Loraine Solas sits next to her green tent, at 8th Avenue and Logan Street, watching city workers help 70 individuals pack their belongings into yellow trash bags and board buses to take them to more stable shelter -- either an undisclosed motel or a safe occupancy site. From that shelter, according to Mayor Mike Johnston, the people living at the encampment would be on the pathway to permanent housing -- part of his four-year plan to end homelessness in the city.
Solas, her boyfriend and their dog, who have been living at the camp for two weeks, are not among those the city will help house for now. They were at work when outreach workers stopped by to determine who would be bussed from the streets to shelter.
She and her boyfriend are trying to earn enough money to get their lives back together, she said. And holding down jobs while living in a tent is "horrible, terrible." Her pants are ripped. She can't find a place to shower. But she's lucky to have a job with some flexibility. She knows working is what they need to do to eventually secure a home again -- even if those who weren't holding down jobs managed to receive shelter first.
"It's working for those who were just sitting around doing nothing while they put everybody on a list," said Solas, who has lived at the sidewalk camp for the past two weeks. "For those who were out trying to make money and to get ourselves better, we missed getting on a list."
Six months ago, Solas and her boyfriend lost their apartment after their landlord decided not to renew their lease to rebuild on the property where they had been living.
When she received the notice that she would need to move, she decided to buy an R.V. to live in. She test-drove the R.V., and it ran well. So she took all of her money and paid a downpayment for her new home on wheels. But when it came time for the seller to drop it off, he never came.
"Crickets," she said.
The man knew her lease was up and that without the R.V. she would be homeless.
"I really need this," she recalled telling him. "I'm giving you all my money that I could be using for other stuff, for deposits."
But he never called back. She's been trying to get her money back ever since.
So she, her boyfriend and her dog moved into a garage at a friend's house. That didn't last.
"They can't have anybody living in a garage because the neighborhood association could deem it as an abode, and they could lose their house," Solas said.
Soon after, the couple was held up at gunpoint and lost everything else they owned.
"We've been camping at Federal and 49th," she said.
When Solas and her boyfriend heard Mayor Johnston would be offering housing to people living at the encampment near the Governor's Mansion, at 8th Avenue and Logan Street, they brought their tent there, hoping the city could move them into a more stable place.
"It was just a luck of the draw if you were here when they came around," she said.
"The names for housing resources were gathered at 8th and Logan throughout the week of Sept. 11.," wrote Johnston's Director of Communications Alex Renteria, in an email. "If folks were not living at the encampment at the time of name collection, their name would not have been collected. However, those who arrived after that time may have been added to a waitlist. We would call upon those individuals should the people on the original list decide not to take a housing resource."
On Monday morning, Solas asked an outreach worker who had been regularly visiting the camp whether there was a waitlist she could get on. By that time, the city had closed the waitlist because there was no more shelter available, Renteria told us.
On his first full day in office, Johnston declared a homeless state of emergency and pledged to get 1,000 unhoused people living on the streets into housing by the end of the year. It's what he calls the House1000 campaign -- the first step in his first-term goal of ending homelessness.
Some of those 1,000 people will receive permanent housing. Some will have stable rental units. Most will receive temporary motel rooms, pallet shelters, safe occupancy site tents and, in some cases, the same sort of group shelter people have been offered for years.
In those temporary units, the lucky few can live with access to wraparound services like addiction and mental health resources, housing counseling, and job-placement strategies, away from the public view, while they wait for something long-term to open up.
Yet long-term affordable housing still doesn't exist at the level needed to house the nearly 30,000 people who received homeless services in the metro area last year and the rising number of people living in encampments.
The Denver area is behind more than 60,000 units of income-restricted housing, according to David Nisivoccia, the former head of the Denver Housing Authority, and the vast majority of those needed units are not even in the planning phase much less have received funding.
By federal standards of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, most of the people given shelter under Johnston's House1000 campaign will still be homeless, albeit in what Johnston asserts are safer situations where they can more reliably connect to various services.
If they stay in shelter for at least 14 days, Johnston's administration will deem them successfully housed. If they're back on the streets in a tent on day 15, they will still be counted as part of his goal to house 1,000.
Moving the majority of an encampment into housing is new -- and it's a big change from how things worked during Mayor Michael Hancock's administration.
Previously, people were referred to group shelter or social services that often led to more referrals from one agency to the next and rarely to housing.
