Survey: 11% decline in Denver homeless

Mayor's 'Road Home' plan appears a factor in better numbers

Myung Oak Kim, Rocky Mountain News

Published May 9, 2006 at midnight

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Denver's ambitious plan to end homelessness saw some encouraging results Monday with the release of a survey showing an 11 percent decline in people without homes.

A survey of the homeless and agencies that help them counted 9,091 people who lacked permanent housing Jan. 23, compared with 10,268 on Jan. 24, 2005. Volunteers counted 661 people sleeping on the street that night, compared with 1,000 in last year's survey.

The number of homeless people also declined between 2003 and 2004, but the number increased the next year. In 1999, the survey counted a modest 5,792 people without homes.

Many people in this year's survey reported that they lost a job or couldn't find affordable housing. More than half of the homeless were families with children and a third had jobs, according to the study by the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative and Mile High United Way.

The survey was taken at more than 150 locations in seven counties. Those counted filled out a questionnaire, either at agencies that help the homeless or after being identified by volunteers on the street.

Advocates for the homeless cautioned that the study is only a snapshot of those without long-term housing and that the true size of the population is difficult to gauge. Linda Murphy, executive director of the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative, said the survey can be affected by the number of volunteers or the weather, and many people aren't counted.

Murphy and others said it's too soon to attribute the apparent decline solely to Denver's new anti- homelessness program, known as Denver's Road Home, that began in July last year.

Still, national experts and local agencies are confident that this is the beginning of significant strides in the fight against a problem that has plagued cities like Denver for decades.

"I think the stars are beginning to align as we begin to see some positive progress on this," said Mayor John Hickenlooper, the key promoter of the 10-year Road Home plan.

The survey results mirror a national trend, said Philip Mangano, executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, also known as President Bush's "Homeless Czar."

Mangano said New York City announced a 13 percent drop in its homeless population two weeks ago, and Miami recently reported a 30 percent decline.

"Denver is right in the forefront of cities that are getting the best results in the country," he said.

That's one reason Denver was picked to host the country's first national summit meeting on the problem. Representatives of about 80 cities will gather at the convention center Thursday to exchange ideas on strategies.

"It's not surprising that Denver is achieving results," Mangano said. "All of these plans are not simply to manage the issue . . . these are all plans oriented to the effort to end homelessness."

Mangano said Denver's plan includes the unique component of partnerships with faith-based groups. About 200 local religious congregations are currently involved, said Jamie Van Leeuwen, project manager for Denver's Road Home.

Since July 1, 2005, the project has added 398 units of housing, 200 new jobs for the homeless and 17 outreach workers who walk the streets to find homeless people and refer them to services, he said.

Murphy attributed the drop in people sleeping on the street to the increase in outreach workers persuading people to use shelters.

Project leaders say they are on track to reach the goal of reducing chronic homelessness by 75 percent over the next five years.

While the expectations for progress are high, some advocates emphasized that the problem is far from fixed.

"Nine thousand people is way too high," Murphy said. "It should be unacceptable to us as a society that there are 9,000 people who are homeless."

Tom Luehrs, chairman of the board of directors of the homeless initiative, stressed the need to show the homeless the same compassion given to the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

"They are, in fact, people first, who have met with a disaster in their lives that they have no means of overcoming," he said. "We can change the circumstances of these 9,091 people. We can do that if we believe that no one deserves to be homeless."

Women and children represent a significant portion of the homeless. Almost half of those counted in the new survey are women.

Terrell Curtis, spokeswoman for The Gathering Place, a drop-in site for homeless women and children in Capitol Hill, said her agency has seen a 10 percent increase in visits every year since 2000.

The agency, which will soon build a new site to handle the increased demand, serves about 300 women daily, providing child care, showers, meals, telephone access, laundry and mail service. About 16 percent of the women have jobs, she said.

Amber Villarreal and her husband and four children became homeless in March. The 32-year-old mother thought she was moving toward the American dream of owning a home when she moved out of subsidized housing and found a deal on a 5-bedroom, 4-bathroom house in Commerce City with only $10,000 down.

But about six months after moving in, her husband was laid off from his $38,000-a-year job and they couldn't pay the interest-only mortgage.

When they got evicted, the family found shelter at the Catholic Charities Samaritan House at Lawrence Street near Park Avenue in Denver, where they live today.

Her husband, Anthony, has found work as a plumber apprentice, making $13 an hour. They hope to move soon into an apartment.

She said her four children still cry about losing their home. "They still tell me, 'We want to go home.'

"We are normal people. We just had bad luck.

We never in a million years thought we would end up being homeless."

The homeless numbers

More than 100 volunteers conducted a survey of the homeless and agencies that help them in Denver and six surrounding counties. Here are some of the circumstances that apply to the 9,091 people found to be homeless on the night of Jan. 23:

19.5%:

homeless for the first time

9.5%:

chronically homeless

20%:

stayed in emergency housing

27%:

stayed in temporary transitional housing

22%:

stayed with family or friends

7%:

stayed on the street