The council unanimously supported applying the pack of new rules, collectively known by the active centers and corridors design overlay, to a stretch of Colfax that by 2027 is slated to be home to Denver’s first bus rapid transit line.

That transportation system is designed to use dedicated bus lanes and high-frequency, quick-boarding buses to transform the way people move along East Colfax. The design rules stand to change what the street offers to people walking and rolling along its sidewalks.

The rules will apply to all new buildings within two blocks of a planned bus rapid transit, or BRT, station between Sherman and Yosemite streets. Not only will projects in those areas be required to feature an active, non-residential use on at least a portion of the ground floors, they will also have to be set back at least two feet farther from the street to widen sidewalks.

“This overlay is not just as a zoning change, this really signals the beginning of an investment in the future of our city and the Colfax corridor,” Councilwoman Amanda Sawyer, one of the measure’s co-sponsors of the zoning change, said. “It really underscores our commitment to creating a vibrant and walkable neighborhood that is unique to the city of Denver.”

Sawyer represents east Denver’s District 5, one of four council districts that will have properties impacted by this change. The rules were now applied to every property along the 5 miles to allow for some larger housing developments to pop up, she said. Residential density will be needed to feed the new businesses city leaders hope will populate the new ground floor spaces.

Denver resident Robin Rothman was among a trio of Denver residents who spoke against the design overlay Monday, saying it did not go far enough because fast food drive-thru restaurants could still develop along portions of Colfax. She noted a Jack in the Box restaurant is being planned for the corner of Colfax and Williams Street, a property not covered by the rules changes.

“Businesses like fast food operators, banks and gas stations have overcome far more onerous requirements than what (the zoning overlay) asks for and the result has health consequences,” she said, pointing to unhealthy food choices and air pollution for idling cars.

Councilman Chris Hinds, the measure’s other co-sponsor, said that while he favors regulations that tip the scale more toward pedestrians and road users other than cars, he felt the design overlay stuck a balance.

Twelve projects already in the planning stages are exempt from the rules, senior city planner Libbie Glick said Monday, but the rest of the properties in the ordinance are now subject to the requirements.

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In the January 2020 evening incident, the car the woman was riding in was forced off the road in the 300 block of North Federal Boulevard, crashing into the Columbine Steak House and Lounge. Denver police officer Thomas Moen had attempted to make a right turn from the middle lane of northbound Federal in his department SUV and struck the sedan, which was in the right lane, according to a complaint filed by Tanya Martinez Perez’s attorney earlier this year.

The sedan was forced off the road where it collided with a parked car, crossed over the sidewalk and hit the building, coming to a stop. The complaint cites the building’s address as 300 N. Federal Blvd., which is where Columbine is located.

The complaint alleges that because Moen failed to drive safely, Martinez Perez suffered injuries to her left shoulder, arm and wrist as well as a concussion that caused post-concussion headaches.

The Denver City Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the agreement on Monday.

If approved by the City Council, the package of proposed zoning changes will govern future development for hundreds of properties between Sherman and Yosemite streets with an eye toward ensuring ample shopfronts and more space for sidewalk users along Colfax.

The measure comes before the council as the city’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure marches toward a final design for the long-anticipated East Colfax Avenue Bus Rapid Transit network. Crews are expected to begin construction on the first segment of that project — which will install dedicated lanes and more than two dozen loading platforms to accommodate a network of high-frequency, fast-loading buses — next year.

While BRT will change the face of transportation along Colfax, the new zoning rule would change the face of buildings around the bus stops.

The rules — technically known as a design overlay — would not impact the base zoning or building heights allowed on any properties. The most important thing it will do is dictate that at least a portion of the ground floor of new buildings includes active, commercial uses. That could be anything from a pizza parlor to an office space.

New buildings would also have to be set back at least two feet farther from the street if the overlay is adopted, expanding sidewalk space, according to city planning documents. Property owners could leave more space between the fronts of their buildings and the property line, creating space for patios that might entice pedestrians.

The proposed standards won’t run for the entire 5-plus-mile length of the corridor, with gaps provided in some places where bigger residential projects could spring up. The impacted properties are all clustered within two blocks of planned bus rapid transit stops.

“The purpose of the design standards themselves is to promote walkability and small business,” said Councilwoman Amanda Sawyer, one of the measure’s co-sponsors. Her east Denver District 5 is one of four council districts that will see properties rezoned should the bill pass. “We’re trying to find the right balance. We want businesses in places everyone walks to and rides to and we want housing, particularly affordable housing.”

There are a few uses that would not meet the criteria for nonresidential active uses facing Colfax, essentially banning them near future BRT stops. Those include storage facilities, car washes, auto shops and drive-thrus that would have entrances and exits on Colfax itself, according to city documents.

“It’s past time that Colfax prioritized people over stuff,” said Councilman Chris Hinds, the bill’s other co-sponsor who represents the city’s central District 10.

Long-term plans drafted over the last two to three years for the city’s east and east central neighborhoods both call for design standards that emphasize active uses like storefronts on busy street corridors while discouraging car-oriented development.

Hinds sees the design overlay, already in place on portions of Tennyson Street and Santa Fe Drive, as Denver living its values on Colfax.

The overlay plan cruised through the council’s Land Use, Transportation & Infrastructure Committee in October. But there was some heartburn among members of the Denver Planning Board when they reviewed it this fall.

The design overlay was created by District 1 Councilwoman Amanda Sandoval’s office to address concerns about the wave of redevelopment sweeping over Tennyson Street between 38th and 46th avenues. Sandoval and others were concerned about blocks of new apartment and condo buildings popping up, crowding the sidewalk and choking out the small business feel of the corridor, a historic node on the city’s long-gone streetcar network.

The overlay has since been adopted for a portion of Santa Fe Drive, another corridor of Denver that is rapidly densifying as developers seek to cash in on one of the priciest housing and rental markets in the country.

The Planning Board voted 5-2 to recommend the City Council apply an overlay to East Colfax but not before discussing whether it was the right fit for the storied avenue. Unlike Tennyson and Santa Fe, north-south streets where properties are generally deeper and backed by alleys that allow for deliveries and other services, Colfax is an east-west avenue and lots are much shallower and without alleys. That means new standards that increase setbacks from the street could make it harder to design a workable building.

