Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s priorities one year into his term are familiar — tackling the high cost of housing, reducing homelessness and rebuilding trust with the police department.
He told Denverite he’s optimistic about making continued progress.
“I think we've made it through some very hard things,” Johnston said. “The most difficult problem is the belief that you can't solve problems at all, and I think we've gained real momentum. When I talk to city employees and our teams, it's like we've taken on some very hard things and succeeded. That makes them more optimistic about what's coming.”
Read the full interview
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity
Kyle Harris: One of the things I keep hearing from readers, and maybe it's because our coverage is so focused on homelessness and migration, and because your administration has been as well: What are you doing for everyday taxpayers who are not in a state of crisis and who maybe don't live downtown?
Mayor Mike Johnston: I'm really glad that you asked that because that's a big part of our focus this year that we wanted to make sure we communicate, and that is why the real starting focus right now is on the affordability of Denver, because what we hear in every neighborhood all over the city is, "Man, it's hard to afford to live here anymore," and the most expensive part of living here right now is housing.
And so, for us, this Affordable Denver Fund that we're focusing on for the 2024 ballot, is really focused on the working families in every single neighborhood. They're focused on the teachers and servers and firefighters and nurses and people that are working one or two jobs, and trying to make it and stay in the city, and that are struggling. And so, that's really the focus of this. This fund does not fund homelessness, does not support services.
It actually is not an allowable use under the ordinance to be able to do that, so it's really focused on the working class, the middle-class families across the city.
(Another issue) we hear a lot about is safety. People still worry about crime in all the neighborhoods, property crime in some places, violent crime in others, and so we lay out a really big five-point plan on public safety, which is focused on bringing safety in all the neighborhoods.
It's both dropping violent crime; we’re looking to drop that 20 percent. We're already on path to do that and to drop property crime. We've already dropped auto theft 30 percent.
That was one of the biggest issues in all the neighborhoods around the city, so those were the two things we saw really hitting home in all of our neighborhoods across the city for every Denverite, and that's what we're focused on.
We also have a whole focus on just doing government better. I call it “Great Government.” How do we make sure the fundamental services you get from the city are world-class? And we look every day at things like how many trash can pickups we move, how long it takes us to deliver a new cart to you if you ask for one? So we're focusing on just the functions of great government, but I think those big ones for us are affordability and public safety.
The last one is we started this service program called Give5 Mile High, and part of the focus there in September will be on cleanliness, just on keeping all of our neighborhoods clean. A lot of times people say, "I love Denver, but why are there weeds in a place down the street?" or "Why is there trash in the intersection?" So we do think a clean Denver feels like a safe Denver, and so those are our big citywide initiatives that we're very excited about.
Harris: You talked about public safety, and the number of uniform positions is actually down, which I thought was really interesting, and if crime had gone up, I would be able to say, "Hey, you screwed up, and things are real criminal now." That's not the case. And I'm curious, one, why are those numbers still low, but two, why is crime going down if law enforcement is actually a little softer than it was a year ago?
Mayor Johnston: I mean, the first is we do have a schedule to get three cadet classes this year. They're going to be back-ended more towards the end of the year, because we're trying to change our recruiting policies as well. We want a more diverse force. We want more women in the force. I was at the cadet class yesterday. More than 50 percent of the cadets are women, which is fantastic for us as a pipeline of future talent, so that's the back end, a little bit like when we were doing House1000. It takes you six months to do it, but most of those units come on in the last two months, because it takes time to identify them, buy them.
So similarly, find the officers, recruit them, bring them on. We're still pushing to do that, and I think we have a good path to hit that target.
There are a lot of other strategies we are using currently that are also driving down crime with the resources we have. A good example is auto theft, right? We put out 111 license plate readers all across the city. We have an auto theft team that's out and very aggressive. We took these actions on putting tracking devices into cars; people wanted to do that, so that you could immediately identify your car if it's stolen. Deterrent devices, so people will know that that car is protected by a tracking device, and those have really made a huge impact.
A lot of those didn't require more officers. They required better deployment of resources we had. Officers’ time is very important.
We've also saved a bunch of officers’ time by things like the success of our All in Mile High effort, because now when we have 1,600 people off the street, that's 1,600 fewer tents, that's 1,600 fewer 911 calls for people to respond to or interventions for officers to have to go to, and so we've been able to reprioritize a lot of their time away from what used to be a ton of time spent down in encampments. And some of the police districts, 60 percent of the calls they got were to encampments. That's 60 percent of their police time that's now freed back up, which helps a lot.
Harris: So what are they doing with that extra time?
