On a freezing morning in December, a pair of Denver Police Department officers and a social worker approached two people hunkered down on a Five Points sidewalk.
“Are you guys connected with services?” asked Allison Parker, the social worker. “Are you guys interested in getting off the street?”
It’s a question that city employees have been asking everyone they encounter outside — and, in one sense, it has been working. Mayor Mike Johnston’s administration has moved over 2,000 people into shelters or housing since he was elected in 2023.
But thousands more remain in homelessness, and many face severe challenges with mental health, drug addiction and vicious cycles of poverty, according to city officials.
Now, Johnston is steering outreach workers like Parker into new strategies to get the next 2,000 people inside.
Parker and her police colleagues were part of a pilot program to address deeper issues.
The first year of Johnston’s program used a “housing first” strategy. But a newer initiative — named Roads to Recovery — is focused on addiction and mental health treatment. It’s aimed at a group of people that some have dismissed as “service resistant,” or unwilling to accept help.
On the Five Points sidewalk, Parker met a man who goes by the nickname Oliver. He’d had run-ins with police before. He was exactly the kind of person the new program is targeting.
Oliver said he had been in and out of homelessness for years. He had slept outside too often. He was cold. He struggled with drugs. And he was ready for a change.
Parker was ready to help. Within a few minutes, she was on the phone with Erin Atencio and Chris Richardson, longtime outreach workers who helped create Roads to Recovery.
They took him to Denver’s Assessment, Intake, and Diversion (AID) Center.
An hour later, he’d been accepted into a recovery program that would push him toward sobriety and provide a warm bed for a few weeks. A Roads to Recovery social worker would follow him through the process and keep an eye out for what he might need next.
“I wasn’t expecting this today. But I'm happy,” Oliver said as he completed intake. “I'm going to do some sober living for a couple weeks, get back on my feet, get my priorities straight.”
This is how Roads to Recovery is supposed to work.
Outreach workers, paired with cops or roving the city on their own, make direct contact with people who need something more than shelter to move off the street.
When they do, they plug that person into a system of case managers with intimate knowledge of Denver’s service landscape. They handle the paperwork and payments to ensure people can access help right away.
Some people have been calling for a crackdown.
Even as they've offered more help, government teams have aggressively cleared camps out of Denver’s downtown in recent months. The move pushed people into other neighborhoods, which sparked new complaints about visible poverty, drug use and crime.
At a recent community meeting in La Alma Lincoln Park, lifelong resident Rudy Torrez said the city should get tougher on people experiencing homelessness.
“Sometimes it's got to be tough love,” he said to officials in the room. “If they've been caught five times, camping out and ticketed for that, maybe an accumulation of those can lead to something bigger.”
The question is personal for Torrez. His nephew, Michael, died of an overdose after years of periodic homelessness in this neighborhood, despite frequent help and hospitality from Torrez and others.
“One of your people said, ‘We’ve got to get them beds.’ I had a bed for him,” said Torrez, a retired eviction counselor, as his voice swelled with emotion.
He wasn’t alone in pressing for a more forceful approach. Some harsher critics have pushed Johnston to jail people who refuse shelter. And similar questions have surfaced in state and national politics. Colorado has passed harsher drug penalties, while California and Hawaii have passed laws that could force more people into mental health and drug treatment.
“Some of these people don’t want treatment,” someone commented during the meeting. “We are the taxpayers. We deserve safe streets.”
But in Denver, the mayor’s administration is pointing to Roads to Recovery as a more compassionate and voluntary response to the changing nature of homelessness.
City officials say “resistance” is not the problem.
Before she became the director of Roads to Recovery, Erin Atencio worked at The Gathering Place, a local recovery center and shelter. She remembers waiting years for one client to ask for help getting sober.
The woman finally came around during the holidays, six years ago this month. But it was a fleeting moment of acceptance, and the system wasn’t ready for her.
“Right before Christmas, she was ready. We didn't have a placement for her. And she died of an overdose,” Atencio remembered.
She’s heard plenty of similar stories about the city’s sprawling network of shelters, providers, clinics and insurance. But she feels more hopeful this season. She joined the Johnston administration a year ago to help launch Roads to Recovery.
“We also knew there would be a population of individuals that weren't going to be ready yet or willing to come in,” Johnston told Denverite in an interview. “How could we help divert them from ending up in jail or in emergency rooms?”
