Denver homeless crisis worsens despite $274M investment; housing-first approach needed, critics say

Metro Denver’s homeless crisis has worsened and become among the most acute in the nation despite the city of Denver contracting for at least $274 million from 2021 through 2024 to keep people off the streets.

The Denver metro region has added more homeless individuals than any other metro region in the country since 2018, according to key metrics collected by the federal government.

Other metro regions, including Seattle and Houston, have had greater success during that period prioritizing permanent housing rather than the quick fix solutions critics say simply perpetuate homelessness.

In Denver, the spending that flowed through the city’s Department of Housing Stability, known as HOST, has relied disproportionately on emergency shelter beds and temporary transition services, records show. Homeless advocates and federal officials say the city should instead prioritize “housing first,” an approach that calls for securing long-term permanent housing as the best and most cost-effective way to help those on the streets.

Of the $274 million the city spent on homelessness in the 2021-24 period, almost half went to one provider, the Salvation Army. The venerable institution invoiced the city for $12.7 million in contracts in 2023 that generated just 17% in permanent housing outcomes for individuals receiving services.

Even that outcome was better than those posted by the Denver Rescue Mission, which was paid $8.9 million but found permanent housing success for just 3.9% of its clients exiting the programs. Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Denver, which runs three emergency shelters for women, only found permanent housing for 2.1% of its clients exiting the programs it administered despite the city paying the non-profit $8.4 million. A joint program the Salvation Army ran with the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless that was allowed to bypass federal rules had much greater housing success. Some providers criticize the city's exit data as not providing enough specificity for outcomes they say should still count as a success.

A review by The Denver Gazette of homeless provider contracts, invoices, performance outcomes and federal data shows that metro Denver trails many other major metropolitan regions in tackling homelessness with permanent housing. Just two out of every 10 people exiting homeless programming in Denver in 2023 found long-term permanent housing, a rate far worse than most other areas in the nation, according to the records.

“This is how people fall through the cracks. We’re putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound,” said Jen Kolic, a volunteer with Mutual Aid Monday, a grass-roots non-profit founded in 2020 to assist the city’s homeless.

“Shelters are temporary. They are an interim solution,” said Mary Frances Kenion, vice president of training and technical assistance for the Washington D.C.-based National Alliance to End Homelessness. “This is not something we can ‘shelter’ our way out of.”

Housing first has a proven track record, Kenion said. She pointed to the nearly 50% drop in veteran homelessness in the decade between 2011 and 2022 when the federal government and communities applied the strategy for veterans.

Reliance on the Salvation Army

In early 2023, Denver officials during one site visit to the Salvation Army’s Crossroads Center, the emergency shelter on 29th Street, noted that nearly 40% of the active clients at the shelter had been relying on emergency shelter beds for longer than 12 months and 50% of them had been there for between six to 12 months.

When a city inspector revisited later in the year and reviewed outcome data for January 1 through November 11, 2023, the inspector found that just four clients who exited the shelter had ended up in permanent housing, not many more than the two people who had died at the shelter.

During that time span, the shelter had provided 19,794 nights in a bed to individuals and had provided case management services on just 57 occasions, according to the data.

“A significant number of guests are staying longer than 12 months,” the city inspector noted on the site visit survey. “Who are they, what is the level of case management? Walk us through the process of engaging these individuals?”

Crossroads, just one of more than a dozen homeless programs in Denver the Salvation Army runs, invoiced the city for $3.55 million in 2023.

Officials with the Salvation Army said the city inspector during the site visits hadn’t accounted for more robust engagement for Crossroads clients provided by other Salvation Army programs. Once those other programs are included, Crossroads clients received programming assistance 1,050 times for all of 2023, according to the Salvation Army.

But nearly half of the services the Salvation Army said it should receive credit for were related to “food assistance related services” or “advocacy.” And “general case management” accounted for only about 20% of the services the Salvation Army identified, according to the data the non-profit provided the newspaper.

The Salvation Army also had to redeploy the case management team at Crossroads to other Salvation Army programming in 2023 as federal COVID aid funding came to an end, said Major Nesan Kistan, the divisional commander of the Salvation Army Intermountain Division, which covers Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and eastern Montana.