“I think Colfax is unique enough with the BRT to deserve a little more attention than just implementing something that was started elsewhere. I think the conditions are very different here,” said Gosia Kung, one of the two members who voted against recommending the council approve the rezonings. “It’s a problem that we are expanding the right of way. We’re pushing buildings away.”

Andy Baldyga spoke at that Planning Board meeting. An architect and former member of the board, Baldyga is now the vice president of the Colfax Ave Business Improvement District, which covers Colfax from roughly Sherman to Josephine streets.

Baldyga lives within a block of Coflax and is excited by the prospect of improving transit services along a road that carries one of the Regional Transportation District’s highest ridership bus lines already. But he, too, has concerns about how an east-west avenue will fare under design standards created for north-south streets.

“Colfax can stitch neighborhoods together and become a uniting element. There are strong neighborhoods on the north and south; great density, great housing stock, people want to live there,” Baldyga said. “I think what the city needs to do is look at all the east-west corridors and develop new standards that incentivize new development in a way that works for east-west streets.”

Hinds, Sawyer and their partners in the planning department did consider tweaks as a nod to these differences. Skinny properties, those under 37.5 feet in width, are exempted from the commercial use requirement, Sawyer said.

Exemptions for shallow properties along Colfax, those that are less than 70 feet deep, were also considered, but the group determined those properties would also struggle to fit new projects into the existing zoning code. Instead, the overlay was extended at least 100 feet to the north and south of Colfax to make sure that developers who assemble multiple properties for a new project would also be subject to the new rules.

BRT itself will completely reshape East Colfax. The high-frequency transit service will be made possible by converting two general-purpose lanes between Broadway and Yosemite Street into dedicated, center-running bus lanes, said Jonathan Stewart, the project’s director within the city’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, or DOTI.

It is worth noting that Aurora is the city’s partner in the project and once the BRT lanes cross into that city’s territory east of Yosemite the buses will share lanes with traffic, Stewart said. The eastern terminus of the BRT line will be near the R Line rail station just before Colfax meets Interstate 225.

Design work is well underway for the project ahead of an anticipated fall 2024 groundbreaking on the first segment between Broadway and Williams Street. City transportation officials have pinned 2027 as the projected start of revenue-generating operations on the new mass transit service.

DOTI was not directly involved in the design standards discussions, Stewart said, but the department is soliciting feedback from business improvement districts along the avenue about what the streetscape should look like between the curbs and the front doors of shops, restaurants, and other businesses.

“It’s part of the larger effort of the city, trying to plan more holistically,” he said of working alongside the planning department. “We’re both wanting to enact the people’s will transforming this into more of a Main Street-type corridor.”

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The sheet goes back 11 years, a third of Erin’s life. There are holes in the narrative: Her daughter is schizophrenic bipolar, Vassis said, and she’s moved around different parts of the country. Still, even incomplete, Vassis’ growing tracker provides a glimpse at the revolving doors that Erin and hundreds of other Coloradans are stuck in every year.

From April 2021 to April 2022, for instance, Erin spent 106 days bouncing between emergency rooms, detox facilities, hospital beds, homeless shelters and crisis centers. During that time, she never spent more than two weeks at a time in one hospital, Vassis said. Instead, she repeatedly was discharged within a fortnight, still unstable, thanks to a decades-old Medicaid rule that often forces the early discharge of low-income, mentally ill patients.

Vassis looks at the spreadsheet again. After one hospital stay in 2021, Erin was dropped at a bus stop. It was January, and other than a dog blanket that a passing stranger had given her, she was wearing only hospital scrubs.

“They just spit you out like you’re a throwaway human being,” Vassis said. “And that’s really tragic.”

Erin is one of 300 to 400 low-income Coloradans with severe mental illnesses who need longer hospital stays but don’t get them because Medicaid caps inpatient treatment at many psychiatric hospitals to 15 days per month, a requirement that advocates say is harming vulnerable patients and straining the broader public safety net. The patients, many of whom are homeless and are discharged before they’re fully stabilized, are left to tumble through jails and psychiatric evaluations, shelters and city streets, emergency rooms and nonprofit groups.

The details are maddening, providers and advocates said: If a patient stays at one facility for 10 days and another for six, neither hospital gets paid. Because the 15-day limit is based on a monthly clock, a patient’s length of stay is partially determined by when they are admitted. A patient admitted on Dec. 8 is likely to be out before Christmas, for instance. But a patient hospitalized on Dec. 18 can stay the rest of the month and then remain in the hospital when the countdown restarts on Jan. 1.

As the state broadly re-assesses its mental health system, a group of legislators, mental health advocates and parents are working to change the Medicaid mental health rule and provide 30 days of inpatient treatment to patients who need it. That requires a waiver from the federal government, plus $7.2 million in annual funding, according to projections provided to the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing earlier this year. Nineteen other states have secured or are awaiting a final answer on similar waiver applications, according to KFF, a health policy think-tank.

With state Medicaid officials on board, Gov. Jared Polis allocated $2.5 million in his recent budget proposal to ensure hospitals are paid for 15 days, even if a patient stays a bit longer. Now, legislators and advocates are calling on the legislature to find the remaining $5 million to extend the program to a full month.

“That just seems like money well-spent,” said Rep. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat involved in the discussions. “That seems very inexpensive to me.”

The rule, advocates and lawmakers say, was well-intentioned: When Medicaid was established nearly 60 years ago, its architects didn’t want large mental hospitals to permanently warehouse vulnerable patients.

But as the decades have worn on, patients are increasingly bouncing between a series of institutions, like jails and emergency rooms, that were never intended to serve as regular pieces of the mental health puzzle. Psychiatric hospitals end up absorbing costs for longer patient stays, and some are cutting back on the number of beds they have available for the service because it isn’t economically viable, said Dr. Roderick O’Brien, the director of intensive treatment at Centennial Peaks Hospital in Louisville.

