If Mayor Mike Johnston's 2024 budget goes through as written, the city will have roughly half the money to prevent eviction through rental assistance it had in 2023.
Though Johnston's already committed to spending $12.6 million, four times the city money on rental assistance that Mayor Michael Hancock did before the pandemic, the 2024 budget doesn't nearly reach the level of rent-assistance funding the city has operated with this year and needs to keep households housed into the future.
Why? Federal emergency pandemic-era eviction prevention funding is gone.
This year has already seen "unprecedented" eviction court filings, according to the Department of Housing Stability's Housing Stability Director Melissa Thate.
Less total money for rental assistance in 2024 could mean more evictions. More evictions could also result in more people living in shelters and on the streets.
A coalition of anti-poverty organizations including the Community Economic Defense Project, the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and Enterprise Community Partners have asked Johnston to add an additional $17.5 million in city money for eviction prevention for a total of $30.1 million.
Other groups who have signed onto the letter include: Coloradans for the Common Good, Towards Justice, the Community Investment Alliance, the Colorado Children's Campaign and Servicios de la Raza / Servicios Sigue, the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, Together Colorado, the Neighborhood Development Collaborative and the Globeville Elyria-Swansea Coalition. Organizers expect more groups to sign on, and we will update this story if they do.
"Preventing an eviction through rental assistance is far less expensive than serving our unhoused neighbors once they enter the cycle of homelessness," the letter stated. "In U.S. cities, the cost of serving someone experiencing homelessness can exceed $60,000 annually. Indeed, under the Mayor's ambitious plan, providing shelter to 1,000 of our unhoused neighbors will cost $48 million - nearly $50,000 per person served. While the Mayor's investment in responding to homelessness is critical, it is cost-effective and compassionate to prevent displacement and homelessness rather than pay for it once it's occurred."
Even the $30 million proposed by the anti-poverty groups is hardly enough alone, they say in their request to the mayor.
"Based on rental assistance data, on average, it takes around $5,500 to stabilize a household, so an emergency rental assistance fund of $30.1 million would prevent 5,000-6,000 evictions -- roughly half of the current number. This is the bare minimum investment Denver needs to make to address the crisis we're facing meaningfully, and it only works when paired with significant investments from the State of Colorado, nonprofits, and other philanthropic efforts."
The Johnston administration did not provide immediate comment to Denverite on the group's proposal.
Where does the group think the extra money should come from?
"By dedicating $17.5 million of existing cash reserves, currently slated to reach $262.2 million by the end of 2024, to emergency rental assistance, the City can prevent thousands of families from experiencing the trauma of eviction and homelessness," the groups wrote.
"Investing $17.5 million from existing cash reserves in emergency rental assistance would not jeopardize the City's finances," they continued. "It would reduce the City's cash reserves to approximately 14.1% of the total budget."
Councilmember Sarah Parady is working on the proposal and says Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, Shontel Lewis and Paul Kashmann have also proposed meeting that goal of roughly $30 million.
Johnston pledged to end homelessness in four years and declared a homeless state of emergency on his first full day in office promising to get 1,000 people from encampments into some form of housing.
He laid out his vision of moving people off the streets through rapid rehousing. He said he would work with landlords to house people in existing units. The city would build tiny homes and palette shelters in micro communities and covert motels and hotels in every City Council district. These would include wraparound services. By federal standards, people living in these transitional longer-term shelters would still be homeless.
When the mayor published his dashboard tracking housing outcomes, he began to count people who moved from the streets into group shelters like the Denver Rescue Mission and Crossroads, where they can wait to transition into permanent housing Johnston acknowledges does not yet exist. A person who stays housed for 14 days would be counted toward the mayor's 1,000-person goal.
Even if he reaches his goal of taking 1,000 people from outside to inside, more people will likely be homeless than come out of homelessness based on current eviction filing and completed eviction trends.
Landlords filed a record-number eviction of eviction cases in August and September . The city is on track to see at least 12,000 cases by the end of the year, according to the Department of Housing Stability.
If that number holds, the number of people experiencing homelessness could grow in the months ahead.
Last year, the Denver Sheriff Department carried out evictions on 1,665 households, according to spokesperson Daria Serna. This year, the Sheriff Department has already carried out 1,400 evictions.
Those numbers are a fraction of the households who lost their homes to court-ordered evictions and moved out on their own or who chose to leave instead of going through a court process at the first sign of eviction.
"Research shows for each eviction filed, two additional households choose to self-evict to avoid a legal process they can't afford or win," the letter states, referring to research based on Milwaukee evictions conducted by Matthew Desmond and Tracey Shollenberger of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University.
Johnston is sheltering people from the streets at a slower rate than new people are being thrown out of their homes by his sheriff's department. With current funding levels, that trend could worsen in 2024.
"The math is simple," the anti-poverty groups wrote in their letter. "Evictions cause homelessness; stopping evictions stops homelessness. Rental assistance stops evictions. If stemming the tide of the homelessness crisis in Denver is a priority for the Mayor, then the City needs to invest millions more in rental assistance to keep our families, friends, and neighbors in their homes."
When pressed about how he plans to reduce evictions -- a goal the mayor has repeatedly set -- he speaks about the work of eviction defense attorneys at the Community Economic Defense Project, a group Johnston has supported.
Gary Community Ventures, the organization Johnston led before running for office, gave seed funding to the Community Economic Defense Project while Johnston was at the helm, something he's quick to note when discussing eviction prevention.
Yet Zach Neumann, the head of that project, has repeatedly stated that there's little eviction defense attorneys can do to prevent non-payment evictions if there is no money to settle the debt tenants' owe.
Neumann cautions that the $30 million the coalition of groups, including his, proposed is far from enough without additional support, but it would do a lot to keep people housed.
"It makes a dramatic improvement in the amount of money and the amount of prevention that can be done," Neumann told Denverite.
