DENVER — The City of Denver is changing how it measures Mayor Mike Johnston's House1000 homelessness initiative, which will allow the city to meet Johnston's goal by the end of the year.
The goal is to get 1,000 people off the streets and into housing by the end of the year — a deadline that's fast-approaching.
Originally, the city said people had to stay sheltered for 14 days to count. Now, Johnston says the city is no longer waiting 14 days to count people toward the 1,000-person goal.
Without this change, the administration would have fallen short already, because there are fewer than 14 days to the end of 2023, and Denver still needs to shelter hundreds of people to meet the goal.
At last update, the city was counting 607 people toward the goal — that's 607 people moved indoors for any amount of time, not 14 days. According to the city's dashboard, 583 people are still indoors today.
While the city is taking immediate credit for sheltering people, it's also offering more transparency in the numbers released to the public on how many people stay with the program long-term and make it to permanent housing.
"This is actually a more accountable, more rigorous, more transparent system than would have been happening either with a 14-day timeline or a 30-day timeline, because those would have assumed, as the federal regulations do, that after 14 days if you have an exit, it doesn't matter, it still counts as a success," Johnston told 9NEWS.
Last week, 9NEWS reported that city leaders became aware weeks ago that they had misinformed the public on how homelessness numbers were being tracked, and they didn't say anything. City spokespeople have chalked it up to internal confusion.
When asked about the changing measures, the mayor's office denied what was happening. Now, a spokeswoman for the mayor says Johnston himself didn't know about the misleading numbers until after 9NEWS reported on them.
"Mayor Johnston learned about the incorrect messaging on Friday morning. The team has been working hard to upgrade the dashboard to increase transparency. The updates to the dashboard have been publicly announced, and shared with council and Cole [Chandler, senior adviser for homelessness resolution] will present on it at Safety Committee," she said.
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