“Helping the chronically unhoused into housing, and helping them stay in housing, is a lengthy process and it requires the existence of readily available housing and financial assistance to help people secure housing,” Kistan said in a prepared statement. “We are in frequent communication with HOST about this.”

Questions city officials raised about case management at Crossroads didn’t stop the Salvation Army from continuing to remain a top player in the city’s homeless provider contracting, records show.

In fact, the city’s reliance on the Salvation Army has expanded under the administration of Mayor Mike Johnston, sworn into office last July. Johnston’s administration made the Salvation Army part of his pledge to move 2,000 people off the streets by the end of this year.

As part of Johnston’s 2,000-person sheltering initiative, homeless individuals are funneled to eight sites, including two former hotels the Salvation Army runs and a Salvation Army family shelter. At the sites, those individuals are supposed to receive further services and case management aimed at helping them find permanent housing. Johnston created the initiative by executive order on July 18 on his second day in office.

The city says 1,481 people have been moved indoors under the mayor’s initiative, and that nearly 29%, or 428 of those individuals, have found permanent housing. Still, virtually all those housing gains came from people who never went into temporary sheltering at one of the eight sites, suggesting much of the permanent housing gains came from cases that were low-hanging fruit and not tied to high-acuity individuals.

Most of those who needed temporary sheltering at the eight sites remain stuck there or are back out on the streets.

More than 800 individuals in the initiative remain in temporary shelter arrangements at the eight sites, city records show. About 250 have left temporary sheltering, but the data shows that of those that left shelter care, just 13% secured permanent housing. The data covers through mid-April.

The city data shows 22 people exiting the shelter sites got subsidized long-term leases in rental units and 10 others went to permanent living arrangements with family and friends.

“There’s a lot of distrust in the system,” said Jamie Rife, appointed by Johnston in November as executive director of the Denver Department of Housing Stability, or HOST, the main city agency fighting homelessness issues. “There’s a lot of distrust in strangers and all of that. So oftentimes, it takes longer for people to want to engage and feel comfortable engaging.”

Hired by Johnston from the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative, which coordinates services among communities in the metro area, Rife said Denver now is starting to see better permanent housing outcomes from the mayor’s initiative and predicted further gains will occur “because that system is ramping up.”

The data shows 132 individuals have gone back to the streets after exiting sheltering at one of the eight sites used for the 2,000-individuals off-the-streets initiative. They are back to sleeping in a vehicle, an abandoned building, outside or somewhere else not meant for habitation, according to the city’s tracking data.

"Any business that continues to spend more and more money on an annual basis on something that did not provide results would either go out of business or change its business model," said Paul Scudo, CEO of Step Denver, a men's residential addiction non-profit, in comparing the city's response to a private sector business.

Nearly as many people exiting the eight shelter sites tied to Johnston’s new initiative have ended up either dead or in custody as have ended up in permanent housing solutions, the city data shows. Nine died and 19 individuals ended up in jail, prison or a juvenile detention facility.

Three years on the street

Lesli Madera-Ibarra and Miguel Games-Perez are among those who have fallen by the wayside. They’ve been on the street for roughly three years, recently in an aging, borrowed camper-style RV with no heat. It was parked under an overpass last month until it was impounded.

For a moment it looked as if their dream of a safer place might be coming true earlier this year when they were moved into a former Radisson Hotel in Denver’s Globeville neighborhood, run by the nonprofit Bayaud Enterprises, after the city cleared out the encampment where they had been. “It was good, they fed us,” the couple said.

It lasted less than three weeks before Games-Perez, 34, said he was kicked out for fighting, an accusation he said was not true but there was no recourse or appeal offered. Instead, he was told he had until 3 p.m. to leave.

So, they returned to living on the street, often finding shelter in parking garages if it got too cold.

They said they have been rousted from a series of encampments in recent months as the city has launched crackdowns. About three months ago, some official-looking person came by an encampment and took their names and phone number for a possible voucher to get more permanent housing. Maybe the Denver Housing Authority? They aren’t sure. They never heard from them again.

