The homeless services nonprofit for youth, Urban Peak, is considering selling some of its downtown Denver properties, including shelter space, as it expands at its $37 million Acoma Street campus called the Mothership.
The Mothership will provide 24/7 support to 15-to-24-year-old youth and overnight shelter for people from 21 to 24 years old, a population that has been impossible to shelter in the nonprofit's current buildings.
The new campus will be divided into "neighborhoods" where different youth facing similar situations can build community. For example, there will be a recovery neighborhood and a neighborhood for pregnant and parenting youth.
The campus will also have classrooms, a music studio, a visual art center, space for behavioral and physical health services, a technology lab, and more.
The idea is for the campus to give youth a place where they can build enough stability to move out of the shelter system. It's an intermediary step between congregate shelter and independent housing, explained Urban Peak CEO Christina Carlson.
"It's a very outside-the-box innovative project that no one is doing anywhere," she added.
Which buildings will Urban Peak sell? The organization's board is working with brokers to figure that out.
Though staff have been informed of the potential sales, Carlson told Denverite no properties have been listed.
"We're looking at all of our portfolio of real estate," Carlson said. "We're really assessing what makes the most sense for us as providers, because property management is a very different skill than providing services for youth experiencing homelessness."
The nonprofit owns five buildings: three for supportive services, the former shelter where the Mothership is being constructed and the drop-in center the Spot, currently being in use as overnight shelter during construction.
With the construction of the Mothership, Urban Peak hopes to shift its work from the city center, where youth experiencing homelessness intermingle with unhoused adults and the issues they face.
"Youth are a very different population than adults experiencing homelessness," Carlson said. "Their brains are still developing. They're very vulnerable, can succumb to peer pressure, trafficking and all that. And so having a differentiation of space and location and service delivery is really important."
Outreach workers will work with youth experiencing homelessness who live downtown to connect them with the Mothership. The organization has robust transportation offerings to help young people get to the new location when it opens.
While some on staff have raised concerns that programming will be cut when the new buildings are sold, Carlson said the move signals quite the opposite.
"We are not reducing," she explained. "We are expanding our programming and really thinking about how to leverage our assets, so that we're being able to be true to our mission and support, first and foremost, youth."
Urban Peak's downtown buildings are surrounded by new residential development. Local businesses have complained about the presence of unhoused people in the area.
Neighborhood groups and the Downtown Denver Partnership have pushed for an end to encampments for years, and tensions have risen between property owners and renters and people living without housing and the organizations serving them.
The news about Urban Peak's potential departure from Downtown Denver coincides with Mayor Mike Johnston's attempt to decentralize homeless services from the city center to all of Denver's City Council Districts.
While there is trepidation on staff about the big changes, Carlson is confident her team is eager to move to the Mothership.
"The beautiful thing about Urban Peak -- from our staff and our board and everyone that's involved -- is that at the end of the day, what everybody cares about is serving homeless youth and figuring out how to do that the best way," she said.
