In late July, Tiara Coleman gave her daughter one last birthday pool party while rushing to pack up their apartment — before the sheriff’s deputies came knocking.
The 34-year-old mother and her three daughters had loved their two-bedroom in a southeast Denver apartment complex. The neighborhood felt safe and the amenities were nice. But eviction day was coming.
If Coleman did not bag her family’s belongings and get out, the city would put everything they owned on the curb.
They were one family among the record number of Denver residents facing eviction cases this year. As she packed, she wondered how this happened to her: a person who has worked her entire adult life, who has an education, who has tried to be responsible.
Coleman invited Denverite to document her experience with eviction. Their disruptive journey this summer brought them from their apartment to the streets, to Denver’s city hall, briefly into a homeless shelter and back to their car. It has ended, for now, with her family in a hotel room for a few nights, unsure what’s next.
Their story shows where Denver is offering help for renters facing eviction, but also how families like Coleman’s can fall through the cracks.
From employment to eviction to homelessness
Like most renters facing eviction, the 34-year-old mother couldn’t afford her home.
She was paying more than $2,200 in monthly rent, fees and utilities, but she made only $35,000 per year at the emergency veterinary hospital where she had worked for two years. She was divorced in the summer of 2023 and wasn’t getting alimony, she said. She was spending more than two-thirds of her salary on rent, far beyond the recommended ratio. She fell behind.
Her landlord lost patience and posted a letter in mid-June demanding a month of back rent. With it, she was given a list of resources, but all the phone numbers and websites seemed to lead to other phone numbers and websites, ultimately ending nowhere.
Soon after, the landlord filed an eviction case in court.
Then, at the end of June, she lost her job at the animal hospital. Her grandmother who raised her had died. Her sister supported her emotionally, but Coleman had no family who could help keep her safely housed.
Finally, Coleman went to court on July 9, where the city offers help. The court was packed. She and a city-funded eviction-prevention attorney huddled with several other people.
The same day, a judge gave her 14 days to pay or move, setting her up for eviction. She scrambled for a solution.
In Denver, renters facing eviction can apply to an emergency-rental assistance lottery that opens for a 24-hour window each month. Coleman, who has received emergency assistance in the past, filed one of more than 5,000 applications the city received this year.
Denver’s assistance programs prioritize help for people the city believes will be evicted and become homeless. Officials declined to specify the criteria for deciding that.
But families with children are not currently prioritized. All else being equal, Coleman and her 5-, 8- and 15-year-olds had the same chance of receiving rental assistance as a 30-year-old who lives alone.
Coleman and her kids struck out in the lottery. The city told her she could apply again the following month, but by then, she and her kids would be out of their home.
The desperate mother tried the resources the housing department suggested: Colorado Emergency Rental Assistance, Denver Human Services, and Colorado Housing Connects. None could give immediate help.
“Everywhere I turn, every place I call, every church I call — Salvation Army, 211, United Way — they can't help me,” she said. “They don’t have services. They don’t have vouchers. Or it’s a waiting list. Who has time to wait when you’re about to be homeless?”
Trying to stave off the sheriff’s knock, she emailed the office of Mayor Mike Johnston, also a parent of three. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office said the city sent her a list of resources and gave her a direct line to the housing department. She said she never heard back.
Evictions and homelessness are rising
Denver is on track to see a record number of eviction cases in 2025.
Housing lawyers have been flooded with cases for years. More than 9,300 eviction cases have been filed in Denver County Court from January through July — twice the city’s pre-pandemic rate. Some of those cases represent individuals, while others could affect a whole family like Coleman’s.
Before the pandemic, the city averaged around 9,000 eviction cases per year. Eviction cases plummeted during the pandemic as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and later the Biden administration put moratoriums on some evictions. But the Supreme Court ended the eviction moratorium and COVID-19 relief money ran out.
The number of eviction cases in Denver began rising sharply in 2022. And since 2023, when Johnston took office, the number has exceeded any other time in recent history, including the Great Recession, according to data from Denver County Court.
Denver’s eviction numbers are abnormally high compared to other U.S. cities.
In most cities, eviction cases have dropped back to pre-pandemic levels, said Juan Pablo Garnham, a journalist and researcher at the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. Denver is one of a few cities, including Phoenix, Las Vegas and Austin, where eviction cases are climbing. Colorado, in general, has seen a rise in evictions, too.