The couple admit they don’t have proper identification documents which remains a persistent barrier to housing.

They both want to work. They also both readily admit to mistakes — the kind of bad choices that linger. He has done time in prison. She struggles with a Fentanyl addiction. He is trying to help her get clean. They know there is a better life waiting but aren’t sure how to get there.

What they really want is a rental house or maybe a townhome. Games-Perez wants a yard so he could do some landscaping. He likes to work with his hands. Maderia-Ibarra, 27, just wants a place big enough so she can have her 7-year-old daughter live with her again. Her daughter is now living with her mother. Sometimes they visit but it feels awkward and embarrassing.

Someday, the couple, who dote on each other like smitten teenagers, say they’d like to have a baby together. But not now. Not while they are homeless.

‘Our city has to diversify’

At least one non-profit provider says the city could be doing things differently with better results.

Scudo, the CEO of Step Denver, was once homeless for two years and who battled addiction which gives him unique credibility. “Housing first is essential, you can't help someone until you take them out of survival mode,” he said.

But he also thinks there must be accountability up and down the chain. Those who are being helped must be required to seek addiction recovery services, follow the rules, get jobs to move toward self-sufficiency, and learn necessary life skills to be able to take care of themselves. Providers, too, must be held to their stated mission.

While Denver means well, he said, it could do better.

"There are two or three large non-profits who are receiving the lion's share of tax dollars to operate programs which are, in essence, not solving the problem," Scudo said. He declined to name those non-profits on the record because he does not want to disparage any group striving to help people, even if ineffectively.

Cathy Alderman, chief communications and public policy officer for Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, acknowledges the city's overall response to the crisis "is far from perfect."

Denver City Council member Darrell Watson said in an interview he is especially dismayed by the Salvation Army's handling of the former DoubleTree hotel site, calling it a "bad fit."

"I have not been impressed nor is there a reason to be impressed," he said, citing the crime, violence and general chaos at the former hotel.

"We as a city made a promise to the unhoused residents that we were going to provide wrap-around services and safety with the ability to be able to move into stable housing. The Salvation Army at that site has not delivered on that promise," he said. He added, however, he thought the non-profit had succeeded at other sites.

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Still, the 9th District councilman favors the city rethinking how it awards contracts. The process should be tightened to not always favor the large non-profits when smaller providers could be more efficient and effective. "Our city has to diversify," he said.

Watson would also like to shorten the length of contracts and force more accountability for groups who receive them. The Salvation Army’s current one-year contract with the city to run the former DoubleTree is $10 million.

Kistan, of the Salvation Army, said the DoubleTree site “is clean, safe and secure.” He said the “non-congregate model of shelter was new to the city, and it was new to us. I’m not sure another local provider would willingly step into this role, while we’re doing the work we’re called to do.”

‘Kicking the can’

Denver HOST’s Rife cited the metro area’s expensive housing as a complicating factor.

“The market definitely made it less affordable to find housing,” she said. “We’re also seeing way more people fall into homelessness. We house quite a few people. The challenge is — like particularly during COVID and some of the economic impact — we just have this inflow that is so hard to stop.”

Metro Denver communities saw the annual number of people accessing emergency shelters, safe havens and transitional housing skyrocket from nearly 5,000 individuals in 2018 to almost 15,000 individuals through 2022, the last year federal data was available. In those five years, the number of individuals in metro Denver annually needing homeless services tripled.

The Denver region’s homeless need in 2018 was on par with smaller metro areas like Milwaukee, Tulsa or New Orleans. By 2022, the need in Denver’s metro area had grown to equal what is seen in much larger regions, such as Seattle, Philadelphia and Phoenix, according to federal data.

The continuum of care data collected by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development shows that most other areas of the nation saw the number of individuals accessing homeless programming stabilize or decline over that period, while the Denver metro region was one of only a handful of metro areas in the nation that saw significant spikes in need.

The federal data for metro Denver covers the counties of Douglas, Arapahoe, Adams, Denver, Jefferson and Boulder. By far the greatest number of those suffering from homelessness are in the city and county of Denver, as are most expenditures on the problem.

