We Know How to Fix Homelessness. Look at Denver.

Homelessness, all appearances to the contrary, is a long-solved problem. We know both the causes and the cure. You wouldn’t think that’s the case from visiting many U.S. cities. Stymied by political and financial hurdles, progressive bastions including Los Angeles, Seattle and Burlington, Vt., appear to have given up. They have surrendered public spaces to the homeless and their encampments to the point that it’s difficult to describe these spaces as truly for the public anymore.

Denver has recorded the biggest recent drop in street homelessness among the largest U.S. cities, according to my analysis of local data. The city’s drop was roughly 13 times the national rate in 2025, the most recent year for federal statistics. Since 2023, Denver’s unsheltered population is down 64 percent. “What they’re doing is working,” said Samantha Batko, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Urban Institute, which is independently evaluating the city’s progress.

Politically, none of this is easy. On the policing side, progressives remain skeptical of using law enforcement to deal with what they see as largely an economic issue. On the housing side, the constraint is money. Building housing and shelters requires public and private funds that cities often don’t have and aren’t willing to prioritize over other spending and tax cuts.

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On a Monday afternoon, Mr. Johnston played tour guide. He wanted to show me the city’s new homeless shelters and how they differed from traditional facilities. We walked 10 minutes from City Hall — the mayor stopped to congratulate a wedding party on the way out — to a block of tiny houses known as Elati Village.

Next, Mr. Johnston took me to The Aspen, a city-owned hotel. For residents, it is like an apartment complex. The rooms weren’t too different from places I’ve lived before. Mr. Johnston said he wanted the city’s shelters to feel like real homes — “a room of one’s own.”

The numbers speak for themselves. Mr. Johnston said that no one has declined an offer to move into one of the new facilities, and that they are consistently at or near capacity. The city’s biggest problem is how it can buy or build more places like Elati Village and The Aspen to meet demand.

Much of the tens of millions of dollars the city has spent on shelters was paid for through temporary federal funds that have expired. The Trump administration has also moved to cut housing subsidies across the country. The financial constraints have led some local officials to question whether the cost of the city’s efforts is worth the benefit. If that sentiment spreads, it could doom progress.

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At 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday, I met with a Denver police squad to see the enforcement side of the city’s strategy. Officer Michael Nierenberg, who led the group, told me his goal was not to arrest people. Tall and imposing, he said the threat he presented was only an incentive to push people to get help. Social workers rode along.

Early in the patrol, we came across a tent. Inside, a couple slept with all their belongings scattered across the floor. Officer Nierenberg waited patiently as they woke up, and then explained the consequences of breaking laws against camping outside: a verbal warning, then a written warning, then a ticket or arrest. He started asking about the couple’s situation. They were from Texas, they said, and still had family there. They would like to go back, but they didn’t have the means to do so.

Officer Nierenberg told them to pack up their tent and that he would go see what he could do. He sat in his car, making calls and looking through his computer. After about 15 minutes, he came back with a bus ticket. The man, who identified himself as Chance, cried tears of joy.

We continued like this for the rest of the morning. Sometimes the encounters were less pleasant. One man told the officers, in colorful language, to go away. Other times, people were cordial. “It has been a typical morning,” the officer told me as we headed back to the police station.

Progressives tend to view the enforcement side of anti-homelessness strategies with disdain because it can involve criminalizing an economic or a mental health issue. At the same time, residents don’t want encampments clogging up parks and sidewalks. Progressive cities have tried to get around the dilemma by flooding the streets with social services, hoping that offers of help would get people on the streets to pack up. The reality, as cities have painfully learned, is that people often need a stronger push to abandon their tents.

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The next phase will be more difficult. Those who continue to live on the streets are much more likely to suffer from mental illness and addiction. They need more than a roof over their heads.

For this step, Mr. Johnston has begun an initiative that focuses on connecting people to mental health and addiction treatment. That will be hard to execute. Many of the sick and addicted are resistant to treatment, and getting them to accept help can require a kind of coercion and policing of low-level crimes that many progressives are uncomfortable with.

SS: ive been constantly curious/frustrated why north american cities cant seem to handle homelessness despite a wide variety of political orientations and i think it makes more sense to view it as weird cross political resource problem.

at it's core, the "move into a house or we'll arrest you" ultimatum seems to basically work in most cases but it requires both a guy to make that ultimatum, a way to actually follow up on that threat and also a house the person can actually move into. the first issue is political, the second one is organizational, and the last one is resources. the resource bit is really hard to overstate – this is the bit where progressives are essentially correct on. homeless shelters are almost always at capacity and even then shelters aren't actually a good substitute for proper housing for various reasons.

one of my big takeaways is that its really, really important to get people a permanent address. like there's also all the lib stuff about stability but that actually might be secondary to making people legible to the state and being able to follow up on them with regard to mental illness, drug addiction, law enforcement, etc.