Mayor Johnston: Yeah, so we have two big things we're focused on here. One is called the Hot Streets Initiative, which is focusing on places where we know we have risks of heightened levels of crime. And literally, we're trying to do five or six visits to those sites per day to have an officer come by, spend ten minutes, check about the happenings, talk to local community leaders of their issues, but be present and visible.
Some of the research we've seen says that an officer in one of those high-risk sites, every two hours, drops the risk of crime by more than 90 percent. So that matters a lot. But you’ve got to free up time to do that separate from whatever calls you're responding to.
The other one we're adding is these trust patrols. That's not responding to a place where there's a high risk of crime. It's just going to places where you want to be able to build relationships with community members or business owners, at a rec center, a business, or a park, and listening and building relationships.
So now we prioritize those two as uses of officers’ time that we weren't doing before, that now help a lot, and we think those are already having a really good impact.
Harris: I'm imagining the officers. They'd lost a lot of trust for many years. I'm curious how those go down and how, in a community that actually often doesn't trust law enforcement, how they won't be somewhat traumatizing experiences, depending on the relationships?
Mayor Johnston: Yeah. I think there are a couple of keys here. One is we've started with places where people are requesting officers to come and it's not a surprise. So we're not surprising you. You're coming onto our website and saying, "I'm a business. Can you come by and stop in? I have some questions I want to ask you," or "I'd love to have you see what's happening in the neighborhood." The other is, "We're having a community event on Saturday. Could you stop by?"
So often, a lot of it is responsive to community requests. The others are really business-based, where it's not as intimidating as having three officers come up to your kid on the playground.
It is more of looking at commercial centers, where I think it is pretty normal for a cop to come in and walk through two or three retail stores or two or three restaurants, and just talk to the manager and say, "Hey, how are things going? What are your concerns?" We talk to businesses, over and over and over, who say, "We want to see more officers. We want to have them on the street. We want to have them come in and check in," and so I think there's a great deal of demand in that context.
The community-based settings, we're going to start by being responsive to requests, not by sending people out into community events that they weren't invited to.
Harris: I'm curious also, as you're thinking about all of the safety stuff, House1000 from the perspective of business owners down here, residents down here, has been a pretty big success. It's created a visual difference downtown. I'm also hearing from people in Mar Lee, who are writing in and saying, "I heard the mayor talk about downtown getting cleaner, and this weekend I had someone sleeping in my yard," and “Bear Creek is filled with unhoused folks.” The South Platte River Trail, same thing.
I'm curious what your message is to those folks who maybe are seeing an increase in unsheltered homelessness?
Mayor Johnston: So the first and most important thing to say is the work is by far not done. We've not reached the finish line. We have a lot of work left to do, and what has happened is it is kind of like triage in the emergency room. You start with the most dangerous and most difficult cases.
For us, these very large 50, 100, 200 person encampments around the city were the biggest early crisis. We were able to close 16 of those encampments.
There aren't now any real large encampments left around the city. We did know once we got past that there would be a lot more of what we call the ones and twos. It is one individual person under a bridge. It's two people on a riverside, and that's sometimes a different type of individual with different types of needs, and they might need different kinds of support and so, that's where we're doing a lot of outreach now, to those places.
So the first most important thing is we absolutely know that; we’re very focused on finding those folks and housing them, and we have different strategies.
So with a lot of these folks, we’re doing what we call Street to Leasing programs, which is we bring them off of the street and put them directly into a leased apartment, because often times they might be more high-functioning. They might be a more solitary individual. They're not in a culture or climate of an encampment, but we are focusing on those folks. We're reaching out to them, we're continuing to resolve, which is to close these encampments and move these people into housing.
That'll continue to be a focus. But instead of it being 200 or 100 people at a time, it's now one or two at a time, which doesn't have the same fanfare or the same direct impact. But we are absolutely aware of it.
And sometimes those ones or twos are harder to track. We get a note that they're down by Bear Creek. We go down there the next night. They've moved. And so we are doing outreach to find those folks. But they're absolutely our priority to move into housing in the next 6 months.
The reason why this phase works better with that population, when you're trying to close a 200-person encampment, you need a 200-room hotel to move them into to close them all in one day. Now when we have those 200-room hotels, and every week four people are moving out of that hotel into permanent housing, you’ve got four new units. And that means that week you're looking for just four people. It's the ability to go to two people at Bear Creek or two people under I-25, and now say, "Great, we have four open units." That works.
It wouldn't have worked to have gone to a 100-person encampment and say, "We only have four units." So the churn of how units open now is actually fit to the population of need that we have now, which was how we hoped it would work. And it really has.
Harris: And what should a resident do when they see one or two people in their community? What would your preferred method be?
Mayor Johnston: We would want them to notify us on 311. They can do that either by our chatbot, Sunny or by texting or by calling. Then, that gets passed through the 311 system to our housing team that would outreach to them and get them connected.
