On New Year's Eve, Mike Johnston celebrated bringing 1,000 people from the streets inside over the past six months, closing Downtown Denver encampments and successfully hitting the first major goal in his four-year campaign to end homelessness -- a project he's hung his political career on.
With the turn of the new calendar year, though, all the same concerns that existed in 2023 remain: Denver still needs more affordable housing units, some House1000 beneficiaries are bound to return to the streets and thousands of Denverites are facing evictions.
There's also the matter of thousands of mostly Venezuelan migrants who have arrived and are expected to continue arriving. Hundreds are living in open encampments while they try to find housing and work.
Considering all that, is celebrating success in House1000 fair?
On his first full day in office, Johnston declared a homelessness state of emergency and said he would house 1,000 people by the end of the year and welcome them to their homes by the holidays. The administration dubbed the effort House1000 and redeployed city workers across agencies to make it happen.
By the end of the year, the city's House1000 dashboard indicated the administration had brought 1,034 people out of encampments into individual shelter spaces where they could begin the process of transitioning to permanent housing.
But does that housing really exist? Denver Housing Authority's former director David Nisivoccia told Denverite in May 2023 that the metro area is at least 60,000 units behind what's actually needed.
When people move inside, they have several months to find a new place to stay. The Salvation Army, the nonprofit operating some of the shelters, tells people they have three months, to create a sense of urgency, but they can stay as long as they need if they're trying to find housing, a spokesperson for the mayor's office told Denverite. Other service providers have different protocols, and there is no citywide standard, a spokesperson for the mayor told Denverite.
Of the people moved into shelter or housing, 98% have stayed inside, according to the dashboard. Of those, 25% have found permanent housing.
Johnston focused on closing the city's largest encampments -- most in the city center. The Downtown Denver economy has taken hits in recent years, and Johnston's working to turn that around. Part of that, he said to reporters at the opening of the first microcommunity, is making sure people can walk around and feel good about Denver -- that the city tries to fix hard problems.
Johnston also learned lessons along the way about how interconnected the various city agencies are and how dependent they are on so many private-sector groups, too.
"Big teams require lots of coordination and lots of creativity and small egos and flexibility," he said. "And there are people in every organization that are built that way. And you've got to find all those people and put them in the right room at the same time."
Johnston's strategy left many people, living outside the spots he was trying to shutter, wondering when their turn for housing would ever come.
People living in group shelters expressed frustration as they had come inside and didn't get first-priority access to the rooms in motels and hotels the city was handing out. And people living outside group encampments also wondered why they weren't prioritized.
Some housed neighbors, who had lived in City Council districts far from concentrated groups of people experiencing homelessness, resisted Johnston's idea that shelters should be spread throughout the city.
Others, living in largely communities of color and working-class neighborhoods in Northeast Denver, wondered why their neighborhoods were being shouldered with the majority of new shelters and why the solution wasn't being shared equitably citywide.
Many came to more than 60 public meetings with the mayor to express their fears that crime would rise, property values would drop and their neighborhoods would be ruined -- arguments the mayor listened to and then largely pushed against.
"I think our public outreach was really successful -- the 60 community meetings we did," Johnston told Denverite. "And that doesn't mean that everybody was happy. That wasn't the purpose. The purpose was everybody was heard. And we changed our mind in a lot of those meetings. We got good feedback. We adjusted plans. And we answered questions people had that persuaded them, that convinced them to change their perspective on it."
What kinds of units did the city create and where did they go?
When Johnston came into office, he said he would be building microcommunities with tiny homes throughout the city. He argued the strategy would be both affordable and quick.
But the city learned that wasn't the case.
Six months in, just one microcommunity has opened, while a few others are in the works.
While Denver will still look for some microcommunity sites where tiny-home villages can be created, the city will more aggressively pursue the acquisition of various hotels and motels in 2024.
"A lot of our hotel sites are a faster way to get a longer term investment made than some of the shorter term micro communities," Johnston acknowledged.
He pointed to the Embassy Suites hotel the city recently opened as proof.
"That's 220 units," he explained. "It has a full pool where you can teach kids how to swim. It has a gymnasium. It has four conference rooms we can use to turn into a childcare center. It has a space we can use for workforce development training. It has a backyard we want to turn into a playground. That would have taken seven years to envision, plan, acquire, permit, build, develop. We can turn that [hotel] around in 70 days."
City Council played a big role in ensuring the first 1,000 were sheltered, and it will play a bigger role in the next 1,000.
Councilmembers approved dozens of contracts costing tens of millions, covering hotel leases and sales, tiny home purchases and agreements with nonprofits to run the shelter sites.
Many went through without a hitch. But others faced pushback from City Council and community members. One contract with the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless for encampment outreach services failed over concerns that it would duplicate services.
Johnston also relied on City Council to approve his state of emergency on homelessness five times, from July through the end of December. That resolution let him move more quickly on things like contracts and funding. His near-full support began to fracture in the fall, with Councilmember Amanda Sawyer's long standing opposition joined by councilmembers Stacie Gilmore and Flor Alvidrez, who all had a number of concerns about communication and transparency. In November, Gilmore resigned from her role as chair of Council's Safety, Housing, Education and Homelessness Committee with similar concerns.