For patients who need more care, shorter stays exacerbate their illness. If they’re not fully stabilized, they may not understand the full breadth of their condition or the need to take medications, said Dr. Chelsea Wolf, the medical director for Denver Health’s inpatient psychiatric unit. Mental illnesses are “chronic, debilitating illnesses,” she said, and they will worsen over time if they’re not treated correctly and consistently.

Most patients don’t need lengthy inpatient treatment stays. But providers said it’s a vital option for those who do, especially if they’re unhoused or aren’t being treated elsewhere. O’Brien estimated that two-thirds of his patients with mental illnesses who decompensate — meaning their condition has worsened — need inpatient care for longer than two weeks.

“So the concern is that people’s health is not getting better,” said Vincent Atchity, the CEO and president of Mental Health Colorado. “They get discharged before they’re better and then, in short order, decompensate yet again and become vulnerable to other unfortunate outcomes, like prolonged periods of homelessness or harmful substance use or engagement in the criminal justice system.”

Those are the revolving doors that patients like Erin have been caught up in. The short stays then strain whichever institution next encounters the patient. Wolf, the Denver Health provider, said her hospital’s emergency room is “very, very, very frequently” filled with patients “who need ongoing psychiatric care and aren’t getting it.”

Others end up in jail. In one 12-month period several years ago, Vassis said, Erin was hospitalized nine times. In six of those cases, she was arrested within three days of being discharged. Erin was arrested again last year for breaking into her mother’s house. She is now waiting for a judge to determine if she’s competent to stand trial.

The state has a broader problem with delays within its competency system, through which people awaiting trial are psychiatrically evaluated. But that crisis overlaps with the Medicaid rule: Patients who were discharged early have ended up arrested and waiting in essentially the same hospital bed they’d been released from before, Amabile said. The difference is they were now caught up in the criminal justice system.

There are positive signs that legislators will set aside the needed money to give patients longer stays. Rep. Shannon Bird, a Westminster Democrat and the chair of the powerful Joint Budget Committee, said there was “great interest” in the idea. At a legislative meeting Thursday, she questioned the basic morality of discharging patients who need more care.

“Keeping people in the hospital for the time they need to get the care they need, instead of sending them out before they’re ready to go, only to recycle them and bring them right back when they relapse or something else happened… it seems like a good thing for us to do,” she said in an interview.

State Medicaid officials are on board with a change, too. They had discussed the problem before but didn’t pursue it because of the relatively small number of patients impacted by the rule — several hundred per year, though Amabile suspects it’s much higher.

But mounting frustration from advocates and hospitals, including from facilities with overwhelmed emergency rooms, prompted state regulators to throw their support behind expanding the rule. The health care policy and financing department can apply for a waiver from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services this spring, depending on how much money is available. The approval process will take months.

“The reason we’re changing this policy is that we are concerned that the payment policy is driving clinical decisions,” Cristen Bates, the deputy Medicaid director here, said.

For Vassis, 30 days would be a good start. She doesn’t think it’s enough for people like her daughter, but it’s better than the status quo. Erin is creative, a painter. She’s curious about the world around her. When her illness is under control, she’s held jobs, lived on her own, gone to school. She just needs help staying stable.

“She’s someone who’s so at risk for recidivism and homelessness, it’s not even funny,” Vassis said. “If they can’t get her in the real world, she doesn’t have a chance.”

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She was one of the first people who moved into a former hotel in Houston that served as a center to help homeless people navigate their way to more stability. She credits the transitional housing facility and programs launched as part of “The Way Home,” the large Texas city’s nationally recognized homelessness-reduction strategy, for the fact that she now lives in an apartment she loves, alongside her adopted dog, Violet. It’s also where she decided to tackle her alcoholism, getting sober.

“You don’t ever want to be in those shoes under a bridge — going through a hurricane, going through the cold, going through the winds, going through hot weather, you name it,” recalled Eddins, 63, of her life in 2021, while sitting on her living room couch. “It’s a nightmare. It really is.”

New Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has invoked Houston as “the best model in the country” and an inspiration for his own plan to move the city’s homeless population off the streets in much larger numbers than his predecessors achieved, starting with 1,000 people by the end of this month. To better assess just how well Houston’s system has worked, The Denver Post visited the city and spoke with the leaders responsible for its 11-year-old strategy — as well as both people who have been helped and those who are still waiting for a hand up.

The Post found that while broad elements of Houston’s plan are similar to Johnston’s emerging playbook, there are key differences in the approaches and the timelines. Houston’s focus is on getting people into permanent housing while Denver largely is relying, at least for now, on temporary options.

Metro Houston’s leaders built the political will, along with reprioritizing the city and federal money long poured into homelessness, to pursue a uniform strategy with the area’s nonprofit providers. The city has weathered sometimes-fierce neighborhood pushback against new homeless housing, but The Way Home has been lauded by homeless advocates as a data-driven prototype for success.

Houston’s system places some hurdles in front of people who are homeless before they can get into permanent housing, and the system isn’t perfect: Street homelessness is still part of the landscape, especially among people who struggle with addiction or mental health problems.

But as city leaders from across the country try to build momentum for real change, they’ve looked for lessons from Houston’s reduction of unsheltered homelessness by about 63% in a decade.

“You can design a better process, and Houston did,” said former Mayor Annise Parker, who began leading the strategy shift in 2011.

On a warm early October afternoon, downtown Houston, the center of the nation’s fourth most populous city, wasn’t devoid of homeless people, but visible signs were far less apparent in the bustling core than they are in Denver. Tents were set up in a couple of places and small clusters of people were living under highway overpasses, but those largely were occurring a good distance from retail storefronts and businesses.

In and near downtown Denver, entire blocks this year have had tents and personal belongings scattered along the sidewalks, sometimes in front of businesses or apartment buildings — though the city has cleared several under Johnston’s House 1,000 initiative, with their residents relocated to hotels temporarily.

Houston’s progress has hit some snags. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey’s destruction pushed more people into homelessness. And during and after the pandemic, the economic pressures facing most cities, including rising rents — even in relatively affordable Houston — resulted in more people living outside after the city had achieved its lowest level of street homelessness.