Harris: Your focus over the next few months is going to be pushing this affordable housing tax. I want to hear a little bit more about the details of it, and that may be a work in progress, and if so, that's fine. That's the thing I was hearing today from the business community. It's the thing I'm hearing from residents. What exactly is that money going to do?
Mayor Johnston: Great, so this would be focused on a series of strategies to meet people across the continuum of housing needs. So the way we describe that in housing is it's up to 100 percent of the area median income. That means, literally, the average income earner in the city is at 100 percent of area median income. So if you're at 50 percent of area median income, you make half of what the average person makes. 25 percent, you make a quarter.
And so I think about them in terms of case studies, right? A person in the 100th percentile might be two teachers who live together. A person in the 50th percentile might be a single teacher with two kids. Someone in the 25th percentile might be a server or someone who is a busboy at a restaurant. And so they all have different needs of housing, and we have different strategies for each of those sections.
At the top, folks at 100 percent, that are middle income, we're really focusing on homeownership. How do we get them into owning a home? And so, that's often a down payment assistance. It could be houses that are owned by a land trust. And then the cost to purchase it is low, and it stays low when you resell it, kind of like you see in a lot of mountain communities.
As you go down into 50th and 75th percentile, there we do a lot of building new units where we're helping provide some public financing to build the unit, but when we use that public financing to help build the unit, the trade is that unit has what we call a permanent deed restriction, which is it says, "This unit can never charge a person more than 30 percent of what they make," and so that's the data I've shared.
If you're a teacher making $60,000 a year, and you're in one of those units, you don't pay more than $1,500 a month, because that's 30 percent of your income. I don't care who owns the building. I don't care if they sell it to an investor from Singapore, London, or New York. That restriction travels with a unit 30, 50, 90 perpetual, and so you never have your rent raised at any point.
That's a big part of the focus, on that middle class. Then, when we go to some of our lowest-income earners, we do a couple of things. Sometimes we do city-based vouchers, which helps us cover your rent when you move into a unit that is going to be subsidized. Sometimes we would do subsidies, where if there's a $2,000 a month unit, we pay $500 a month, so you're only paying $1,500, so it's still affordable to you, but we cover the difference. Then, we also will take units that we will preserve.
So sometimes you build affordable housing units through the federal tax credits. They're called LIHTC credits, and oftentimes when you build those units, they have a 15-year expiration, so the unit stays affordable for 15 years. At year 16, whoever owns that unit can suddenly sell it at market rate or can take the rent from $1,200 to $2,500. So what we try to do is intervene before that happens and preserve that unit to stay affordable.
The other one is we can acquire units. If there's a naturally occurring, affordable unit out there or a unit that is lower market rate, but it's not yet affordable, we could buy that unit and could make it affordable to people at a guaranteed lower cost.
So these are all different strategies based on different levels of the income spectrum, and they're quite complicated. But the key is they're all the different strategies we know work best at the right income level to keep housing affordable, and importantly, to do it on the lowest amount of city investment.
If it costs $500,000 to build a unit, we don't want to put $500,000 of taxpayer money to build one unit. We want to have the city put in $30,000, and the developer borrows from a bank and raises their own money to cover the rest of it, but our investment helps just cover the gap to keep that unit affordable. So we want to get the most possible affordability we can on the lowest possible city investment.
Harris: One thing I'm trying to wrap my head around is, in a market like this, when the city, the state, or otherwise subsidizes housing, it gives landlords the ability to make whatever they're asking, right? So like a $1,600 unit, if there's some subsidy going in there, they can keep it at that rate. With these sorts of programs, are we sort of unnaturally inflating the market and interfering with what would actually drive prices down?
Mayor Johnston: It's a great question. We're doing the opposite in two ways. One is all of these units that we're building and financing and investing, we're investing in order to keep those units permanently affordable at the affordable rate, so they're not getting subsidized. They're not charging $2,500, and renters only have to pay $1,500.
We're financing the way that they can charge an affordable rate and still make back the money that they spent. So that's the top, best outcome. Same with the units that we're preserving.
The only place we do a subsidy is if you have a person that is in and out of work, but is trying to get a place to live, and they're making $20,000 a year. We don't want to spend $400,000 to build that whole unit from scratch for that person. That's too expensive. So it's easier to find a unit that's $1600 and discounted to $1200. We're only spending $400 a month, not $400,000, to keep that low, while we add units at the same time.
The other really important part of this, Kyle, which I'm glad you asked about, is we also believe that building market-rate units is still part of the solution. Denver has this very unique feature where the housing market is so competitive, that even when you add new market-rate units, it adds more affordability to the system.
