DENVER — Mayor Mike Johnston's office told Denver City Council members for the first time Tuesday how expensive the mayor's plan is to solve homelessness.
The total cost of the House 1000 and All In Mile High programs has been a bit of a secret. No one knew, or at least no one would say, until Tuesday. It turns out the programs are costing tens of millions of dollars more in the first two years than the public was led to believe.
"It looks to me like we are spending between Jul. 15, 2023, and Dec. 21, 2024, $155 million on this," said Denver City Councilwoman Amanda Sawyer.
It took some math from Sawyer and a deep dive from 9NEWS into the spreadsheets to put everything together, but it's now known the City of Denver plans to spend around $155 million on Johnston’s homeless initiatives between July of last year and the end of this year.
That’s about $65 million more than what Johnston said it would cost when he held two news conferences last year.
"This total cost is about $48 million," Johnston said back then.
The 2023 budget for the programs as $48 million. The next year would be cheaper, Johnston said.
"We’ve laid out a $39 million budget," Johnston said at a news conference detailing his 2024 budget.
That adds up to a total of $87.8 million budgeted over two years. Now it's known the city plans to spend around $155 million in that time period.
Here's a breakdown of the costs:
- More than $100 million will be spent on expenses for hotels that have been bought or leased and converted into shelters.
- More than $35 million will go toward building and running micro-communities around the city.
- Another $14 million will be spent on miscellaneous expenses like programs to put people in permanent housing.
"We’re getting to a point where we understand now what this program costs moving forward year-over-year," said Dr. Jamie Rife, executive director of the Denver Department of Housing Stability.
Rife said the expected annual operating cost for the homeless programs has also grown. The city now expects to spend $57.5 million every year to try to solve homelessness.
"If we serve 2,000 people, which is what we anticipate serving, that is about a per person cost of $28,750 per person," Rife said.
Much of the $155 million that the city is spending are one-time costs, including buying hotels and pallet shelters. The mayor's presentation during a news conference last September outlines that those costs were part of the budget that now seems to be tens of millions of dollars over.
Johnston's office on Tuesday asked City Council members for another $17 million for costs that they said were unexpected and not a part of the original budget, including repairs to hotels that were more expensive than anticipated. Most of the funding would come from federal dollars.
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