In the last two years, through October, the city “decommissioned” more than 113 encampments where a combined 700 or so people lived, said Marc Eichenbaum, the special assistant for homeless initiatives to current Mayor Sylvester Turner.

What enabled those moves was the opening of the city’s navigation center, first piloted at a hotel — where Eddins passed through — and then, at the start of this year, moved to a converted former school with 100 beds spread in dorm-style bedrooms. Eichenbaum said federal pandemic aid helped pay for the nearly $7 million facility, which serves as a place for residents to stay while providers find them more permanent housing options. The nonprofit group Harmony House operates it.

Photos of past guests line the walls in the hallway, many of their faces beaming. That’s how Eddins said she felt when she walked into the first navigation center in late 2021, after leaving the bridge.

“I felt like I was in heaven. It’s like your feet are lifted up off the ground,” she said.

From crisis point to maximizing “the life boat”

A dozen years ago, Houston’s homeless population was at a crisis point, ranking as the sixth largest in the country. The annual point-in-time count for the Houston region found an estimated 8,538 people, or 1 in every 300 residents, were homeless — more than half of them unsheltered.

The next year, in 2012, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development named Houston a priority community for addressing homelessness. The designation brought federal funding and technical assistance, along with a mandate to follow a research-supported strategy called “housing first.”

That meant getting people who were chronically homeless and living on the streets a place to live as quickly as possible, ahead of all other concerns. Support services such as addiction treatment or mental health counseling — if the tenants wanted them — would follow. The model, which has its critics, is based on the concept that people can’t meaningfully change their lives if they don’t first have a safe, stable place to live.

It didn’t take much to get Parker on board. She’d already seen the fruits of a federally backed program that Houston participated in, successfully moving 101 homeless veterans into housing in 100 days — an initiative the city would later scale up.

Parker, the mayor from 2010 to 2016, says not every aspect of Denver’s developing homelessness strategy under Johnston can look like Houston’s, though Johnston also is aiming for a housing-first approach. But Parker believes every U.S. city can significantly reduce its homeless population by learning from the sustained improvements in Houston.

“In dealing with housing and homelessness, we’re all passengers in the Titanic,” Parker said, analogizing the sinking ship to cities’ attempts to get everyone housed in the face of larger societal forces. Among those are an insufficient supply of affordable housing; too little access to mental, behavioral health and substance use treatment; and inadequate supports for young adults leaving the foster care system.

“What I was able to do in Houston is maximize the use of the lifeboat,” Parker said.

And she had a lot of help. All the players from local governments and nonprofit groups came together to assess what was working and what wasn’t in metro Houston’s past approaches. That included service providers having to “put some of their egos aside” and altering their programs’ approaches, said Mike Nichols, CEO of the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County.

The coalition was appointed by a steering committee as the lead coordinating agency. Having a nonprofit lead came with advantages, Nichols said, such as being able to raise money from private donors, recruiting volunteers who could donate their professional services, and advocating for housing solutions on multiple fronts. Nonprofits also can pivot quickly during crises, such as the pandemic, without as much political interference.

“This is a model for solving social problems,” Nichols said of Houston’s homeless response system. But, he added, “this doesn’t happen overnight.”

Parker said she took advantage of the powers given to her office to push initiatives. She said she tried to follow the data and to ensure everyone understood the plan — and if providers wanted a piece of the city’s allotment in federal funding, they had to follow it.

“At that point, I just brute-forced it and used up a lot of political capital,” she said.

Programs see success — along with challenges

With more programs now in place, Houston’s The Way Home includes rapid rehousing options for people who need short-term assistance, often due to economic conditions, and who don’t have a disability preventing them from working. And it provides permanent supportive housing for the “chronically homeless.”

It’s this latter group that’s targeted for the most help, but they also face high hurdles. Not just anyone can get in line for an apartment. And once there, a small portion of their income contributes to the rent. In Eddins’ case, she pays a portion of her Social Security money.

To be considered chronically homeless under federal funding guidelines, a person must be able to prove that they’ve experienced homelessness for at least a year continuously, or for a combined 12 months over the course of three years, and also have a disabling condition.

Outreach workers from several participating agencies and partners use a standardized assessment to rank each client’s needs. The goal of the system, according to the coalition, is to ensure that “any door is the right door” — meaning that a person goes through the same intake process, and has access to the same housing or other help, no matter which provider they come in contact with.

The Way Home also offers programs aimed at shoring up families facing housing instability to prevent them from becoming homeless.

Before a bus took Eddins from the small bridge encampment to the navigation center two years ago, she’d spent nearly four months living under the structure, she said. She has had medical problems since she was young, and after her parents died, she lost the home she had shared with them and spent years living in various temporary accommodations.

She ended up under the bridge in 2021 after being discharged from a hospital following treatment for a problem with her bladder, she said.

Four other people were living on Eddins’ side of the bridge at the time. One person had left before outreach workers could take him to the navigation center, while another left the center and went back to living on the streets, according to The Way Home’s data-tracking system. The other two, like Eddins, moved into permanent housing and remain housed.

“I’m extremely proud of myself,” Eddins said of her newfound stability in an apartment, one that’s full of plants that spill out onto the balcony.

She and the others are among the success stories the homeless coalition cites for The Way Home’s continuum of programs. In 2022, about 81% of the people who were placed in permanent housing remained housed after a year. In rapid rehousing programs, the data shows, 83% of people who were placed had not returned to homelessness within two years, and at least two-thirds of them ended up in permanent housing after their time-limited stay ended.

Getting people enrolled requires significant legwork. For several hours on an October day, Fernando Torres and Otha Rice drove around to various parts of the city, trying to track down specific people they’d been assigned through their outreach work with an organization called Avenue 360.

As they made their way through the city, Torres reached in his pocket, grabbed his phone and texted a man he’d been working with for months on getting his documentation ready to get into permanent housing. But he couldn’t reach him. He tried to call him — no luck there, either.

So the outreach workers drove to an encampment known as “The Grove,” where at least 100 tents were scattered across a grassy area downtown, just blocks from Minute Maid Park, the Houston Astros’ stadium.

With a photo of the client in hand, they struck out.