Metro Denver’s annual count of people accessing such services increased by 9,369 over the five-year span that began in 2018, more than any other major metro area in the nation during that time, according to the federal data.

At the same time, metro Denver in recent years has logged one of the worst rates in the nation at finding permanent housing solutions for individuals exiting homeless programs, according to the data.

“Any good homeless plan will have an emphasis on permanent supportive housing,” said Jamie Van Leeuwen, who ran Denver’s Road Home homeless initiative from 2006 to 2010 when now U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper was mayor. “You want to make sure that as you’re moving women, children, families and chronically homeless people off the streets, you want them to remain in housing and in stable living situations long term.”

Denver’s metro area successfully found permanent housing solutions for only 21% of those exiting homeless programs in 2022, well below the 33% rate that was the average that year for the 48 most populated metro regions, according to federal data.

“It’s just kicking the can down the road,” said Terese Howard, lead organizer for Housekeys Action Network Denver (HAND), a non-profit that advocates for permanent housing over temporary solutions.

Denver’s current system, critics say, seems to emphasize the optics of moving people off the street but fails to provide the follow-through needed for the long-term solution that prioritizes permanent housing. A sense of permanence is often seen as the starting point to tackling other issues such as mental illness or addiction.

Without the stability and safety that comes from not having to constantly scramble to find the next place, or if people feel abandoned by overburdened caseworkers, they just drift through temporary fixes and end up right back on the street and the cycle begins anew, those on the front-line of the crisis say.

“If you put someone in permanent housing how many other problems would that solve?” asked Kolic, the Mutual Aid Monday volunteer.

‘Still in the infancy stages’

Increasingly, the federal government is stressing permanent housing as the gold standard for homeless programming, with studies that show providing permanent housing not only improves lives but also saves money compared to cycling the homeless through temporary solutions and emergency shelters.

Congress in 2009 passed legislation known as the Homeless Emergency Assistance Rapid Transition to Housing Act during the Obama administration that put local communities on notice that they should prioritize permanent housing solutions for the homeless. The legislation established a federal goal of ensuring that individuals and families who become homeless return to permanent housing within 30 days.

“The whole argument has been that our cities are spending so much money on the front end, providing emergency rooms, jail and detox services to people, that if you would just house them and provide them with mental health and substance abuse services and stabilize them, you would spend a lot less money than you would by using some of the most expensive units of service that cities have available to them,” Van Leeuwen said.

In 2018, consultants hired to assess metro Denver’s homeless initiatives issued a report warning that local programming needed to bolster permanent housing options, noting that individuals exiting local emergency shelters and transitional housing too often returned to the street.

The report prepared by Covina, Calif.-based Focus Strategies found local rapid rehousing programs needed a boost because those programs “are achieving strong results in exiting people to permanent housing with low rates of return to homelessness in comparison to either shelter or transitional housing.”

Since that report, the Denver metro region’s percentage of successful exits from homeless services to permanent housing has declined significantly — down from 34% in 2018 to 21% in 2022. Other metro communities, such as Houston, Austin and Seattle, saw significant gains in the percentage of homeless individuals exiting programming ending up in permanent housing.

By 2022, Denver’s metro area had the 10th worst permanent housing success rate for individuals exiting homeless programs of the 48 most populated metro areas.

The Houston and Seattle metro regions both found successful permanent housing outcomes for nearly 40% of the people exiting homeless programs — though the number of individuals exiting programs also declined significantly. Austin, Miami and Washington D.C. found permanent housing for more than half of the people exiting such programming, according to the data.

Rife, the executive director of Denver’s HOST department, said other communities finding success have factors that Denver hasn’t been able to rely on. Houston has lower housing costs, she noted, and that city also received an influx of housing vouchers after a devastating hurricane hit the area in 2017.

“There was kind of this perfect kind of timing for them to have increased resources, high vacancy rates and lower cost rental markets,” Rife said. “And so, they were really smart, and they created a model where they have put people in transitional housing, and then they have a navigation center to move those people into permanent housing. That is essentially the same concept we have here.”

