DENVER — Denver’s plan to house people experiencing homelessness only works if there’s somewhere to move them. If not, they end up right down the street from the camp they used to live in.
Near the corner of 4th and Kalamath, a new camp is forming after a camp near 8th and Kalamath was swept on Tuesday.
"These folks just arrived here yesterday," said Amy Beck, a homeless advocate with Together Denver. "We are just a few blocks away from the sweep that occurred yesterday where they made 150 people move."
Food, tents and people with nowhere else to go pile up right down the street from where they were told they weren’t allowed to be. Beck was there Tuesday as the city swept the camp at 8th and Kalamath. For the first time under the Johnston administration, housing was not offered to people living there. On Wednesday, many of them set up camp nearby.
"Even Mayor Johnston has said himself that there is no point in moving just around the corner or a couple of blocks away," said Beck.
She's right.
Mayor Mike Johnston told 9NEWS in July he didn’t want to follow his predecessor’s plan of sweeping people from one corner to another. But now that his administration has moved more than 1,400 people indoors, they’re out of space. He knows what happens next.
"You know, the reason why the previous challenges have not been solved is because we cannot move people off of one block if they have no place to go. They just end up on the next block," Johnston said at a press conference in July. "When you are not offering those folks some place to go in the form of housing, all they can do is take their stuff and move to the next block."
It’s hard to know exactly how many more people are still living on the street. The most recent count was taken in January 2023. There were 1,423 people then, but that’s before the city started offering people housing.
9NEWS asked for a list of camps the city hopes to decommission in the near future, but wasn't given that information. In July, new numbers will be released on how many people experiencing homelessness are still living on the streets.
The city has decommissioned 11 encampments since September, offering shelter to 930 people living there. At 8th and Logan, the spot where there was a camp is now a parking lot. At 20th and Champa, rocks now cover the sidewalks people used to sleep on. And at 22nd and Stout, there’s nothing really going on anymore.
The mayor’s office said they’ve seen a significant decrease in 911 calls for the areas around encampments that they’ve closed. In some cases, the numbers decreased by up to 75% in the month after an encampment was closed.
"It’s good that we were able to move 1,000 people off of the streets. I think that is a benefit," Beck said.
But back here off Kalamath Street, this new camp shows what happens when people are told to leave with nowhere else to go.
"There are so many more people on the streets than he put inside so far," said Beck. "We have a long way to go."
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