Later, Torres was able to find another person he was helping to verify his 12 months of homelessness so the man could get on the list for permanent housing. The man met Torres at a convenience store, where the clerk attested that she had known the man to be homeless for at least three months. It was progress.

They drove the man back near the street where he was staying. The white outreach van, labeled “Street Outreach Mobile Unit” with a red, blue and yellow wrap depicting houses, made multiple stops that day, including at an underpass where the workers searched for a client. The outreach workers also met new people living on the streets or under bridges, listened to their stories and figured out whether they could connect them to programs for help.

Addressing homelessness and its complexities is a challenge for many cities, and Rice said part of the problem is that “people are dealing with it like it’s a political issue, and it’s not. It’s a humanitarian issue.”

Navigating through local resistance

But Houston’s mayors have run into plenty of local politics as The Way Home has developed. Local resistance has also been a challenge at times for nonprofit leaders whose organizations build affordable and supportive housing.

Most recently, the opening of the city’s navigation center in Houston’s low-income Fifth Ward neighborhood was delayed because of neighborhood pushback.

“People don’t want this in our community — we’re up against enough,” resident Sandra Edwards told the City Council last year, according to the Houston Chronicle. The people in the low-income neighborhood were already struggling, she said.

City leaders put a pause on the project as they called community meetings and promised improvement projects in the neighborhood as part of the development package. They also promised that any services available to formerly homeless people in the center also would be offered to community members in the area.

That reduced some of the opposition, but others stood firm. The center opened early this year.

“Even after educating folks, there are going to those folks who will never change their mind,” said Eichenbaum, Mayor Turner’s special assistant for homeless initiatives. “And so then it takes political will to say, ‘I’m going to go in a direction that not everybody is 100% supportive of so I can get everybody the results that they want.’ ”

In Denver, Johnston has weathered neighborhood opposition to plans for a series of temporary micro-communities of tiny homes or other shelters. His House 1,000 plan also is making use of former hotels.

Denver’s position now, with Johnston declaring homelessness an emergency, shows how progress can recede over time as new challenges arise — in this case, the city’s skyrocketing rents as people flocked to Denver in the 2010s.

Officials and providers in Houston recalled viewing Denver’s data-driven approach to homelessness as a model more than 15 years ago. Joy Horak-Brown, the executive director of an affordable housing development nonprofit called New Hope Housing, said she visited Denver in 2007 and remembered stopping by old apartments above retail spaces that had been made available to the homeless.

Now it’s Denver and its neighbors that are sending delegations to Houston.

Over the last three years, Denver’s homeless population increased by more than 48.5%, according to the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative. The city’s 2023 point-in-time count, which occurred over a single day in January — and which advocates say likely misses people — reported 1,423 unsheltered people in Denver, with another 4,395 in various forms of shelter. Metro-wide, the respective totals were 2,763 and 6,302.

Johnston, who took office in July, has pledged to end street homelessness in Denver by the end of his term in 2027. But while temporary solutions are rolling out, few details have been fleshed out publicly for later plans for permanent housing.

Getting people into permanent housing

Houston officials have commended Johnston’s ambitions, but they say both temporary and permanent housing should be in place to maximize the impact.

“The Catch-22 is that building temporary facilities is on the assumption that you have long-term housing for them to exit and go into,” Eichenbaum said. “… Putting people into a temporary facility takes lots of resources, time and money — and you’re not getting any reductions in homelessness” without the permanent housing.

In an interview, Johnston countered that Denver was making progress on that front, securing 500 housing vouchers through a partnership program for people who will transition out of the micro-communities. The city also is developing plans to provide more rapid rehousing — paying at least some portion of a person’s rent for three or four months to help them recover financially until they can become self-sufficient.

“Those are the times you need the most services,” Johnston said. “It’s once you’ve applied for that job, gotten it worked for three or four weeks, saved some money, reconnected to your family, gotten some help for your mental health needs — now you’re ready to actually go out to your own unit.”

Still, he acknowledged that in higher-rent Denver, finding permanent housing for people who leave shelters will be the biggest challenge.

In Houston, some of The Way Home’s programs are aimed at spurring more permanent housing — including new apartment complexes — while others enlist existing apartments and homes scattered across the area.

The coalition and its partners established the “Landlord Engagement Team” in 2019 to work with rental owners and property managers. The coalition pays market-rate rents, with the cost covered by vouchers and a portion of a tenant’s income.

About 70% of the properties signed up are multi-family buildings or communities, and the other 30% have individual landlords, according to the agency’s data. There are still too few available rental units to meet the demand in a tight market, but officials say it’s an important part of Houston’s response.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when college campuses closed, Jamil Hasan found himself in a predicament: He was losing money on vacant apartment units that he previously had no trouble filling. About 80% of the more than 70 apartment units he and his wife had acquired and renovated near Texas universities sat empty, a situation that persisted as college students returned to classes remotely.

Then Hasan learned about the coalition’s landlord program.

“My model was a perfect fit,” he said. Now most of his properties, which are split-level homes divided into apartments, have a mix of formerly homeless tenants and students.

Denver’s mayor has a similar idea in the works. His administration last month announced a $400,000 partnership with a nonprofit called Housing Connector that uses Zillow and other tools to find apartments in the city that are open. Plans call for the organization to reach out to landlords and negotiate lease rates and contracts for those willing to house formerly homeless people.

Cara Conrad, one of Hasan’s tenants in Houston, said the housing program changed her life. She’d been homeless for more than three years — a trajectory she attributed to multiple factors, including being sexually assaulted as a child, addiction problems, time spent in jail, medical challenges and family losses.

She got help, and in July she was able to get a housing voucher.

“It’s still emotional,” Conrad said. “I’m really proud of myself. … I had to go through a lot to get to where I am right now.”

Conrad said she’s not going to do anything that would jeopardize it and put her back on the streets. Talking about her apartment and the new stability she’s found, she mentioned her favorite spot: her bedroom closet.

The first thing she did when she moved in, she said, was hang up a shirt — taking satisfaction that she finally had found a safe place for her belongings.

