late 1990s, Scarlett hung the window dressings inside the DoubleTree Hotel at 4040 Quebec St.

Last week, the city offered him a free room there to get off the street. 

There was also desperation in the camp that day. Reuben Howard approached the mayor to ask how he could get on the list to be moved to the DoubleTree. He was a new arrival and hadn’t talked to city housing department outreach workers yet. 

“Who is the right person for me to connect this person to?” Johnston shouted at staff members after talking to Howard. 

Marlene Middleton, 43, strapped a mattress to the roof of her father’s car as she bagged up the belongings she planned to take to the DoubleTree. She went through multiple encampment closures this fall without being offered a shelter space, she said.

Now she and her 5-month-old pit bull Cash finally had a place to go. 

“Today they’re offering us a hotel and they’re not throwing away my stuff,” Middleton said. “It’s cold outside. Maybe it will give me an opportunity to think and gather my things and look for a place to go to get into some housing. Shelter is the most important thing.” 

What comes next? More enforcement is on tap

McNulty and other advocates are bracing for a heavier-handed approach to enforcing the city’s camping ban in the new year — especially in the urban core and other areas where the administration has “closed” blocks to camping in recent months.

Administration officials are recommending that people contact the 311 hotline if they see camping in closed areas in particular, though Johnston says his goal is never to criminalize homelessness.

His aim, he said, is to eliminate the need for large encampments by providing shelters and resources.

He’s also hoping that more activity downtown will deter people from setting up tents.

For Arfsten, the key metric to watch next will be how many of those who have been given rooms at converted hotels move into addition and mental health treatment. 

The city’s online dashboard shows just one person has moved to an inpatient drug treatment facility, but that is just one form of support available, with other services offered to participants elsewhere. The City Council in November approved a $850,000 contract with the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless to provide mental, physical and behavioral health support to people living in all of the hotel shelters and forthcoming temporary micro-communities through the end of 2024.

McNulty’s reservations also hinge on what Johnston does next when it comes to drug treatment and mental health support.

For McNulty, voluntary participation is a key component, since compulsory drug treatment “would be a major violation of our Constitution.”

Terese Howard, with the homeless advocacy group Housekeys Action Network Denver, has been among Johnston’s most withering critics since he launched the House 1,000 effort.

She has a litany of concerns about how the Salvation Army operates the hotel shelters for the city. But her biggest worry now is the lack of a clear next step for the people brought inside through the program.

“Unless there is new low-income housing created for these folks to move into, there is not an option,” she said. “Many, many, many of these folks are going to land back on the street.”

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