This is a rerun of a Bucket List Community News podcast from September 2023.
Thousands of people from Denver and across the country will return home to spend time with their families this holiday season. Unfortunately, not everyone has that luxury.
The issue of homelessness in Denver has been ever prevalent throughout the last few years, as more and more people found themselves unhoused. According to Metro Denver Homeless Initiative’s annual Point-in-Time count data, 9,977 people are currently homeless in the Denver metro area in 2024, which is a 10% increase from last year.
On this month’s Bucket List Community News Podcast, we’re sharing a conversation our Mimi Herrick had with activist Randle Loeb last September about Denver’s homelessness crisis to give some context on the issue ahead of the holiday season.
Homelessness is something Loeb is no stranger to, being unhoused for six years of his life. Since then, he’s dedicated his life to advocating for the unhoused in whatever way he can.
“[Being unhoused] is terrifying,” Loeb said. “In a conventional society like this one, if that’s what’s going on, it usually means there’s something disturbing in both your experience and the system that is supposed to protect you.”
Loeb serves on the board of directors of the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative, collaborates with the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and the People’s Advocacy Council and serves as a liaison for the mayor’s commission to end homelessness. With all of Loeb’s experience and years as a homeless advocate in Denver, he believes that ending the homelessness crisis will require commitment from many sources.
“[Ending homelessness] has to be a collaborative activity by both the people that are homeless and the people who are running the programs, and the political will and the corporate structure to make it possible for homelessness to end,” Loeb said
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston campaigned largely on the issue of homelessness in the city. Part of Johnston’s plan is creating microcities in each of Denver’s neighborhoods for the unhoused to live. Loeb questioned the plan’s efficacy, claiming that temporarily housing the homeless in a micro-community does not result in any rehabilitation to help keep people off the streets permanently.
“You can’t create a model that just consistently houses temporarily 1,000 people,” Loeb said. “It has to have, at the end of it, a place you can live with supportive services for good, so I’m waiting to see how this unfolds.”
The micro-community plan has an even bigger problem too, according to Loeb. Running an effective micro-city to help the unhoused isn’t cheap and Loeb believes that Johnston’s $48.6 million in allocated funding for the plan is nowhere near enough. Instead, Loeb believes that a budget of around one billion dollars is required to fully realize the concept.
“[Funding] is the main problem,” Loeb said. “You need about a billion dollars a year to make that possible, because you need infrastructure, houses, development, all sorts of supportive service… that is an expensive ordeal.”
Loeb understands that asking the local government for one billion dollars is unrealistic, so he has turned to the corporate world for assistance in putting an end to homelessness.
“It’s the corporate world that needs to step up and essentially make it possible for [homelessness] to go away,” Loeb said. “Because that’s where they have the capital to make the investment that would be far greater than what Mayor Johnston could do. Johnston doesn’t have the strings attached to the funding sources to pull it off, period.”
Even in his mid-70s, Loeb continues to push back on the system to help the unhoused population by giving them better resources and ways to rehabilitate their lives. Loeb is passionate about what it will take to address homelessness and will not stop fighting until that change is made.
“What we need is real, set, decisive action to make it possible for people of all ages to be safe and sound until the end of their lives,” Loeb said.
