Denver criticized for pushing homeless camps farther from city center

City Council woman Amanda Sandoval said constituents have been calling her in her northwest Denver district lately regarding a large encampment of unhoused people under the bridge that carries 20th Street over Platte Street.

“I have seen periodic tents along the Platte (River). Just one or two and then they usually move on,” said Sandoval, who has had her council office on Platte Street since 2019. “We have a growing, bigger number under the 20th Street viaduct. I have never seen that, ever.”

In Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca’s District 9, encampments of people experiencing homelessness are common in downtown-adjacent neighborhoods such as Five Points. Recently CdeBaca was trying to arrange trash pickup services for an encampment scattered around the RTD rail tracks near her home in Swansea. There was a fire in a camp in the same area last spring.

“It is much more dangerous, much more secluded and less likely to be swept,” CdeBaca said of the camp.

“People don’t like looking at it,” she said of the encampments. “We get that. But our policies are putting it right in their alleys. We’re pushing people who can get away deeper into the neighborhoods.”

Both city leaders and homeless advocates have said that more aggressive tactics in recent years are pushing violators of the nearly 10-year-old camping ban into new territory, farther from the city center.

“Anecdotally, they do exactly what they are intended to do; they move people around and push them out of some neighborhoods and into other neighborhoods,” Colorado Coalition for the Homeless spokeswoman Cathy Alderman said. “And then the people who are subject to those sweeps and subject to those enforcement actions may not want to return to those areas where they were told to move from.”

On Monday night and Tuesday morning, officials in the seven-county Denver metro area performed their first in-person point-in-time count of people experiencing homelessness since 2020. Concerns about COVID-19 safety prevented an in-person count last year.