Lisa’s plan for homelessness

Homelessness is one of the most pressing issues facing Denver today, and because of that, it cannot be solved with top-down policies that do not involve the unhoused community, who are experts in their own needs. 

This plan has been assembled collaboratively by community leaders, service providers, experts, people with lived experiences with homelessness, and activists. Together, we’ve identified the most urgent needs of the unhoused community and proven strategies to get people the services they need and into permanent housing.

We reject “quick fix,” one-size-fits-all solutions to homelessness that flatten the diverse and unique needs of unhoused individuals. At the same time, we are committed to working toward a city where housing is attainable for all. 

30-DAY PLAN 

On day one of being sworn in as mayor, Lisa Calderón will stop the ineffective, wasteful sweeps. These not only make it harder to connect people with services like medical care but are more expensive than housing-first policies. We will also stop the “compassionate crackdown” on unhoused people downtown and near Union Station. Sweeps and “crackdowns” like this destabilize people further and get us further away from connecting folks to permanent housing. 

Instead, we will activate crisis response workers, including after hours, to support people on the streets in crisis with coordinated resources. This approach is a shift from downtown business lobbyists making safety policies to public health experts, service providers, and unhoused people themselves working in tandem with expanded STAR, 311, mental health, and other appropriate resources. We will reinvest cost savings by reducing arrests, incarceration, judicial resources, emergency room visits, and other more costly responses.

Setting up sanitation stations is also a priority in the first 30 days of a Calderón administration. Unhoused people deserve the basic human dignity of places to relieve and wash themselves, and dispose of trash. In addition to helping people to care for themselves, this will reduce the interactions between unhoused people and law enforcement, and will also benefit tourists and residents who are also in need of accessing public restrooms and trash receptacles.

Recognizing that every person has different needs as they wait for housing to come available, we will maintain Safe Outdoor Spaces and shelters across the city while also creating an apartment Master Leasing program. These units will provide housing for families, people with disabilities, and others in desperate need of housing. This represents a fundamental shift from shelter-first to housing-first, as the leasing program will ultimately be less expensive than maintaining more Safe Outdoor Spaces or shelters.

Within the first 30 days, a Calderón administration will also do a full audit of city programs for homelessness, and in particular of HOST, and share the findings with the public, including the total cost of the City’s housing efforts. We will also get an accurate accounting of the total cost of the houseless sweeps, including the cost of personnel from the public safety, public health, and transportation departments.

90-DAY PLAN 

Beyond making these urgent changes to immediately support our unhoused communities, within the first 90 days in office, Lisa Calderón will overhaul the case management system to install case managers where they can be accessible where unhoused people already are. By integrating care into the community, we will create a person–centered co-planning personalized process that is consistent, trauma/healing informed, gender and culturally responsive.

We will also update training programs for case managers to ensure that our city workers are dedicated, reasonable, passionate, and knowledgeable about the challenges faced by unhoused people. We will encourage people with lived experiences with homelessness to enter training programs to become case managers in their own right. Again, one of our core beliefs is that no one knows what unhoused folks in Denver need more than those who have lived experiences. 

Knowing that desired housing will take some time to create, we do not see a total immediate phase-out of shelters, and we will install better ventilation in all city-run shelters to reduce the strain of COVID and other airborne illnesses on residents. We will work with shelter residents and staff to address other issues in shelters such as improved storage, bed spacing, and policies. Finally, we will also provide cell phones and computers for folks in shelters and Safe Outdoor Spaces to connect folks with telehealth services and housing navigation. 

Too many people are discharged to the streets or shelters from hospitals - leading to sickness and death. We will increase hotel respite beds for people leaving hospitals and work with health care providers to ensure more houseless people have a safe room to stay in while healing.

We will increase access to medical respite facilities by expanding recuperative care facilities and other respite options for people leaving hospitals and work with health care providers to ensure more houseless people have a safe place to stay while healing.

We will also work with Colorado state services to set up safe injection sites and overdose prevention sites to further invest in harm reduction practices. 

6-MONTH PLAN

The Calderón long-term plan to address homelessness will focus on creating publicly-financed and publicly-owned social housing managed by the city. We will do this not just through building new housing on city property, but retrofitting unused office space and other buildings into apartments, a recommendation that housing justice advocates have long called for. We will also work with Denver public schools to convert underutilized classroom buildings that can be converted into smaller neighborhood schools or community resource centers with vertical housing.

The city will build and maintain these housing spaces kept off of the speculative housing market so we can maintain a consistent attainable rent regardless of the market value of the space. 

We also recognize that housing affordability is essential to preventing people from reaching the crisis point of becoming unhoused. We will do this through a constellation of policies from local rent control, to emergency funds to keep families in their homes when they hit financial hardship, to legal eviction defense. We will work with low-income landlords to offset or subsidize their costs for bringing units up to code and achieve clean and energy-efficient upgrades.

— Lisa Calderón

— Sarah E. Rowan, MD, Denver, CO

— Terese Howards, Housekey Action Network

— Jess Wiederholt, Mutial Aid Mondays

— Andrew McNulty, Attorney and Advocate

— Teri Washington, Community Leader

— Mary Putman, The Reciprocity Collective

— Ana Miller, Activist and Advocate