The number of people living without homes in Denver may be growing, but the appearance of the city’s center — once dotted with sprawling encampments — has changed over the past 18 months.
Where tents once lined the streets of downtown, there are now open sidewalks and medians.
“You might see three people together, whereas you used to see 16,” said Cathy Alderman, the chief communications and public policy officer for Colorado Coalition for the Homeless.
That transformation is the result of new shelter beds and a controversial crackdown in enforcement of the city’s camping ban ordinances.
But the next stage of addressing homelessness in Denver still looms large. To further reduce the number of people sleeping outside, Mayor Mike Johnston and his advisers will have to find a way to get about 800 more people to use their shelters. At the same time, they will have to move as many people as possible into affordable housing units that don’t all exist yet.
All of this while the city’s budget is crumbling, lawsuits with the Trump administration keep multiplying and the state is dealing with its own financial shortcomings.
“Our goal is to take it to zero. We’re only halfway there,” Johnston said about unsheltered homelessness in a recent interview. “It is a different set of strategies from here forward.”
Johnston’s office released new data last week showing there has been a 45% decrease in the number of people sleeping on the streets since 2023, dropping from 1,423 to 785 people, according to annual point-in-time counts.
That’s despite the overall number of people living in the city without homes increasing 27% — reaching 7,327 people — during the same period. The annual point-in-time count, coordinated by the Metro Denver Homelessness Initiative, provides a snapshot of data from a single night in January each year.
As Johnston’s administration winds down its efforts to add more shelter beds through tiny homes and the conversion of hotels into shelters, the ever-evolving All in Mile High initiative will now focus on trying to get people into stable housing. To do it, Denver officials will use a mix of tools that include rapid rehousing programs, addiction services and the creation of more affordable housing units throughout the city. The program now costs the city about $58 million per year.
Johnston said the city will have to get creative to find ways to build more affordable housing units without relying on federal housing vouchers or tapping the city’s stretched general fund. He called that effort “the next frontier for the city.”
When voters elected Johnston in mid-2023, he vowed to move 1,000 people indoors by the end of that year by opening 20 micro-communities and offering wraparound services for individuals. His administration opened fewer of those communities than originally planned but still crossed the goalpost, in an effort that now counts the moving of 2,654 people into All In Mile High’s noncongregate shelters since he took office.
The program has also moved about 5,500 people into more permanent housing since 2023, according to an online dashboard.
Striving for affordability
The mayor plans to lean on several strategies to address homelessness and housing affordability, from the conversion of commercial buildings into residential to looking for plots of public land that could be granted to housing developers, he said.
The Downtown Development Authority, a special tax district with a newly expanded mandate, has about $570 million set aside to help revamp the central part of the city, including boosts to housing stock through new development and office conversions. Johnston estimates that pot of money will help build 2,000 units of affordable housing in the next five years.
On the campaign trail, Johnston said he could build 25,000 units of permanently affordable housing for income-qualified individuals over eight years. How he will accomplish that is still unclear, and one ambitious plan to increase sales taxes to support affordable housing failed with voters in last November’s election.
But other ideas are in the mix. City officials are also evaluating public land they could give developers in exchange for projects that building affordable housing there.
“Land can be 30% of the cost of a deal,” Johnston said. “If we’re able to contribute the cost of land for free, that drops the total cost of the project 30% — and now you can make them affordable without having to add additional subsidy.”
He said such deals could result from negotiations for all kinds of public land, including parcels owned by the Regional Transportation District, the state, the city, library districts or recreation centers.
Denver may also offer additional property tax breaks to housing developers. While that wouldn’t require additional payment from the city, it would decrease how much revenue it takes in for its operations. That would cut into an already-stretched Denver budget, even though property taxes make up only 11% of the city’s revenue.
Johnston announced last month the city will have to drastically cut its costs in the next year, laying off workers and cutting programs.
The city faced blowback after officials announced last week that due to budget constraints, they would close its Assessment, Intake and Diversion Center. The center helps people who have active warrants for low-level, nonviolent crimes find housing and services and costs nearly $600,000 in the 2025 budget. Officials later walked the decision back, saying they would postpone the closure indefinitely.
Battling a growing problem
Alderman, with the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, said she would like to see the city pursue more affordable housing projects as part of an $800 million bond proposal that will go before voters this November.
“This is a battle against a problem that is growing, significantly, year over year,” Alderman said.
The bond program, which can pay only for capital construction, is intended as a way to jump-start city projects that can be completed in the next six years. The bond’s executive committee is currently considering a list of projects to recommend for that proposal, including a few that would improve shelters and create some housing.
But many of the ideas residents submitted would be improvements for things like parks, playgrounds, intersections and bridges, said Laura Swartz, the communications director for the Denver Department of Finance.
“There are many financing tools available for private housing developments,” she said. “At this time, the best use of our bond dollars is to focus on investment and maintenance of public resources.”
Beyond moving the people currently staying in its shelters into permanent housing, Denver officials are also striving to get the remaining people who sleep outside into the shelter system.
Many of them have acute mental illnesses or substance-use problems, Johnston said. He plans to lean on his Roads to Recovery program — which attempts to divert people from criminal justice toward intervention, treatment and rehabilitation — to continue those efforts.
Ana Miller with Housekeys Action Network Denver, and who once stayed at the Salvation Army-operated Crossroads shelter in Denver, has a different idea of why there are still hundreds of people sleeping outside.
“A lot of people don’t want to go to the shelters,” she said. “These places are not fit for human habitation.”
HAND is leading a campaign against the Salvation Army. The nonprofit group has been the subject of many complaints and some on the Denver City Council have questioned whether the city should still contract with the organization for its services.
There is also less visible homelessness, Miller said, because the city has cracked down on people setting up tents. She said tents can represent safety and privacy for people who don’t want to use shelters.
“The people who are on the streets out here still can’t set up a tent,” she said. “If you do, there’s somebody to tell you to take it down and move along.”
Johnston said he plans to announce more ways the city will address its housing shortage in the next two months.
“Eventually, I think, to drive more development of affordable housing,” he said, “we will need more resources.”
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