Homelessness grew in metro Denver in the region’s annual point-in-time count released Wednesday, but city officials see a big silver lining — a notable reduction in the number of people living unsheltered on the streets.
The total number of homeless people counted over the course of 24 hours in January by the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative and its partners was 10% higher across seven metro counties than than the previous count in early 2023, the new data show. That included an increase within Denver city limits, despite a decrease — by more than 10% — in the subset of Denverites who were not staying in shelters.
For Mayor Mike Johnston, the count affirmed that his administration was moving in the right direction. He launched a homelessness program that late last year began moving people out of large tent encampments and into hotel shelters and temporary micro-communities.
“That is exactly the step-by-step process — to move people off the streets and into transitional housing, and from there into permanent housing,” Johnston said in an interview. “I think this is a clear indication that the strategies we’re using are working.”
The Homeless Initiative and its partners counted 9,977 people either staying in different types of shelter or living unsheltered in cars, tents or other places considered not fit for human habitation between sundown on Jan. 22 and sundown on Jan. 23. The sheltered population included those in emergency shelters, transitional housing and safe-haven shelters for people fleeing domestic abuse.
On Jan. 30, 2023, when the last count was performed, the organizations recorded 9,065 homeless people across Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas and Jefferson counties.
While point-in-time counts are among the few comprehensive gauges of homelessness, the Homeless Initiative cautions against using them to measure trends. Counts are only snapshots, and variables that include weather, methodology and volunteer engagement can influence results.
And the counts are assumed to be incomplete. By the Homeless Initiative’s estimate, based on information uploaded by government and nonprofit organizations into its central data system, it’s likely that the number of people experiencing at least brief periods of homelessness over the course of a year is closer to 30,000.
This year’s 24-hour count include migrant-only shelters that mostly were taking in asylum-seekers from Venezuela at the time, amid the broader crisis at the southern U.S. border. On the day of the count, more than 4,300 were staying in Denver’s temporary shelters.
67% of those counted were in Denver
A county-by-county breakdown of the 2024 count showed that Denver once again had the largest proportion of homeless people recorded — 6,539, or almost 67% of the metro total. The city also has the most homeless service providers of any jurisdiction in the region and the most shelter space.
Denver’s homeless population increased by more than 12% from the the last count in early 2023, when there were 5,818 homeless people counted in the city.
For Cathy Alderman, chief communications and public policy officer for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, the growth in the region’s homeless population is yet another stark reminder that housing costs are simply too high for many low-income people to afford.
“People are staying in homelessness longer and longer, and there is just not enough supply of affordable housing, and there’s not enough resources to get people into housing,” she said in an interview.
But the Denver-specific data showed that the number of people living outside on the city’s streets was 1,273 in January, down from 1,423 in the 2023 count.
That’s a drop of 150, or 10.5%. Offsetting that was a nearly 20% increase in the number of people living in shelters and transitional housing in Denver — including the facilities that are part of Johnston’s temporary sheltering initiative.
Johnston took office in July 2023 after running a campaign in which he vowed to end unsheltered homelessness in the city by the end of his four-year term. His All In Mile High initiative, which relies on hotels converted into transitional homeless shelters and micro-communities of temporary manufactured homes to provide an alternative to life on the streets, brought more than 1,000 people indoors by Jan. 1.
That initiative has since counted hundreds more people as being sheltered for at least one night through the strategy of shutting down homeless encampments and offering residents space in transitional shelters.
It’s a costly undertaking. Based on the administration’s projections, the city will have spent just shy of $155 million on the All In Mile High initiative by the end of this year, including operations as well as hotel purchases and other one-time costs.
As of Wednesday morning, the initiative’s online dashboard counted 1,673 people as having been moved indoors since late last year. Of that total, 188 people have since returned to unsheltered homelessness, according to data tracking outcomes.
“Folks entering homelessness continuously”
While the 150-person decrease in unsheltered homeless people may not be as dramatic as expected, given the scale of the program, the mayor celebrated the finding.
Johnston noted that Denver was used to seeing large increases in most homeless categories. The unsheltered count in the city rose more than 8% from 2022 to 2023, a difference of 110 more people living outside, according to the Homeless Initiative’s data.
He sees the lack of large tent encampments in downtown Denver as a visible mark of the impact All In Mile High has made.
“We, of course, know there are folks entering homelessness continuously. That’s part of the challenge,” Johnston said. “But more importantly, what we know is that you see a real impact in the places where we focused on making an impact.”
Some advocates for homeless people have been critical of Johnston’s approach, in part describing it as an attempt to hide the most visible examples of the problem while failing to provide long-term solutions — namely more permanently affordable housing.
Ana Miller, an advocate with the grassroots group Housekeys Action Network Denver, suggested Wednesday that the 2024 count missed more unsheltered people, since it happened weeks after the big year-end push to shut down encampments. While hundreds of people moved into All In Mile High sites, others scattered.
“All of these camps that could have been counted to get an accurate count have been broken and sprawled over large areas,” Miller said. “Yeah, it looks like it went down, but it hasn’t gone down. It’s just been spread about.”
The city, in a news release, cited a count of 117 tents on the city’s streets as of Wednesday, down from 242 observed during the point-in-time survey in January.
But Alderman said the overall numbers pointed to a need for more significant help on longer-term solutions.
She and the coalition have been lobbying the Denver City Council to refer Johnston’s proposed 0.5% sales tax increase to support affordable housing initiatives to city voters in November. The council gave preliminary 8-5 approval to the referral measure Monday after haggling over several amendments, and members are set to take a final vote — and potentially debate more changes — next week.
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