Last year, roughly a fifth of the 15,960 people facing eviction had a city-funded lawyer.
Half the Denver households with eviction cases and city-funded lawyers either avoided eviction judgments or had their cases dismissed. About a quarter got other help from the city, ranging from legal advice to in-depth assistance.
Just over 30 percent had their cases suppressed, making it impossible to know what happened because of Colorado’s tenant privacy laws.
While the Eviction Lab has not studied Denver, cities with higher eviction rates share a few things in common, Garnham said: Their populations are growing and they tend to have laws that favor landlords, with faster eviction processes and low-cost court filing fees. Denver’s population growth essentially stopped during the pandemic, but the city is now adding several thousand people per year.
“Denver got so hot and the market increased so much that even if it corrects a little bit, it outgrew the capacity for someone making $40,000 or $50,000 to raise a family,” Johnston said. “And so that is why we're most committed to adding more and more housing stock to try to solve that problem.”
In most cases, evictions are filed over a failure to pay rent, said Zach Neumann, head of the Community Economic Defense Project, a nonprofit offering legal aid to tenants facing evictions.
It can happen to anyone, he explained: You lose your job. You have a catastrophic health issue. Your landlord raises the rent higher than you can afford. And suddenly, you are without a home.
“The city, the state, the nonprofits, the housing providers, we have not gotten our arms around this problem,” Neumann said.
Coleman’s fall into homelessness
Coleman had worked her entire adult life — including at an eye bank, where she removed eyes from deceased organ donors, then at the emergency vet clinic, and now as a food delivery driver. She also earns money as a musician.
“We've always had a roof over our head, and all I needed was time,” Coleman said. “If I worked all my life, where did all my taxes go? What am I paying for? And why can't I just go get help? Why isn't there any help besides a lottery number? If you see someone needs help and have the money, help them. I don't understand.”
On the day of her daughter’s birthday party, the children splashed in the pool with new friends from the neighborhood, unaware of the eviction looming the next day. The family moved after the party, getting out before the sheriff's department came. She took her belongings to a rented storage unit, then drove around the city with the kids, looking for somewhere safe to sleep.
“There's three girls,” Coleman said. “It's dangerous, and we've never been out on the streets.”
Three children and a single mom were added to the nameless tally of people experiencing homelessness in Denver. To Coleman, it was a sign that Mayor Mike Johnston and other city leaders aren’t seeing the reality of the problem.
“This situation is not resolved,” Coleman said. The mayor “just pushed it under the rug.”
In a recent interview, the mayor said preventing evictions is a top priority.
“This is what gives me the urgency to get up and fight every day again,” Johnston said. “You have to find a way to serve people with the urgency they deserve, and she needs urgency.”
Eviction cases have risen even as the price of rent in Denver has dropped.
Denver rents dropped year-over-year in 2025 for the first time in years, but evictions kept rising.
Neumann suspects this is because most of the reduction in costs has been for luxury apartments, while lower-cost apartments are still far out of reach for what most Denverites can afford.
The mayor said much the same.
“I think that it is a function of the market still being so expensive that while rent is dropping, it is not dropping enough to meet the ability to pay of where most Denverites are,” Johnston said.
Drew Hamrick, the senior vice president of government affairs at the Colorado Apartment Association, suspects the higher eviction case rates in Colorado have to do with a state law that forces landlords to accept applications even from tenants who would have to pay up to 50 percent of their income towards rent — far higher than the 30 percent that is recommended. The law is meant to give people access to more rentals, even if they have to stretch their budgets.
“We believe this mandated rent-to-income ratio is imprudently high and leads to default,” Hamrick wrote.
Additionally, virtually all of the state’s pandemic-era emergency rental assistance funds have dried up, he said.
While Johnston dedicated more than $25.5 million in city funds to temporary rental assistance and eviction legal services in 2025, the total amount offered by the city was lower by nearly $6 million due to the loss of pandemic-era federal funds.
“The cost of living is rising faster than incomes, and funding for rental assistance programs simply isn’t enough to meet the growing need,” Julia Marvin, a spokesperson for Denver’s Department of Housing Stability, wrote Denverite.
Marvin emphasized the value of eviction prevention, saying it typically costs about $10,000 to help a household avoid displacement — compared to costs of more than $20,000 per year for “housing interventions” for homeless households.