She added: “We haven’t been able to fully see that yet because we’re still in the infancy stages. That is the next phase, getting more and more people into that permanent housing, while recognizing that we do have some market differences here in the Denver metro area.”

She said Seattle benefited from significant investments in creating additional affordable housing.

Those struggling to find permanent solutions, though, say Denver needs to do more.

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‘I don’t feel safe here’

In late September 2023, Tanya Chavez said she found herself face to face with Denver Mayor Mike Johnston. He was touring a sprawling homeless encampment near 48th Street and Colorado Boulevard.

“Tanya,” she said the mayor told her that day as he looked around at the sea of tents, “give me 60 days to get you guys out of here.”

Chavez, 53, was living there with her dog, Sumo. She had been mostly homeless since February 2022 after losing the lease on her house in Aurora because she said the landlord became fed up with of the dozens of times the police were called for domestic violence. She said she was called a public nuisance.

She stayed briefly at a hotel provided by a battered woman’s shelter. She then drifted through a series of places, crashing at friends’ houses and living with a boyfriend, who also turned out to be abusive. Ultimately, she alternated between a Catholic Charities of Denver women’s shelter and living on the street.

She remembers that first night as a woman alone with only her dog for protection. She spent it under the partial roof of a bus stop on Colfax Avenue, bolting awake if she dozed off to sleep, frightened by what might happen if she did not remain alert.

Roughly two months after meeting the mayor, Chavez was in fact, off the street, moving with Sumo into the 300-unit former DoubleTree hotel in December 2023.

The hotel concept was part of Johnston’s vow to get 1,000 homeless people off the street by the end of 2023. The mayor revised that promise to move 2,000 off the street by the end of 2024.

Chavez believed her stay would be temporary — no more than a few weeks — and she would then move into a house or apartment again so she could restart her life.

But four months later, as of late April, she felt no closer to that goal and is instead stuck in the hotel, which she said is chaotic, poorly run, and dangerous.

The Denver Gazette has previously reported there were more than 1,200 police 911 calls for gun violence, drug use, theft and other violent acts at or near the former DoubleTree between October 2023 and Jan. 12, 2024. That is hundreds more than at other city-leased hotels for the homeless.

Further, The Gazette found, using public records, that there were seven deaths at the DoubleTree between January and the end of March.

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Chavez said she knows of one overdose death of a man whose body was not discovered for two days despite assurances from the Salvation Army that every resident is accounted for each day. It is unclear if that death was among those reported.

Since a double homicide on March 16 where two people were shot to death at the hotel, security was heightened, the city said. Yet, less than two weeks later there was another shooting at the shelter. That woman survived.

Drug dealing is rampant at the hotel, Chavez said. So, too, are strangers roaming the halls despite supposed measures to keep outsiders out.

Chavez says her nerves are now frayed not only by the shootings but also the crackdown in security — all in a place she was told would bring her relief. There are now police raids and frequent sweeps of residents’ rooms to look for drugs or weapons, she said.

The new push for security only adds to the chaos and uncertainty for those living within, she said.

Chavez also said she recently was pulled aside by a Salvation Army worker who told her if she spoke with a reporter about conditions at the hotel it might jeopardize any future placement in permanent housing.

“I don’t feel safe here,” she said, “I felt safer in my tent.”

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Homelessness, she said, can happen more often than most people imagine. “I am embarrassed. I used to see people on the street and think, ‘How sad.’”

What she really wants is something real and lasting. “I know what it’s like and I want to get it back," she said, “Peace looks like me and my dog watching TV at night by ourselves. Mowing my own lawn. Sitting on my porch. That’s living.”

Big spending, little permanent housing

Also troubling, the percentage of people in metro Denver leaving street outreach programming, emergency shelters, transitional housing and permanent housing programs who become homeless again within two years of their exit from services has dramatically increased since 2018, according to the HUD data.

By 2022, 33% of the people exiting such programming in metro Denver had reported becoming homeless again within two years — the ninth worst major metro homeless return rate in the nation. The Denver metro region does far worse at keeping people exiting homeless programs from becoming homeless again than other metro areas, such as Portland, Seattle and New York, the data shows.

