At-large City Council member Sarah Parady looked distressed as she navigated a sidewalk encampment on Tuesday morning. She visited with people as they packed up their belongings and as city workers cleared what they left behind.
This forced cleanup had gotten to her, she said as she left. People walking away from this temporary refuge said they expected more help when police and workers with fences arrived.
"I thought, 'Hey, we're going to put you in a room.' But it is just like, 'Get on out of here,'" Ron Taylor lamented as he carted some of his stuff away from a camp on Marion Street Tuesday morning. "I'm a senior. I've been having seizures. It's hard, man. I don't know what I'm going to do."
City workers cleared the encampment where he was staying, at 16th Avenue and Marion Street, on Tuesday and began clearing one at 16th and Sherman Street on Wednesday. Last week, KDVR reported that a propane tank exploded at the encampment near 16th Avenue and Sherman Street.
Officials did not offer anyone a bus to a hotel room, like they did for some people who were removed from tents near the Governor's Mansion last week, as part of Mayor Mike Johnston's "House 1,000" initiative to resolve homelessness in the city.
But people living on both blocks had heard about Johnston's effort, and they were disappointed to learn these camp closures weren't part of it.
City spokesperson Derek Woodbury, commenting for Denver's Homeless Resolutions Operations Center, told us the forced cleanups this week were fully "separate" from Johnston's program and carried out under the Denver Department of Transit and Infrastructure's "authority to remove encumbrances from the public right of way."
"There also were significant public health and safety hazards at these encampments. The areas were posted with 7-day notices last week and the unhoused residents at both encampments have been provided access to resources, including shelter," he wrote us. "When feasible, the City and County of Denver will implement a relocation effort like the one launched last week at 8th and Logan. However, there unfortunately are still times when public health or public safety risks, or other reasons, require a cleanup even in cases when housing resources are not available."
Still, Council member Sarah Parady said she's growing frustrated with the city's direction on this issue.
There was a honeymoon period after the mayor took office in July, when advocates and unhoused residents who were exhausted by former Mayor Michael Hancock's relentless sweep schedule felt relief that the forced cleanups had ended and hoped that things could be different. Johnston had said publicly that moving people along, only to set up tents on another block, was pointless and potentially dangerous, and that he would strive to let people stay put until he had somewhere safer to send them.
But a few weeks into his term, he announced the city needed to sweep a camp on Stout Street, due to a rat infestation related to boulders placed in the public right-of-way. It demonstrated a fragile balance the mayor needed to strike between a compassionate solution, concerned neighbors and public safety.
A few months later, Parady said she's worried that balance is tipping in the wrong direction.
"The mayor, upon taking office, publicly took the position and made a promise that he would stop encampment sweeps other than in emergency situations. And that was because he knows - and we all know - how harmful and how damaging those are, and that we shouldn't be moving people from place to place when they have nowhere else to go," she told us. "I'm concerned that we have strayed from that intention and that promise."
Parady said the sweep she attended on Tuesday resulted from a shooting and an overdose death in that camp. Like a similar shooting near 18th Avenue and Logan Street, she said the perpetrator did not live in the camp they attacked, and that residents were punished for being victims of a crime. If drug use is an issue, she said, harm-reduction tools like Narcan would be a more appropriate response.
"What I'm concerned about is that we're really addressing the visibility of encampments and the frustrations of people surrounding encampments, instead of the actual emergent conditions inside the encampments," she said. "The existence of encampments is an emergency, so what kind of emergency are we looking at? And how, from data and science and public health, do we actually solve that emergency that isn't just essentially scattering people and committing additional harm to them?"
Johnston spokesperson Jordan Fuja sent us a statement that reiterated Woodbury's response.
"The Mayor's main objective is to permanently get people off the street and into housing," she wrote us. "He has made it clear that on occasions, encampments will need to be cleaned up due to significant health and safety risks, trespassing, or because they're infringing the public right of way. The encampment at 16th and Sherman met these criteria. As critical as it is to get people into housing, it's also critical to keep them and the surrounding neighborhoods safe, which is why clean-ups like these are occasionally necessary."
Parady's comments came as City Council works to approve Johnston's first mayoral budget, and on the same day council member Stacie Gilmore released a statement challenging the mayor to be more transparent in that process.
The bottom line, Parady told us, is the mayor may lose the trust he needs to really address homelessness' underlying problems.
Lilith Evol, who we met in her tent at 16th and Sherman on Tuesday, said people gathered in this spot because word had spread that this is where resources would be available.
"Yes, exactly. That's why everybody's circled here," she said. "We were told that we would be one of the first to get the voucher for the hotel."
Lance, who was sitting on the ground around the corner (and declined to say his last name), told us the same. But he was cynically unsurprised to learn no help would come when the sweep there began.
"I've had a little bit of hope of what they're telling us, and then it ends up being all bulls***," he said. "I don't see how the hell I'm staying sober."
This, Parady told us, is what Johnston risks with each cleanup he carries out before his micro-communities are ready to receive people.
"The more we break trust with people, and we don't live up to promises and commitments that we made, the less likely people are to trust us to say to them, 'Get on a bus. Let us take all of your belongings except two bags. The bus is going to go to a hotel,'" she said. "People are not going to trust us to make that leap of faith if we keep reneging on commitments that we made in July."
While the city has approved money for pallet shelters and bought hotels, the mayor's emergency housing program still needs time and faces plenty of loud opposition from residents who don't want micro-communities near their homes. Beyond the deadline Johnston set for himself - housing 1,000 people by year's end - he's also racing to deliver solutions before frustrations boil over, from both housed and unhoused constituents.
In the meantime, many people living outside are just hoping for help as they bounce between blocks.
"I'll believe it when I see it," Carl Thomas, who ended up on 16th and Sherman after he was swept from 18th and Logan, told us. "It seems like they really just want to just get us out of here."