But the mayor hasn’t said whether he will cut funding for rental assistance as he wrestles with the city’s budget crisis.
City officials are trying to fill a $250 million budget gap, including plans for mass layoffs of city employees next week — many of whom live paycheck to paycheck, struggle to pay rent and fear eviction themselves.
Other housing resources are stretched thin, too. The city's family shelters are often full, and federal cuts have reduced the availability of vouchers that can get people like Coleman into housing.
“About 180 housing vouchers we use to help people get into housing have been cut from a combination of federal cuts and state cuts absorbing federal cuts,” Johnston said. “They're immediately getting in the way of our capacity to get folks out of our All In [shelter] sites, into permanent housing.”
The Denver Housing Authority says there are no housing vouchers available, and it’s uncertain whether any will be funded by the federal government in 2026. That’s contributed to a bottleneck in city shelters, leaving families like Coleman’s few places to go.
“Summer is a difficult time for families, and this summer looks particularly bad,” said Jennifer Forker, a spokesperson for The Salvation Army, the nonprofit that runs several city shelters.
The Salvation Army’s Connection Center, a crisis hotline, took 2,740 calls from families in housing crises in July. Of those, 450 were related to rent and eviction.
There are currently 252 families experiencing homelessness on the Connection Center’s waitlist for shelters. This year, the Connection Center has referred 285 families to shelter and supported 145 with rental assistance.
Last week, Coleman took her message to Denver City Council.
Coleman and her three daughters walked to the lectern in the city council chambers on Aug. 4. She told her story, explaining that she had tried every option and found nothing.
“What I'm asking for today is for help, not just for me, but other people like me who maybe can't sleep in their cars,” Coleman said. “What about mothers who have to live on the streets with their babies? It's not fair.”
Councilmember Diana Romero-Campbell watched from the dais. After Coleman spoke, the council member got to work behind the scenes to find Coleman a job. That has not panned out yet.
“I think what people want is, you know, a silver bullet solution that's going to just make it so that families are housed, kids are safe, etcetera,” Romero-Campbell said.
But the problems are complex and relate to a lack of childcare during work hours, employment issues, and for some families like Coleman’s, a lack of a support system from friends and neighbors, she said.
After Coleman spoke, a staff member in the mayor’s office approached her and connected her with the city’s housing department.
Jamie Rife, the head of the Denver Department of Housing Stability, declined a broader interview about the state of evictions and family shelter. But when asked about Coleman, Rife said the city is prioritizing bringing unsheltered families indoors, either through housing or existing shelters. She noted the annual Point in Time Count shows a drop in family homelessness.
“I don't want a mom and three kids sleeping in their car, so I’m happy to work with them,” Rife said.
The mayor, too, said in an interview on Wednesday that he would help Coleman. That same night, Coleman and her daughters moved into the Tamarac family shelter, which Johnston’s administration opened in a former hotel.
The shelter provides rooms for about 200 families, but the city and The Salvation Army have struggled to maintain it. The city spent tens of thousands to repair the air conditioning, but complaints from some rooms continued — contributing to an 11-year-old girl’s fall from a window in the building, which she survived.
“We have times where we had 30, 40, 50, 60 rooms that were out of commission for renovations or construction. That's 60 families that we could be putting into a site right now,” Johnston said.
When Coleman arrived, the shower in her family’s room was not working. There was no air conditioning. The room was not clean. The bedding was dirty, she said.
Her daughters started scratching their bodies. She examined the mattress and found bed bugs, she said. She was stunned. Her family had never faced those issues before. A city spokesperson said he had recently visited the shelter, and it looked clean.
Around midnight, Coleman spoke to shelter staff, and they agreed to move her to a different room. As they were walking to it, a roach ran across the floor in the kitchen area.
“We cannot stay here,” she thought.
Coleman lost her cool, argued with the shelter staff, and eventually took her girls back to the car to sleep outside the shelter.
The city placed her in a hotel room for a few nights and says it is still looking for shelter for the family, but Coleman is afraid of putting her kids through another traumatic situation. She hopes to find a job that pays enough to afford a motel room while she saves to rent again.
“Mom, it's OK,” Coleman’s oldest daughter told her recently. “Keep your head up. We’re gonna be all right.”
Coleman wishes she could believe that.