But Johnston has worked in hand with Councilmembers in other ways. In October, Councilmember Shontel Lewis told Johnston her support for the emergency declaration was weakening. "I'll be honest with you, you're slowly losing me," she told the mayor's Senior Advisor on Homelessness Cole Chandler at the time.
But a few months later, Lewis stood side by side with Johnston as they moved 200 people from an encampment downtown into a hotel in her district. And on New Year's Eve, she and Councilmember Sarah Parady were there to celebrate the opening of the first micro-community. Nearly half of the units created to shelter people under House1000 are located in District 8, which Lewis represents.
But some sites faced fierce community opposition, like a hotel on Hampden Avenue. Another micro-community planned for Santa Fe Drive switched from a planned 150 units to 60 units after some community members voiced concerns about being outnumbered by unhoused residents.
One big issue headed to Council in 2024 will be a fight over sweeps during freezing temperatures.
Though more than 1,000 people have been moved indoors, many remain outside vulnerable to the elements. Encampment sweeps justified by the city over public health and safety concerns and without housing offers are expected to continue.
A big fight on Council in the new year will be around proposed legislation that would ban sweeps during freezing temperatures and raise the temperature threshold to open emergency warming shelters from 20 degrees to 32 degrees.
All of City Council will vote on the legislation in the coming weeks, and if approved, the bill would require Johnston's signature. But in an email to Council, he said he opposed the ordinance because it would "effectively repeal the camping ban for a third of the year."
Instead, Johnston suggested a pilot program where the city would open warming centers during colder temperatures. If passed, the bill would accomplish a major goal of activists, who have long pushed back against freezing sweeps citing increased health risks.
Despite all of the city's efforts, Denver could still see homelessness grow in 2024.
Johnston has focused on the 1,500 people living on the streets of the City of Denver, a figure that comes from the 2023 Metro Denver Homeless Initiative's Point-in-Time count of unsheltered homelessness that measures how many are without shelter on a single winter night.
But that figure does not take into account the tens of thousands of other people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity who stay in shelters, their cars and on friends' couches throughout the year.
Meanwhile, evictions could outpace shelter in the coming year. By November of 2023 Denver had already broken eviction court case records. But experts say the level of evictions is likely higher, as many people self-evict to avoid a case on their record.
More support on the evictions front is coming, after Council and activists pushed Johnston to up the city's rental assistance budget to about $29 million. It's a massive increase in city funding, but it's still not enough to replace what the federal government gave the city and state in recent years. A recent study from the Community Economic Defense Project showed that Denver could need up to $55 million annually to meet the need.
"I think about the scale of our need and what it takes to have the scale of solutions," said Britta Fisher, president of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, a nonprofit helping with the city with House1000. "I think that 1,000 people to better circumstances than unauthorized encampments should be applauded, and I think our last state of homelessness report by Metro Denver Homeless Initiative showed 28,000 people experienced homelessness in the Metro Denver area over a one-year period. We have scale disparity here between where our resources are and where the need is."
There are also the tens of thousands of migrants who have arrived in the city with no immediate pathway to work legally and who are struggling to find homes they can rent. The city is currently sheltering more than 4,000 newcomers, according to Denver's migrant dashboard, and it has documented served more than 35,000.
Many migrants are living in encampments near migrant shelters and concentrated social services, where they can stay connected to friends and family living inside.
This week the city plans to open group shelters for a large encampment of newcomers and connect them to housing, though the arrival of more people from the border is likely to outpace any city and private sector efforts.
If Denver's efforts supporting migrants continue at the current pace, Johnston says he will have to cut 10% of city services. He's joined the mayors of New York City and Chicago to ask for federal support, though so far that isn't coming. If the city cuts its offerings and federal relief does not come, the number of migrants living unsheltered could balloon.
House1000 is a small part of fulfilling Johnston's larger campaign promise to end homelessness in four years -- and despite all the challenges, he maintains the city can ensure that instances of homelessness are "short and rare and safe."
At the opening of the city's first House1000 microcommunity, Johnston made it clear the work was just beginning.
In 2024, the city plans to bring another 1,000 people living in encampments indoors.
And he plans to do something he says is even harder: Build or identify 3,000 units of permanent income-restricted housing where people can actually afford to live in a city where home prices have risen far out of reach for many working class people.
The shelter system he built up to bring 1,000 people indoors these past few months relies on this coming to fruition. There's a limit to how many hotels Denver can buy and microcommunities it can open. Ideally, people moved from encampments to shelters will find long-term housing, opening up a spot for someone else living on the street.
But that might be easier said than done. During his first six months in office, several Hancock-era income-restricted housing projects opened. And because the roll-out of such new development can take years to fund and even longer to build, Johnston has not created any, yet, himself.
He plans to push for some affordable units to be built, existing ones that are slated to be timed out and turned market rate to be preserved, and other spaces, including underused commercial properties, to be converted into homes.
He also acknowledges that while 3,000 is three-times more than the city has built per year in recent history, the need is 20-times that.
Despite the odds of success, Johnston's undeterred in his mission and says he's committed to ambitious goals.
"I'm more and more optimistic than ever before," he said. "These really hard problems are solvable, if you get people committed to staying focused on them. That's the real takeaway I have is one of big hope and optimism and inspiration about what we're capable of doing."
Editor's note: This article was updated to correct the Hampden hotel's Council district.
