Less than 24 hours after being sworn in, new Denver Mayor Mike Johnston announced he was declaring an emergency to combat growing homelessness in the city.
In making that declaration his first official act in office, Johnston signaled the new administration’s priorities.
The declaration is also an administrative action designed to knock down some of the regulatory barriers in Johnston’s way as he races to quickly stand up temporary housing options for people who might be living in tents, on sidewalks, in alleys or in cars tucked away on side streets in industrial neighborhoods. Expediting permitting and construction timelines for homelessness and affordable housing projects is a key pillar of Johnston’s “all-of-the-above” housing approach.
The new mayor coupled the declaration with a measurable goal: Get 1,000 people who are homeless today access to housing by the end of the year.
“What we know is the issue of people living unhoused in the streets is the most significant issue the city faces right now,” Johnston said at a press conference held in the lobby of city hall where he stood flanked by City Council members, police Chief Ron Thomas, Sheriff Elias Diggins and others.
Johnston described street homelessness as a human rights issue, a public health issue and a challenge to the city’s economic development goals.
“We know all of the key visions we have for the city revolve around making sure those folks who are most at risk right now can get access to the services they need,” he said.
The declaration is the first step toward Johnston’s marquee campaign promise — ending unsheltered homeless in Denver in his first four years in office. But at least some homeless service providers say they are awaiting specifics about how the declaration will translate into more housing options.
Johnston signed the declaration in the mayor’s office — a space so new to him he had to search for the light switch — at 11:29 a.m. Tuesday.
The order empowers the administration to move faster on a number of things including procurement and issuing contracts for things like building tiny homes, erecting fencing or wiring properties for electricity, he said.
Using tiny homes and managed tent communities as a short-term answer for homelessness, but getting sites selected and ready to accept residents has taken years at times — a timeline the new mayor says he isn’t willing to accept.
As a mayoral candidate, Johnston said the primary mechanism he said he would employ to get people out of illegal encampments of tents and into sanctioned places to live was “micro-communities” of tiny homes.
A major expansion of the nonprofit Colorado Village Collaborative’s tiny home village model, Johnston’s communities would have 10 to 20 tiny homes, community bathrooms and kitchen facilities and space for onsite mental health, addiction treatment, job training and housing support services.
Then-candidate Johnston projected it would cost $35 million to build the 1,400 tiny homes necessary to end street homelessness, that’s a total that did not include the cost of staffing and services. Homelessness service providers were skeptical of that total and other critics wondered if Johnston was earmarking too much of the city’s funding around homelessness for what is supposed to be a short-term solution while more permanent supportive housing is built.
Asked Tuesday just when the first such site might open with the emergency declaration now in place, Johnston said the goal is by the end of the year but he hopes to move more quickly if possible.
“The goal would be to actually try to open as many of them simultaneously as we can because then you can move a much broader chunk of folks who are unhoused into housing at the same time,” he said. “So our goal is to kind of assemble all these units, get them all ready and prepared and try to have a coordinated effort to move people at the same time.”
The mayor said he and his partners have identified 197 publicly owned sites that could be used for that purpose. The next step in his emergency plan is having conversations and gathering feedback on how those sites and potentially others that are privately owned can be put to work toward the unified goal of ending street homelessness.
Council members will be partnering with 10 mayoral appointees on a tour of the city that will touch all 78 of the city’s statistical neighborhoods and engage with residents on topics including potential places where temporary housing might fit into their communities. The mayor also called on the city’s landlords to offer up available rental units.
The emergency declaration doesn’t automatically generate more money for homelessness resolution — something Denver taxpayers got behind with a dedicated sales tax they voted for in 2020. But Johnston has his eyes on drawing down more state-controlled COVID relief dollars. There is an application deadline at the end of the month for that money, he said.
“We know that to be able to identify locations, to be able to rehab them, retrofit them, to be able to permit them, to be able to get construction up on those sites is going to take a tremendous amount of effort to seed from our internal agencies and our external partners,” Johnston said at his morning news conference. “And the power of the emergency declaration is to move much more quickly and certainly through what could otherwise be a slow regulatory process …”
The number of people living unsheltered on the city’s streets more than doubled between 2015 and 2022, according to point-in-time counts performed in those two years. The 2022 count tallied 4,794 people experiencing homelessness in Denver, with 27% considered “unsheltered,” or living on the street, according to the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative.
Other communities — including Los Angeles, Missoula, Montana and the state of Oregon — have previously declared emergencies over homelessness within their boundaries.
Following his news conference, Johnston spent much of Tuesday in meetings with groups including business leaders and homelessness services providers discussing his plans.
Cathy Alderman, the chief public policy officer for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, was in one of those meetings. It is meaningful that Johnston took this step on his first day in office, she said, but the plan is still light on details in her view.
“It still creates a little bit of anxiety in terms of where’s the funding going to come from, what is going to be expected of providers and how do we keep ourselves, as a community, accountable to the vision,” Alderman said.
But in Johnston, she sees the potential for a stronger city partner.
“Anything is realistic if you make the right investments and you build the political will around it,” she said.
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