Nearly five months after being sworn into office, he renominated Sheriff Elias Diggins and Fire Chief Desmond Fulton, subject to City Council approval. Those nominations follow last month’s announcement that Johnston plans to keep Armando Saldate III as executive director of public safety and Ron Thomas as police chief.

If all four picks are approved, it will leave the public safety leadership chosen by former Mayor Michael Hancock intact.

“These are leaders who have grown up in this community, have served this community, and share our vision for bringing public safety to every neighborhood in Denver,” Johnston said about Diggins and Fulton in a news release. “I look forward to working with them shoulder to shoulder to deliver a safer Denver.”

His decision to retain all four safety leaders has drawn criticism from some community advocates who had pressed for change, including Lisa Calderón, a former mayoral candidate who endorsed Johnston in the June runoff.

Diggins has been a member of the city’s sheriff’s department since 1994. He had a stint as the city’s interim sheriff in 2014 and 2015, and Hancock later chose him to succeed former Sheriff Patrick Firman on a permanent basis in 2020. The news release lauded him as an “advocate for the mental health community” who created a management-level position to focus on the issue in the department.

Hancock nominated Fulton to lead the Denver Fire Department just months after nominating Diggins. Like Diggins, Fulton is a veteran of his agency, with more than 25 years of experience with DFD.

Johnston’s cabinet still has some key openings, including permanent leaders for three major departments: Public Health and Environment, Community Planning and Development, and Transportation and Infrastructure.

Last week the mayor’s office announced Johnston had chosen Jaime Rife, most recently the director of the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative, to lead the city’s Department of Housing Stability. That department is tasked with overseeing homelessness response and the mayor’s approach to affordable housing.

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It was the fourth and, so far, the largest action at an encampment yet as part of Mayor Mike Johnston’s House 1,000 homelessness initiative. With another mass relocation planned in the coming days at an encampment near East 48th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard, administration officials say the city is on track to shelter more than 500 people by the middle of next week as part of the effort that has been Johnston’s primary focus since he was sworn in in July.

“After we bring people indoors from these two encampments, we will be more than halfway to the mayor’s stated goal,” Johnston spokesman Jose Salas said.

The online dashboard tracking the administration’s progress showed that 317 people had been moved off the streets and into shelter or housing as of Thursday afternoon. That will be updated in the days ahead once the relocation work is complete, Salas said.

The Johnston administration previously carried out an encampment closure in the area of 20th and Curtis streets, relocating 61 people in that effort, which concluded Nov. 1, according to a new release at that time. Thursday’s action area was much larger, covering rights of way on both sides of 20th from Stout Street to Curtis and both sides of Curtis from 20th to Broadway. A map included as part of a legal notice providing residents with seven days’ warning of the action also showed 21st Street between Champa and Curtis as part of the cleanup area.

The city is still working on a final tally of how many people living in tents and other makeshift shelters in the area were relocated Thursday. Derek Woodbury, a spokesman with Denver’s Department of Housing Stability, said three bus trips were required to move everyone who accepted the shelter offer.

“Outreach staff worked in this area over the past several days. During this time, we identified well over 100 individuals for the move, and staff visited the encampment daily to provide housing-focused services as well as behavioral health, substance misuse, harm reduction and emergency medical services,” Woodbury said in an email.

The residents were moved to a former DoubleTree Hotel at 404 Quebec St. in Councilwoman Shontel Lewis’ District 8. Lewis appeared alongside Johnston Thursday morning at a news conference

Lewis repeatedly has highlighted that her district is carrying a heavy share of the load of the House 1,000 effort, with multiple hotel properties being used as noncongregate shelters and a forthcoming micro-community in the parking lot of one of those hotels.

Next week, the administration will relocate people living on the streets in her district when buses pull up to the encampment near 48th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard. Lewis said she personally informed some of the people there they were going to be given shelter and said some shed tears of joy.

“You know, there are folks who have been living unsheltered in that particular encampment for months or even a year in some cases,” she said. “There’s a person in the encampment who has cancer. There is an individual within the encampment who is a veteran, who served this country.”

Lewis said temporary shelter is an important step, but she is looking forward to the city taking on new approaches to developing more housing next year including via a study of social housing that will be funded through the 2024 budget.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Hunter Biden was indicted on nine tax charges in California as a special counsel investigation into the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son intensifies against the backdrop of the 2024 election.

The new charges filed Thursday — three felonies and six misdemeanors — are in addition to federal firearms charges in Delaware alleging Hunter Biden broke laws against drug users having guns in 2018. They come after the implosion of a plea deal over the summer that would have spared him jail time, putting the case on track to a possible trial as his father campaigns for reelection.

Hunter Biden “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills,” special counsel David Weiss said in a statement. The charges are centered on at least $1.4 million in taxes Hunter Biden owed during between 2016 and 2019, a period where he has acknowledged struggling with addiction. The back taxes have since been paid.

If convicted, Hunter Biden, 53, could a maximum of 17 years in prison. The special counsel probe remains open, Weiss said.

In a fiery response, defense attorney Abbe Lowell accused Weiss of “bowing to Republican pressure” in the case.

“Based on the facts and the law, if Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought,” Lowell said in a statement.

The White House declined to comment on Thursday’s indictment, referring questions to the Justice Department or Hunter Biden’s personal representatives.

The charging documents filed in California, where he lives, detail spending on drugs, strippers, luxury hotels and exotic cars, “in short, everything but his taxes,” prosecutor Leo Wise wrote.

The indictment comes as congressional Republicans pursue an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, claiming he was engaged in an influence-peddling scheme with his son. The House is expected to vote next week on formally authorizing the inquiry.

No evidence has emerged so far to prove that Joe Biden, in his current or previous office, abused his role or accepted bribes, though questions have arisen about the ethics surrounding the Biden family’s international business.

The separate, long-running criminal investigation into Hunter Biden had been expected to wind down with a plea deal where he would have gotten two years’ probation after pleading guilty to misdemeanor tax charges and avoided prosecution on the gun charge if he stayed out of trouble.

The agreement was pilloried as a “sweetheart deal” by Republicans, including former President Donald Trump. Trump is facing his own criminal cases, including charges that he plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden, a Democrat.

Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, gave credit for the new charges Thursday to two IRS investigators who testified before Congress that the Justice Department had mishandled and “slow walked” the investigation into the president’s son. Justice officials have denied those allegations.

The two IRS employees, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, said the indictment was “a complete vindication of our thorough investigation.”

The new charges against Hunter Biden include filing a false return and tax evasion felonies, as well as misdemeanor failure to file and failure to pay.

The defense signaled that it plans to fight the new charges, likely at least in part relying on immunity provisions from the original plea deal. Defense attorneys have argued those remain in force since that part of the agreement was signed by a prosecutor before the deal was scrapped.

Prosecutors have disagreed, pointing out the documents weren’t signed by a judge and are invalid.

Lowell said he’s also planning to push for dismissal of the gun charges next week, calling them “unprecedented and unconstitutional.”

The three federal gun charges filed in Delaware allege Hunter Biden had lied about his drug use to buy a gun that he kept for 11 days in 2018. Federal law bans gun possession by “habitual drug users,” though the measure is seldom seen as a stand-alone charge and has been called into question by a federal appeals court.

Hunter Biden’s longstanding struggle with substance abuse worsened after the death of his brother Beau Biden in 2015, according to court documents and his memoir “Beautiful Things,” which ends with him getting clean in 2019.

His gross income nevertheless totaled some $7 million between 2016 and 2020, prosecutors said, pointing to his roles on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and a Chinese private equity fund as well as his position at a law firm.

Hunter did eventually file his taxes in 2020, while facing a child support case in Arkansas, and the back taxes were paid by a “third party,” prosecutors have said in court documents.

Colorado officials say their plan to import cheaper medicines from Canada has been stymied by opposition from drugmakers and inaction by the Biden administration, according to a state report obtained by KFF Health News.

The Dec. 1 report, prepared for the state legislature by Colorado’s Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, says that state officials approached 23 drugmakers in the last year about an importation program. Only four agreed even to discuss the proposal; none expressed interest in participating.

“Generally, the challenges that remain are outside state authority and rely on action by FDA and/or drug manufacturers,” the report reads.

Lawmakers in both parties, at the state and national level, have sought for decades to legalize importing drugs from Canada. Since 2020, when President Donald Trump’s administration opened the door to Canadian drug imports with regulations issued just weeks before he lost reelection, only a few states have filed applications with the Food and Drug Administration to create importation programs.

The FDA hasn’t yet ruled on any of them. Colorado filed its application in December 2022. Florida, which applied in 2020, has been waiting nearly three years for a decision from the Biden administration on its importation plan, pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, now a Republican presidential candidate.

FDA spokesperson Cherie Duvall-Jones said the FDA has not acted on states’ importation applications because it has not determined whether they would save significant money for consumers without posing risks to public health.

U.S. consumers pay some of the highest prices in the world for brand-name pharmaceuticals. Drugs are generally less expensive in Canada, where the government controls prices.

Under Trump, the federal government declared that importing drugs from Canada could be done safely — satisfying for the first time a condition spelled out in a 2003 law.

But Colorado officials cited another catch: The rule didn’t take into account that states would have to negotiate directly with drug manufacturers, which oppose selling their brand-name drugs in the United States at Canadian prices.

“As the federal Final Rule did not contemplate the need for this negotiation step, we have urged FDA to release further guidance regarding how states can operationalize the program with this in mind, but to date, no guidance has been released,” the Colorado report said.

Unlike many other Trump administration health policies, Biden hasn’t revoked or revised the importation rule. But his administration hasn’t shown much support for the idea, either. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told KFF Health News last December that he wouldn’t commit to the FDA ruling on any state application in 2023.

The president has repeatedly suggested that under his watch Americans would be able to import drugs from Canada.

During his 2020 campaign, Biden said he’d allow for the importation of drugs the government certified as safe. In 2021, he ordered the FDA to work with states to import prescription drugs from Canada. In a 2022 speech about how he planned to reduce drug prices, he cited Colorado estimates of how much people in the state could save through importation.

FDA officials responded to Colorado’s application in March by asking for more information and a smaller list of drugs to target, to prove that importation could save money. Colorado’s initial application listed 112 high-cost drugs. The state estimates residents and employers could save an average of 65% on the costs of those medicines, including drugs for diabetes, asthma, and cancer.

Colorado said it plans to submit an updated application early next year. By then, it’s possible the FDA will have ruled on Florida’s application.

The Colorado and Florida importation proposals differ. Colorado’s program is intended to directly help consumers obtain cheaper medicines. Florida’s plan aims to cut spending on drugs in government programs such as Medicaid, the prison system, and facilities run by the state Department of Children and Families.

The drug industry has argued the Trump administration didn’t properly certify that drugs imported from Canada would be safe, jeopardizing Americans’ health. Canada’s government, too, has expressed concern that U.S. imports would lead to shortages and higher prices in its country.

Drug manufacturers “will do anything to protect their golden goose that is United States consumers and patients who pay the largest amount for drugs in the world,” said Colorado state Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis, a Democrat, pharmacist, and leading advocate for drug importation.

The White House and Congress, she said, should force drugmakers to negotiate with states to start importation programs.

In its initial response to Colorado’s application, the FDA listed several types of information it still needed, including plans on labeling and drug eligibility, according to a March letter from the FDA to the state. Another problem, the FDA said: The state planned to import medicines across the U.S. border in Buffalo, New York. The FDA said the only port of entry it allows for medicines is in Detroit.

Colorado officials told the FDA in March that without federal approval of its application, it was having difficulty securing commitments from drug manufacturers to obtain medicines.

“It has been made clear that potential partners will be more interested in committing to participate once our program has been approved by the FDA,” Kim Bimestefer, executive director of the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy & Financing, wrote to the FDA.

“While we understand the regulatory framework does not permit for a provisional approval, we know that showing progress towards an approved program will aid in our negotiations with drug manufacturers,” she added.

Another complication is that the FDA’s rule doesn’t allow states to buy drugs directly from secondary drug wholesalers. Instead, they must purchase medicines directly from manufacturers, said Marc Williams, a spokesperson for the Colorado agency.

