Denver shutting down homeless encampment without shelter to offer for the first time in months

Metropolis crews on Tuesday morning started shutting down a homeless encampment in Denver’s western Lincoln Park neighborhood attributable to public security considerations together with three overdose deaths and greater than two dozen felony arrests there over the previous couple of months, in line with metropolis officers.

Cleanup work on the encampment centered on the intersection of West Eighth Avenue and Navajo Road is anticipated to proceed by way of at the very least Wednesday.

It’s the primary time in roughly six months that Mayor Mike Johnston’s administration has licensed shutting down a homeless camp with out having rooms in transformed resort shelters or tiny properties in micro-communities obtainable for folks dwelling within the camp, stated Cole Chandler, the mayor’s lead homelessness advisor.

The 138 folks the town counted within the camp have been suggested to hunt open beds within the metropolis’s conventional group homeless shelters, in line with Chandler. In need of that, they face searching for new locations to sleep outside.

“It’s not a cheerful factor that we’ve to shut an encampment this manner. We all know one of the simplest ways to handle encampments is to convey folks indoors to everlasting and transitional housing,” Chandler stated Tuesday. “This camp at Eighth and Navajo is simply too large. We don’t have sufficient obtainable rooms within the All In Mile Excessive system to resolve it indoors.”

All In Mile Excessive, previously often known as the Home 1,000 initiative, is Johnston’s signature program that he introduced on his second day in workplace in July. This system has moved 1,473 folks off the road and into shelters or housing as of Tuesday, in line with an internet dashboard, with a purpose of housing 2,000 folks by the top of this 12 months. The administration has largely relied on a community of 5 transformed lodges to offer house for these folks.