Atencio still thinks about the woman who died before she could get help: When someone is ready to say “yes,” the system should be ready to embrace them, she said.
“It's not that participants are service resistant, it's that they literally cannot access the service that they need in the time that they need it. And that's not their fault,” she said.
There are available beds in Denver, she added, but getting into one quickly usually requires payment. People who can't pay can wait as long as three months to get into treatment. Roads to Recovery case workers can use city money to fast track that process.
The project had $800,000 in funding in 2024, during its pilot phase. The mayor's office said $3.7 million is set aside to ramp up operations in 2025.
Atencio says it’s a chance to achieve her dream of reshaping a dysfunctional system.
“It is very solvable. It can be done,” she said.
Looking for the most arrested man in Denver:
When Roads to Recovery quietly launched in 2023, Atencio and her colleagues made a list of the people who have been arrested and jailed most often in Denver.
Their first goal was to find the people on that list — and help them.
Atencio told us about one man who had “more arrests than anyone in the whole city," mostly for trespassing and shoplifting. They got him a room in one of Johnston’s All In shelters and a membership to a rec center gym. It seems to have worked.
“Truly a great story,” Chris Richardson, a social worker who’s DPD’s representative within Roads, said of the man. “No arrests or police contact since Feb. 2, when we connected with him.”
Accept help or face arrest
Police will sometimes use the threat of arrest to convince people to accept help from Roads to Recovery. In recent months, Roads has deployed co-responders, like Allison Parker, to offer “diversions” from citation or arrest.
That's what happened to a man named Robert, who has been homeless most of his life.
“The way that they found me is by the cops rushing me and pulling all kinds of drugs out of my pockets and saying, ‘You want to go to jail, or you want to talk to these people?’ It was wild,” Robert told us. (We’re not sharing his last name, because he fears it would hurt his job prospects.)
People like Robert and Oliver have both been the focus of a recent expansion of the program. Instead of just targeting people on the initial list, the program now is focusing on people who generally have regular contact with law enforcement.
That first interaction was jarring, but Robert called it a “blessing in disguise.” The program got him a room in a city-owned hotel. Then, a month ago, he moved into a place of his own, with financial help that the city arranged.
“It's been school and then mental health, starting getting involved with therapy and things like that,” he told us. “I feel like I'm still working on assimilating into society, especially spending so long on the streets. So that's kind of tough. But no, definitely, I have optimism. And look at what I have now. It's just such a leg up. A chance forward.”
Oliver and Robert are among about 430 people that Roads has interacted with in the last year. About 350 of them were connected to case managers; 187 were plugged into “high-quality services,” like medically assisted addiction treatment or sober living homes.
Mayor Johnston wants the city to do more to coordinate sober living homes, employment programs, medical detox centers, suboxone clinics and more. His administration has started hosting quarterly meetings, gathering city officials and external service providers, to get everyone on the same page and discuss shared obstacles in a collaborative setting.
“We're already investing across the city to do this work. They just weren't always aligned around one common set of goals, and around one, I call it, common set of rules of engagement,” he told Denverite. “We wanted to be able to both align all of our internal city efforts and work with all of our external partners.”
There's a long road ahead.
Atencio and Richardson headed back into the frozen city after Oliver was on his way to treatment. They’d gotten a call about a man who was unconscious and shivering on the sidewalk outside a Colfax Avenue McDonald’s.
“Can I help you sit up?” Atencio asked the man. “We want to make sure you’re safe.”
The man stirred beneath his blanket, and eventually accepted an Egg McMuffin. They offered him a ride to the AID Center. For a moment, it seemed like he was ready to go.
But after half an hour, it was clear he wasn’t going to move. Richardson warned him that the McDonald’s manager was going to call the cops, but he didn’t seem to care. An hour later, he was still sleeping on the pavement.
“I wish we could have done more. He got breakfast out of the deal, which I'm completely OK with,” Richardson said as they drove away. “This afternoon, we might circle back around — and maybe he warmed up, got some sleep, and he's actually in a different conversational mood.”
It’s slow work. While people like Richardson and Atencio wait for people to say "yes" to treatment, the people they hope to help might still end up ticketed or arrested. Residents who want to see more arrests may still see people on city sidewalks. The point, for now, is to keep the door open.
“We're not very big on the ‘give up’ mentality,” Richardson said.
