Mayor Johnston’s House 1,000 goal in sight with one micro-community

The push by Denver Mayor Mike Johnston to move 1,000 homeless people off the streets by year’s end gained new urgency Tuesday as city officials detailed a schedule of coming encampment closures.

And they confirmed that it will be converted hotels — not the micro-community sites in neighborhoods that have attracted the heaviest pushback — that they will rely upon most heavily to accomplish that goal. Just one micro-community is projected to open by the end of the month, on Dec. 31.

“By the end of the month, we expect to have resolved as many as 12 total encampments and have more than 1,000 people indoors through these efforts,” Cole Chandler, Johnston’s top homelessness adviser, told members of the City Council during an untelevised meeting at city hall.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Johnston administration’s existing dashboard counted 584 people sheltered through the effort, which Johnston launched with an emergency declaration to combat homelessness in mid-July, on his second day in office. The 1,000-person goal is the first step toward Johnston’s larger goal of ending street homelessness in four years.

The city has arranged or proposed the use of several hotels this year and has plans for more than a half-dozen micro-communities that will place tiny homes or other temporary structures on vacant properties. Johnston talked often about the micro-community concept on the campaign trail.

The first one, set to open on the last day of the month, will be in the parking lot of the former Stay Inn Hotel at 12033 E. 38th Ave., Chandler said. Plans call for 54 Pallet shelters, quick-assembly housing units so-named because they are shipped on wooden pallets.

That site and hotels already being used as converted shelters should give Johnston room to make good on his 1,000-person goal, if city officials’ scheduling holds.

Chandler provided councilmembers with a calendar that marks Dec. 19, 20 and 21 as the next days on which city crews will visit yet-to-be-announced encampments and load willing residents onto buses, transporting them to shelters. Officials also have set aside the final four days of the year as move-in days.

Tiny home villages under development now in the city’s Golden Triangle and Overland neighborhoods will not open to residents before the new year, Chandler confirmed. The administration was waiting on modular common buildings to be delivered to complete those build-outs. Chandler said they could open in January.

Flor Alvidrez, the District 7 councilwoman who represents Overland, said there was still a long way to go to finish the process of establishing a “good neighbor” agreement with nearby residents that sets parameters for how that site will operate.

The city is not announcing the encampments it will close in advance. Officials say their intent is to avert more people moving to those sites, potentially complicating move-in efforts.

Lana Dalton, the city’s director of unsheltered homelessness response, appeared at Tuesday’s meeting in a sweatshirt because she had been at an encampment that’s being closed at East 48th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard earlier in the day. She noted that while not every resident at recently cleared encampments had accepted the city’s shelter offer, the administration still was tracking an acceptance rate of better than 90%.

“I want to pause and appreciate this outcome,” at-large Councilwoman Sarah Parady said, lauding some of the visibly exhausted city staff in the room. She credited the city’s homelessness response teams for “just stretching our resources and for treating this like the priority that it is.”