Denver Cut Street Homelessness Nearly in Half

During his 2023 campaign, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston told voters he could end unsheltered homelessness in his first term. It was a big promise for a big problem that few mayors feel they can control.

Johnston wasn’t banking on political will alone. After serving two terms in the Colorado state Senate, he had led a foundation that worked on housing and homelessness issues. He met experts on the topic, visited sites, and felt that he knew what worked and what didn’t.

“I got a real sense that this problem could be solvable with the right amount of resources and the right team,” Johnston says.

Since taking office in July 2023, Johnston has worked to prove this point. The city can’t say there’s a place for every person who is unhoused, but it’s almost halfway there.

Denver’s high-water mark was 2023, when 1,423 people were living outdoors, says Cole Chandler, the city’s senior adviser for homelessness. By 2025, the unsheltered homeless count was 785, a 45 percent reduction. The number of unique encampments with 10 or more tents went down by more than 90 percent.

“Holding that trend over two years has been hard,” Chandler says. “We think our two-year reduction is the largest in the history of the point-in-time count.”

At the same time that Denver has managed this reduction, the total number of people in Denver without stable, permanent housing — the “homeless” — has increased continuously since 2023. If the city had not found new ways to provide transitional shelter for thousands of the newly unhoused, the unsheltered count could have doubled or tripled.

Fast Start

On his first day in office, Johnston declared a state of emergency on homelessness. “That allowed us to bring all the relevant departments into an emergency operations center to work together to build plans and remove barriers,” he says.

Johnson created “tiger teams” to plot the way forward, an approach he uses to work toward other city goals. The term, which refers to a multidisciplinary group of experts assembled to solve a complex problem, entered the public vocabulary whenNASA adoptedthis strategy.

Johnston set a target of getting 1,000 of the “unsheltered homeless”— those who sleep in places not meant for human habitation — indoors by the end of 2023. 

To pave the way, he spoke at 60 community meetings in his first 180 days. “We listened to nonprofit partners, to folks that were homeless, to neighbors, to business leaders,” he says. Taking this input, and the best practices he’d encountered before he came to office, the city implemented a multipronged strategy.

The first priority was to rapidly increase the supply of “transitional” housing, shelter that could bridge the gap between the streets and permanent housing. (A number of cities with large homeless populations are investing more heavily in this, recognizing the challenges of increasing affordable housing supply.)

American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds gave the city a generational opportunity to invest in transitional housing. The tiger team streamlined systems and regulations, reducing the time it took to site, permit and build a tiny house village from 18 months to 30 days. The city also purchased or leased hotels.

One by one, encampments were cleared. The block or neighborhood where they had been situated was permanently closed to future camping. By the end of December, the city had cleared nine major encampments and moved 1,100 people indoors into 1,100 new beds in hotels and “micro communities” of tiny homes.

None of this was open-space, congregate shelter, Chandler says. “What we had heard from people living in encampments was that they wanted their own room, their own dignity and privacy,” he says. The prospect of shelter in a hotel or tiny home broke down resistance to encampment closure. Services for those with mental health and addiction problems were available onsite. 

This approach stands in stark contrast to a wave of criminalization of homelessness in recent years, says Samantha Batko, an Urban Institute policy expert who co-wrote an evaluation of Denver’s efforts. In addition to offering non-congregate spaces, it created enough capacity to allow people to stay with “made family” they had created over years on the street. The prospect of losing these relationships is another cause of pushback against moving to shelter.

The endeavor hasn’t been entirely without its detractors, however. Johnston took office in July 2023. In November 2024, news reports reflected citizen complaints that clearing downtown encampments was pushing the unhoused to other parts of the city and increasing crime rates. Police department data shows that violent and property crime has since decreased in the neighborhoods where concerns were raised, with one exception. Citywide, these offenses (and crime overall) has decreased continuously between 2023 and 2025, with property crime down more than 30 percent.

A November 2024 audit by the Denver Auditor’s Office raised concerns about safety at shelters and deficiencies in expense tracking by the Department of Housing Stability. The audit found that key security failures led to a double homicide at a hotel the city had been using as a shelter. The city took over security at that shelter after the incident, and 911 calls went down 66 percent. The city has also changed how expenses are tagged in accounting software, city spokesperson Jon Ewing says, that seem to be addressing what the city auditor wanted to see.

Three Steps

Denver’s progress has attracted national attention. Mayors in other cities have reached out; Johnston says he hosted a group of 20 who wanted a firsthand look at what the city is doing.

He tells them it takes three big steps. “You’ve got to bring on enough units to meet the size of the problem, and you’ve got to bring them on quickly and affordably,” he says. “You need to be able to provide wraparound services on sites where people get access to transitional housing, and you need to make sure the solution serves those who are homeless and the residents at the same time.”

Johnston’s “tiger team” approach, bringing all agencies that deal with homelessness together to plan and strategize, is a best practice that has helped other communities succeed, says LoriAnn Girvan, principal of strategy and impact for Community Solutions. So is the online data dashboard that the city uses to track and share progress.

Community Solutions worked in Denver before Johnston was in office, and Galvan now leads its efforts in and around the city. The work is personal: Her mother lived in a Capitol Hill neighborhood that had become “ground zero” for encampments, where walking to a grocery store had become impossible.

Looking Ahead

Mandy Chapman Semple, a homeless system expert who helped Houston greatly reduce its homeless population, has worked with Denver to find ways to maintain momentum by moving people from interim placement into permanent housing. The city has set a great example by moving people rapidly off the street and supporting them with services, she says.

But in Denver, as in other cities, a lack of affordable housing is the main factor driving people to the streets. About a quarter of Denver renters spend half of their income on housing. (The U.S. average is 25.6 percent.) It’s estimated that the city needs 44,000 new affordable units over the next decade. Johnston hoped to speed progress toward this goal through a sales tax increase, but voters rejected the proposal in 2024. 

The city’s current goal is to get 2,000 people indoors and 2,000 people into permanent housing on an annual basis, Chandler says. In 2026, it hopes to open 2,500 new permanent housing units and permit another 5,000.

There won’t be ARPA funding for this, but Johnston believes the city budget can sustain progress without increases, in part because it is bolstered by a homelessness resolution fund voters approved in 2020 that provides about $55 million a year.

Denver has another resource in a nonprofit impact investment fund operated by Community Solutions. It purchases apartment buildings that might otherwise fall into the hands of profit-driven investors and puts them under nonprofit management. Half the units are allotted to persons exiting homelessness and half to residents earning at or below 80 percent of the area’s average median income.

The fund owns five properties in the area, two in Denver and three in surrounding communities, encompassing 360 units, says Dave Foster, the fund’s president. One building in Aurora, part of the Denver metro area, is “almost adjacent” to a VA medical campus, Foster says. It’s focused on giving permanent shelter to veterans.

Johnston is especially proud of what Denver has done to support this community. About nine months ago now, it became the largest American city to ever end the cycle of street homelessness among veterans, he says. “Now we can say Denver is a place where no one who has served our country is ever going to have to sleep on the streets.”