That’s proven challenging because drug manufacturers have prohibited the export of products intended for sale in Canada to the U.S., Williams said.

“Without their permission and a supply agreement directly with a manufacturer, Colorado is unable to buy and import these lower-priced drugs that would save people money,” he said.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF–an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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The “Roadmap to Colorado’s Future: 2026” lays out six broad objectives, largely targeted at increasing housing supply and affordability while seeking to dovetail those efforts with improved access to transit and the state’s climate goals. Polis unveiled the plan at an affordable apartment complex near a transit stop in Lakewood, highlighting the connection he’s made in developing more transit and more housing.

Though the governor repeatedly stressed the roadmap as a vision for the state to pursue, the 34-page document further cemented Polis’ broader desire to reform land use and zoning across Colorado, along with calls for more strategic growth to maximize resources, prepare for wildfires and protect the state’s outdoor areas.

Zoning reform and coordinated strategic planning are policy solutions that the governor and other Democrats see as a panacea to several of the state’s current and future ills, from climate change to housing and transit development to water limitations. The roadmap comes seven months after Polis’ marquee zoning proposal collapsed in the Capitol and four weeks before legislators return to Denver to debate the issue at length once again.

“We have too many obstructions that get in the way of building more homes, especially starter homes — homes in the 200 (thousand), 300 (thousand) range, multifamily and apartments,” Polis said in an interview. His office previously released similar roadmaps to address climate change. “What we’re really seeking to do is create a vision, a compelling vision, for Colorado’s future that’s more livable, more affordable, protects our water and our open space.”

The plan, which is pegged to the state’s 150th birthday as well as the end of Polis’ second term in 2026, details a list of worrying data points about Colorado’s present and future: The state, Polis’ office wrote, is the 12th most expensive for renters and sixth most expensive for homebuyers. Nearly three-quarters of renters making less than $75,000 spend more than 30% of their income on rent. Crop land is decreasing. Homelessness has increased.

What’s more, the report notes, the state is going to continue growing. Thirty-five thousand new households are expected to move here each year through the end of this decade.

“Unless we direct this growth in thoughtful ways, and build enough housing in existing communities and near job centers, this reality will drive up the cost of housing and put additional pressure on open space, our quality of life, affordability, and our environment,” Polis’ office wrote.

Collaboration with local governments

To hit the broader vision, the roadmap calls for eliminating exclusionary zoning practices and promoting a mix of housing types, a nod to the need for condos and multi-unit buildings, as opposed to single-family homes. Polis specifically called out making it easier for Coloradans to build accessory-dwelling units, also known as carriages houses or granny flats. ADUs are regulated differently across the state. Polis set aside money in his budget proposal to subsidize ADU construction, and a bill to allow for the building of more ADUs is expected to be introduced in the coming legislative session.

Other strategies include updating housing regulations and modernizing “regulatory and zoning policy”; supporting expedited local government permitting and housing construction; and focusing on more walkable neighborhoods and development near existing and future transit corridors.

While acknowledging that more renewable and electric energy will be a “major” part of the state’s climate change strategy, the roadmap argues that “the design of both buildings and transit systems over the coming years will have pollution, traffic and cost-of-living implications for decades, further emphasizing the importance of expanded transit and smart building design.”

In a way, the Lakewood development where Polis unveiled the plan Thursday is a perfect synthesis of land-use reformers’ ideals. The building charges $950 a month to rent a one-bedroom unit, and it’s available to people making 30% to 60% of the area’s median income. It’s near public transit and neighborhood schools. It also has baked-in requirements to keep it available for lower-income renters. Affordable housing advocates have repeatedly said they support land-use reforms, so long as they include affordability requirements.

Local governments, meanwhile, were strident critics earlier this year of the governor’s proposed land-use reforms, which would’ve legalized ADUs across the state and eased zoning restrictions in transit areas. They promise to be similarly opposed in 2024, arguing that zoning decisions are best made by local officials.

Polis said his plan doesn’t focus solely on zoning reform and noted that he was seeking to collaborate with local governments, including with millions of dollars in incentives to make reforms more palatable. His roadmap includes several examples of local governments’ own efforts to improve housing, and he and other speakers pitched the roadmap as a collaborative vision.

“Your skepticism is not just valid — it’s essential,” Peter LiFari, who runs Adams County’s housing authority, said of reform skeptics. “…How do we navigate growth without forsaking the essence of our Coloradan identity?”

Polis and other proponents of reform have argued that the housing crisis — and the broader climate and water challenges facing Colorado — don’t care about city or county boundaries and that coordination, including on a statewide level, is required to provide more housing and improve transit.

“Move as fast as possible”

Polis pitched his vision as a roadmap not just for the coming decades but for the rest of his term, though he said Thursday that there weren’t specific benchmarks to judge if his roadmap is coming to fruition.

Proponents acknowledge that land-use reforms take time to bear fruit. But there’s an urgent need in Colorado for renter relief now: Evictions are surging across the state and have already hit record levels in Denver. Polis’ roadmap encourages interventions to prevent and reduce homelessness, but it otherwise focuses on his preferred, supply-side solution to the housing crisis of development and strategic growth.

“We are going to partner with the legislature and with local government to implement this roadmap,” the governor said. “We believe that Colorado needs to move as fast as possible and, in a perfect world, we would have moved a couple of years ago on this route, but it’s not too late.”

Echoing what land-use reformers have long advocated, the roadmap argues that improved transit availability can cut down on car pollution and ease congestion. Polis’ office argues that the state “should be on the forefront of rail infrastructure in the United States,” and Polis touted the $500,000 in seed money that the state will receive from the federal government to bolster a Front Range passenger rail system.

The roadmap calls for increasing transit options; improving new and existing networks while planning for new ones; and promoting a complete and connected system.

“Zoning is a part of any discussion, but it’s a lot broader than zoning,” Polis said. “It’s about tax credits for placemaking, including art spaces. It’s about reforming and investing in transit. It’s about Front Range rail. It’s about the kind of Colorado that we want to live in. That saves people time and money, reduces traffic improves air quality, and it’s fundamentally more affordable.”

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