So right now, there's a term called the moving-chain index, which is whenever you build a new unit at market rate, someone moves out of a unit, someone else moves into that new unit, and if they move out of a more affordable unit, you're actually creating an opening in an affordable unit.
Denver, of all the cities canvassed in the national study, has the highest moving chain index of any city. It's 0.82, which basically means every time you build a market rate unit, you create 0.82 affordable units instantly, and so that means this is a moment where a rising tide lifts all boats, more units bring more affordability, and whenever you build a new unit, three years later, like up to 70 percent of those market-rate units have now dropped to be in some sort of affordable range. So they start off as luxury, but often, as the class adjusts, they become more affordable. So that's why we're trying.
We don't want to have a shortage in the market, like where there is now. We're driving up costs by trying to be a buyer in the market. We want to have there be more units at all levels. So there's more supply, less demand.
Harris: We're looking at increased sales taxes. Some of our readers are saying, "Hey, wait a second. We're already paying so much in taxes. We can't afford anymore." What do you say to those, particularly low-income, working-class residents, who feel like they need that extra money?
Mayor Johnston: I mean, the key is, who we're worried about most is the low-income and working-class families that are most at risk. Those are the ones that have the most to benefit from this structure, because the thing that's killing them right now is not the sales tax. It's the cost of housing.
And so the net impact on a family would be about $2 a week in total sales tax increase. Because keep in mind, you don't pay this on groceries. You don't pay it on gas. All of our biggest bills, sales taxes don't apply to. So $2 a week and then the net result is you could save up to $1,000 a month on a unit that is now deed-restricted. That's a huge win for those target families.
Also, important is that we won't have the highest sales tax in the state. We still are, in the total tax package, among the lowest in the top 40 municipalities in the country, and so of the big cities, we're about the 18th or 19th largest city in the country. Of those top 40, 50 cities, we're in the bottom quartile of total tax burden. So we are monitoring that, and about 35 percent of the total sales tax paid in Denver are paid by folks from outside of Denver. It's not all carried by the residents.
So this is why we think it's not as regressive as it could be, and because the upside for those folks that are struggling the most is so high, that's why we think it's a really worthwhile investment.
Harris: Let's talk Broncos. Where is your head? Where are we with negotiations in terms of keeping the Broncos in Denver, and also, where are all the possible spots in Denver that they might move to?
Mayor Johnston: Yeah. I think I've said before, the only thing I would get disowned from by my own family is not being able to keep the Broncos in Denver, so I think my dad would come out of the grave and kill me, himself, if I let that happen.
So we are intensely focused on trying to keep the Broncos in Denver, and we think it's part of the culture heritage of the city, it's part of the brand, and we are in negotiations with the Broncos on how to make that happen.
And we're looking at all possible options, so I think we don't know anything more than that, other than to say we've had good conversations so far. We think they're committed to the long-term future of the city and its success, and we think there's a good partnership to be had there. So we are working on it and we will get back to you when we have progress, but I'm optimistic.
Harris: Is Burnham Yards on the table right now?
Mayor Johnston: I can't really say anything about any potential sites that are on the table, because I know they're looking at a bunch of sites. I only know some of them, and we're in ongoing negotiations, so we're looking at a number of places that could be options. But my job is just to find an option that will work, and we're going to try to figure one out.
Harris: Park Hill Golf Course?
Mayor Johnston: That one, I can tell you, is not on the table.
Harris: Going into the second year, I'm curious where you are also having your own doubts?
Mayor Johnston: Good question. I am mostly quite optimistic right now. I mean, I think we've made it through some very hard things. It's not like these things weren't difficult. I mean, homelessness is incredibly difficult. Migrant support, incredibly difficult. Affordable housing, difficult. Public safety, difficult.
But the most difficult problem is the belief that you can't solve problems at all, and I think we've gained real momentum.
When I talk to city employees and our teams, it's like we've taken on some very hard things and succeeded. That makes them more optimistic about what's coming. We, obviously, have a lot of things we have to get better at. I want to be at 100 percent trash pickup every week on every block. That's not easy to do.
We want to do a much better job at case management and support for folks that are in our “All In” sites to get them up and into independent housing, long-term, faster. That's a real priority for us.
We want to reduce gun crime all over the city faster. That's a real priority.
So these things are hard. I mean, reducing gun crime is not an easy thing to do.
But I think what I feel confident about is I feel like we've talked to a lot of people. We've gotten a lot of feedback from residents. We've talked to a lot of experts. We've looked at other cities. We think we have, on each of these issues, maybe the best combination of strategies that can work.
Now we’ve just got to implement them really well and relentlessly, stay at it, look at the data, see what's working, do more of that, see what's not, and do less of it.
So I feel like we have the strategies we need. Now it's time to implement really well and make sure we hold ourselves to that, and that part I'm excited for.