“If you look at the mayor’s race and both of the lead candidates and our current mayor, I don’t think there’s any question that everybody who is involved in this issue agrees that there’s a need to rethink our strategy in Denver and metropolitan Denver,” Van Leeuwen said. “I think that data reinforces that clearly that the approach that we’re taking on homelessness needs a rethink.”

In the city of Denver, most contracts and spending issued by Denver’s Department of Housing Stability, HOST, over the past two years have failed to make significant improvements at finding permanent housing for those exiting programming, according to a review of the spending and program exit outcomes by The Denver Gazette.

In 2023, just 20% of those exiting homeless programs that received a contract through Denver’s HOST ended up in permanent housing, such as a long-term lease. More than 75% of those exiting those programs that year ended up in emergency shelters, unsheltered, incarcerated, in an unknown destination or dead, according to tracking data.

The city of Denver paid $57.1 million in 2023 to seven contractors — all of which invoiced the city for in excess of $1 million for that year. In return, just 15% of the individuals exiting the programs administered by those contractors ended up in permanent housing.

Terry Peltes, chief program officer for Catholic Charities, said the low percentage of permanent housing gains at the agency's three emergency shelters for women, only 2.1% of clients in 2023, is due to providing care to particularly difficult cases. The shelters are for women, often single, who are among the most vulnerable among the homeless in Denver, he said. They often struggle with drug addiction and disabilities. Some don’t know how to use the bus. Others are in wheelchairs.

“Many have experienced real severe trauma, and they are skeptical of any help,” Peltes added. “They’re really kind of afraid of being on their own. As strange as it sounds, it’s better to be in a community of other people, where you know that you’ve got a place to go at night, and it’s a safe place for you to sleep, and you’re going to get up and you’re going to have breakfast.”

One contract that paid $1.8 million in 2023 jointly administered by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and the Salvation Army had more robust permanent housing success, with nearly 62% of the individuals exiting the joint program receiving permanent housing.

“We are very proud of this collaborative effort, which was successful because the funding was so flexible,” said Kistan of the Salvation Army, who added the program did not have to adhere to federal rules and regulations because the program was launched during the COVID crisis.

The city paid $2.7 million in 2013 to 11 contractors — all of which invoiced the city individually for less than $1 million for the year. Those entities receiving the smaller contracts tended to have much greater success at finding permanent housing for individuals. Those contractors overall found permanent housing for 53% of the individuals exiting their programs.

The city paid $962,584 to Jewish Family Service of Colorado, which had one of the highest permanent housing success rates, with nearly 85% of the individuals exiting that non-profit’s programs in 2023 finding their way to permanent housing.

The Jewish Family nonprofit prioritizes case management and finding wraparound services and tries to ensure a ratio of 20 individuals or fewer to every caseworker.

“It’s not just financial assistance we provide,” said Elizabeth Lawrence, the director of community resources for stability at Jewish Family Service. “They have a dedicated case manager that helps them with individualized access plans, and that looks different for every individual, every family.”

The Denver Gazette’s analysis only encompassed contracts managed by HOST and did not review other homeless provider contracts at other agencies, such as the Denver Human Services Department.

Van Leeuwen, who said the priority during the Hickenlooper administration was permanent housing, said he’s not surprised so much of the city’s spending has tilted in recent years towards emergency and temporary solutions given the problems the city is facing.

He said a fentanyl crisis, a migrant surge and a rapid rise in housing costs have hit the city all at once, a confluence of factors he thinks is forcing the city to prioritize emergency services.

“You have this enormous amount of demand for emergency services, all these encampments, people showing up with overdoses in the emergency room, so you’re going to start putting more of your money in your contracts into those emergency services just to address the flow right now,” Van Leeuwen said. “If your kitchen is on fire, you’re not going to go start painting your house for resale. You’re going to put the fire out in your kitchen.”

Still, he predicted the homeless crisis in Denver will remain until permanent housing gets more support from the city.

