Denver building on new ideas for helping homeless

from The Denver Post

By Christopher N. Osher

Armed with data showing there's a hidden cost to leaving the unemployed, mentally ill and alcoholics alone on the streets, Denver officials are pushing forward with a $20 million plan to build 200 new housing units for the homeless.

The plan is in keeping with Mayor John Hickenlooper's homelessness initiative, which holds that the past patchwork system of shelters wasn't the best way to tackle the issue.

The proposal is still being finalized and then, depending on financial terms, could go before the City Council this spring. The council has emphasized the need to spread the housing instead of clustering it in strongholds of poverty. While support seems strong among most council members, some reservations persist over that issue, which could raise the ire of some neighborhood activists.

"I can't emphasize enough the importance of this project moving away from the traditional islands of poverty that just warehouse folks," Councilman Paul Lopez said during a recent council committee meeting on the subject.

The administration, sensitive to those concerns, is pledging to make sure the housing is spread around the city, in areas close to mass transit. They are also promising to include on-site managers.

"We would really do our due diligence and make sure these facilities are not in the same old spots," said Roxane White, director of Denver's Department of Human Services.

In the past, the emphasis was on getting a homeless person an emergency meal and bed for the night. Now, the Hickenlooper administration is stressing the need to get behind the root problems that cause homelessness in the first place.

And the best way to do that, officials say, is to provide actual, long-term housing first.

The homeless placed in the new units can stay for months, where they will be encouraged to take advantage of intensive support services, such as drug- addiction counseling, job training and medication for mental illnesses.

Savings can be big

It's a theory that first took hold in Philadelphia. More than 300 communities, including Denver, have now embraced it.

A two-year study by Denver CARES, Denver Health Medical Center's addiction rehabilitation and detox facility, found that the number of emergency admissions dropped by 76 percent among 82 clients directed into housing programs. The number of admissions dropped from 3,701 to 899.

Because detox treatment is so expensive, those reductions represented big cost savings, to the tune of more than $500,000, Denver officials say.

But Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz remains a persistent critic. She argues that voters didn't get to have a say on the proposal after the administration declined to put the new housing in the recent $550 million bond package that voters approved.

"This is a blatant violation of the trust of the voters," Faatz said during a recent meeting. "This is a way to go around the voters. They have been so generous to Denver, and then to turn around and slap them . . ."

She remains suspicious that the new housing will produce actual cost savings to the general fund and worries that promised federal and state funds might dry up.

Only by taking away the emergency pressures of surviving day to day on the streets can the homeless actually stabilize and get back on the road toward becoming productive members of society, administration officials counter.

"What we now know is that once we move them indoors and surround them with services, there is a cost of moving them off the streets," said Jamie Van Leeuwen, the project manager for the mayor's initiative against homelessness. "But compared to the cost of them living on the streets, there is a significant difference."

One success story

Denver CARES was where Paula Holland ended up after three months on a friend's sofa. The friend called police after Holland's vodka drinking got out of control.

Holland had crashed at her friend's place upon returning to Denver after spending four years as a semi driver in Fort Worth, Texas. The isolation of the truck-driving job brought her back to Denver, where she hoped to find new work and the supportive embrace of friends.

Instead, she found no work and resorted to drinking to deaden the pain. She would smoke cigarettes and drink the vodka until the bottle was empty and stop just long enough to buy another bottle.

"It was about getting numb and getting away from it all, and then I wanted to get away from that too, but I didn't know how," Holland said during a recent interview.

From Denver CARES, she got enrolled in a supportive housing program in August provided by Arapahoe House at the Wright Center — the type of housing Denver is looking to create. Her case worker there enrolled her in a job-training program that taught her cooking skills.

Holland went on to an internship as a cook at the Wright Center, where she learned how to judge proper portions for about 20 other residents.

Last week, she talked about how recent job interviews as a cook at a club looked promising. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she said she finally got the proper dose of medication and no longer experiences the crashing lows that once paralyzed her.

She is graduating from the Wright Center and moving into a studio apartment in Capitol Hill, where her rent will remain subsidized. Once she gets a job, she's expected to pay up to 30 percent of her income toward rent there. She can stay there for two years until she is able to live fully on her own.