"I call this a major milestone for the City and County of Denver," said Derek Woodbury, a longtime public information officer for the Department of Housing Stability, who was working for the Office of Emergency Management's Joint Information Center.
Those who did not make the list for the 70 available shelter units will be forced to leave the encampment on Tuesday morning and could end up camping on another nearby block.
Mayor Johnston personally promised housing to Thomas Materese, he said. So far, the city hasn't delivered.
While many people he's been living with were boarding the bus Monday morning, Matarese was laying bricks and remodeling a building near Champa St. and Broadway, to turn it into housing -- possibly low-income housing, the sort he won't immediately receive.
Like Solas, Materese also didn't connect with city outreach workers when they were drawing up the list for those who would receive shelter.
Earlier in the month, he was in his tent, getting ready to go to work, when Mayor Johnston and his staff stopped by the encampment -- something he has done ahead of every forced cleanup.
Materese heard the mayor's people announce that anyone who needed to sign up for housing and had missed their chance would be allowed to do so. So he spoke to the mayor about missing the initial sign up.
"He assured me that everything would be OK, and that there'd be no problems, no hiccups, no bumps, and that everything would be taken care of," Materese said.
Johnston and Materese took a photo together.
No word of the promised housing came.
Last week, Materese asked outreach workers with the city, who were preparing for the move, if his name had been added to the list.
"They could not find my name or my information," he said. "When I spoke to the mayor's office, a young, chirpy little secretary, she explained to me that someone would be in contact with me."
He contacted the mayor's office again and showed the photo as proof of the interaction. Still, no progress.
"Our outreach teams are familiar with Mr. Materese and will contact him to get more information on how we can be of service," said Johnston's spokesperson Renteria.
For him, the request is simple: housing.
"We did the meet-and-greets," Materese said. "We've seen him come out, say 'hello' ... But we've done this before."
Now, he knows the camp where he's been staying will be swept on Tuesday morning, and he's uncertain where he'll go.
"Maybe I'll just stay at work," he says. "That's my new life."
In a parking lot at 8th Avenue and Logan Street, a muscular young man with piercing blue eyes named Christopher, shouldered a large faded Army-green backpack.
In one hand, he held the leash of his pitbull named Mercy. With the other, he shielded his eyes from the sun as he watched city workers mull about tents near the governor's mansion.
Christopher, who declined to give his last name because he camps illegally in parks around Denver and fears being caught, said he tries to steer clear of encampments because of the drugs, sexual assaults and thefts. Because he wasn't camping at 8th and Logan, the city's offers of housing don't apply to him.
But he showed up Monday morning, anyway, hoping to connect with a city outreach worker, to get one of the motel rooms or other shelter -- something he's been trying to do since his girlfriend died in April and he lost his home.
He's worked with a caseworker just after he lost his housing, and it took her months to even try to get him on a waitlist for housing, he said.
"To get on the housing list, you have to get into an SOS camp," Christopher recalled the caseworker saying, several months after they first met. To do so, he needed to get on another list.
"Like, I have to go stay in a camp first?" he replied. "Is this some punishment thing? Fine. Put me on that list."
Several weeks later, he asked the caseworker how things were going. She told him that when she went to refer him to the city, she was told they had stopped taking referrals.
"The mayor's going to house a thousand people by Christmas," he said. "That's a very small part of the population. I show up here, me, my dog, and a bag. 'You guys have to have one more room available?' 'Nope, sorry, we don't, because you weren't living in this camp when we came through and had people sign paperwork."
Now, he's trying to figure out where the city's next sweeps that lead to housing will take place so that he can get himself in the best place possible for hope of a home -- even if it means living in what he feels could be a dangerous situation for a few weeks.
Solas is glad for the people who are receiving housing -- even as she knows she, her boyfriend and others holding down jobs are being left behind.
"I'm not jealous," she said. "I'm really happy, because a lot of these people have been homeless for years. And this is the first time the city has done anything for them. So I'm glad that they're finally seeing a way out, or something that's kind of benefiting them. Because usually, you know, people look at the homeless as degenerates, and we're not."
She's still not sure what her pathway back to housing is.
"It was just the luck of the draw," she said. "That's all I needed was just two weeks being somewhere where I don't have to wake up and leave."
At least for now, that isn't happening, though she did speak to outreach workers who weren't able to offer immediate shelter for her, her boyfriend and their dog.
"It's just so weird how the cards were dealt," she said. "It is what it is. We just have to move. It's nothing new."