“I do think that long term, if Denver is going to address this issue, as they rethink these strategies, there is a need and an emphasis for more permanent, supportive housing, if we don’t want this issue to be an issue for us 10 years from now,” Van Leeuwen said.

Meanwhile, providers reported increasing desperation on the streets to city workers conducting site visits in 2023. Records show that Safehouse Denver, a shelter for domestic violence survivors, reported to city officials in the first three months of 2023 seeing “lots of substance use” and “fentanyl everywhere” during a city site visit to the shelter. Violence also was rising, but it took Denver police up to two hours to respond to calls from Safehouse, if they did at all, the Safehouse officials told a city inspector during a city site visit.

Rapid rehousing’s expiration date

What Teri Washington wants most is certainty.

On March 31, Washington launched a GoFundMe page in desperation. Time was running out before she would again be back on the street after two years of living in an apartment that finally let her exhale.

“I love it here,” she said, her voice wistful. Boxes were piled up in the living room, the life stuff acquired during her time in the apartment but also proof that it likely is soon over. Her plea for money asked for $4,000 to keep her off the street. So far, she has only raised $1,880.

She was part of the city’s much heralded rapid rehousing push in 2022 to move homeless people into what seemed at the time to Washington as a permanent home.

But there was an expiration date. That has now passed. Her lease, partly paid for through city funding and administered through Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, expired April 30 and as time ran out there was no follow-up plan despite her frequent pleas for months to anyone who would listen to come up with her next step.

The 53-year-old woman who is disabled from a severely herniated disc, came to Denver in late December 2021 from Baton Rouge. Originally from Denver, she had gone to Louisiana to help care for her parents, both of whom are now dead.

She came back to what felt like home because she figured she would fare better here. The minimum wage in Louisiana was $7.25 per hour.

At first, she lived in her car, parking it under the lights of all-night gas stations for safety. She was getting mental health therapy for her recurring bouts of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the legacy of surviving the 2016 floods in Baton Rouge that killed 13.

“I was scared out of my wits,” she said.

Her therapist helped get her into The Delores Project shelter in December 2021. Promised a caseworker within six weeks to begin the process for more permanent housing, four months passed before she got an appointment, Washington said.

“They kept saying, ‘We don’t know,'” Washington said of the delays.

When at last she said she was contacted by Colorado Coalition for the Homeless in April 2022 to apply for a housing program she figured she had better up her odds. She lied about drug addiction, claiming to be abusing her prescription of Percocet. She was not but had heard that drug addicts get priority for services.

She tried to chase the apartment suggestions from the agency who gave her listings, but the housing was always long gone by the time all the paperwork was compiled. That is when she started contacting listings on her own and was able to find a $1,300-per-month apartment. She was able to get a $1,100 voucher towards the rent. Her disability check of just more than $1,300 covered the rest as well as her other living expenses.

Washington was part of a spring 2022 push to get the homeless into primarily temporary housing, said Howard, of Housekeys Action Network Denver. While many benefitted from that initiative, she said, there are others, like Washington, who are now left in limbo.

Alderman, with the Coalition, said that while her organization could not speak about Washington's case directly because of privacy issues, she said Rapid Rehousing programs "work very well for some people." The program was most successful for those able to secure financial security through steady jobs, for those who reconnected with family or friends to live with them or could otherwise stabilized their lives.

She did admit, however, because of limited resources "we have learned it's not always the most appropriate intervention." Rapid Rehousing remains, in essence, a temporary solution, she said.

Time ran out for Washington on Tuesday, April 30. Because no one had contacted her she felt she had no choice but to let her apartment lease expire and move out. Then, midday on her final day, she said she got a call from a caseworker saying that her voucher was being extended for three months.

Alderman told the Gazette last week her organization was trying to get some vouchers set to expire extended for an additional 60 or 90 days.

Washington said she turned the offer down. "What is three months going to do? I asked what would happen then and they said they couldn't tell me."

So now she is back to living in her car.

"I have nowhere to go.” Washington said on Wednesday. "I’ve been really crying a lot. I’m really hopeless. It’s worse having something and then having it taken away than never having it in the first place.”