Coordinated Entry Impact Report 2023

We are proud to release the latest Coordinated Entry Impact Report, highlighting the impressive housing outcomes of our region’s OneHome Coordinated Entry System (CES). The data in this report is from 7/1/22-6/30/23 and includes breakdowns for the total people housed, total households housed, and new households assessed for housing.

Our region was able to house at least 1,788 people and 1,443 households through Coordinated Entry while completing 1,559 new assessments. Due to incomplete household information for the Emergency Housing Voucher program, the number of people housed is likely an undercount.

OneHome is grateful to have strong partnerships with community agencies across Metro Denver that work hard to support and house people experiencing homelessness. Some of our partners serve as Access Points for people experiencing homelessness to connect with OneHome. Here, they are Assessed and can be supported by Case Management. Other agencies are Housing Providers, who submit vacancies and available resources to HMIS. Once a household is matched to housing, Housing Providers work with the household and other service providers in the community to engage and support these households. Thank you to all the providers who interact with our system as we work to ensure everyone has a safe, stable place to call home.

We also want to acknowledge Wells Fargo for donating $75,000 to support housing access and resources through Coordinated Entry for people experiencing homelessness in metro Denver. We sincerely thank you for this investment in our community.

OneHome is the Coordinated Entry System for the Metro Denver region. Coordinated Entry is a client-centered process that partners with service providers and community members to assess and identify the housing needs of people experiencing homelessness. Coordinated Entry matches individuals, youth, and families to the appropriate housing resources available while elevating client choice. Metro Denver’s Coordinated Entry System serves all people experiencing homelessness.

PRESS RELEASE: New Report Shows Over 30,000 People Accessing Homelessness Services in Denver Region

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JANUARY 18, 2014

Layla Elena Said
Communications Specialist
Metro Denver Homeless Initiative
layla.said@mdhi.org | 484-772-0559

Rebecca Mayer
Interim Executive Director
Metro Denver Homeless Initiative
rebecca.mayer@mdhi.org

NEW REPORT SHOWS OVER 30,000 PEOPLE ACCESSING HOMELESSNESS SERVICES IN DENVER REGION

DENVER, COLORADO – January 18, 2024 – The Metro Denver Homeless Initiative (MDHI) released its 2023 State of Homelessness report today, highlighting new data related to homelessness in the region. The report demonstrates the overall issue of homelessness across multiple sources including the region’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), the 2023 Point in Time (PIT) count, and the Colorado Department of Education’s McKinney Vento Act.

The HMIS showed 30,409 unique individuals accessed services related to homelessness between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023. This data, entered by about 100 partner agencies across the region, shows an annual account of homelessness as compared to the region’s one-night PIT count, which counted 9,065 individuals on January 30, 2023. Additionally, the report shared that 7,217 people stayed outdoors at some point during the year, compared to 2,763 on the night of the 2023 PIT.

“The Homeless Management Information System is our state’s most comprehensive database on homelessness and housing instability,” said Rebecca Mayer, Interim Executive Director of MDHI. “When we use data collected throughout the year to measure the scope of this crisis, we can more effectively plan an equitable system response that is geared toward ending homelessness,” she added.

One significant disparity that has remained consistent across data sources over time is the overrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color experiencing homelessness. While Black or African people represent only 6% of the general population, they make up over 22% of the homeless population. This overrepresentation persists for American Indian/Alaska Native (3.6X), multiracial (1.6X), and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (5.0X) people experiencing homelessness.

HMIS data also show that the overwhelming majority of people (94%) are not choosing to experience homelessness, nor are they moving to Colorado and becoming homeless (88%). The top factors contributing to homelessness continue to be relationship and family breakups, as well as economic instability due to rising rents, inflation, and low wages. One member of our Young Adult Leadership Committee added, “I hope others read these stories and see that being homeless doesn't make you less of a person. It's a tough reality, but we're stronger for having lived through it.”

Highlighted in this report is the progress our region has made to know every veteran experiencing homelessness by name, month over month. In 2023, our region’s coordinated efforts in partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Community Solutions, the Department of Local Affairs, and community partners across the region led to a 16% reduction in veteran homelessness. Our goal is to reach functional zero - a measurable state where homelessness is rare, brief, and nonrecurring.

Sofia Vigil, Regional Coordination Lead, added, "The remarkable reduction in the number of Veterans actively experiencing homelessness across the region stands as a testament to the transformative power of collaboration and coordination. Recognizing that approximately 50% of Veterans currently on the By-Name-List are over the age of 55, it is fundamental to acknowledge and address age-related factors in homelessness as we strive towards achieving and sustaining functional zero."

To access a full copy of the report, please visit mdhi.org/soh-2023.

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MDHI is the Metro Denver Continuum of Care, the regional system that coordinates services and housing for people experiencing homelessness. This includes prevention/diversion, street outreach, emergency shelter, transitional housing, rapid rehousing, and permanent supportive housing. MDHI works closely with each county in its continuum (Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas, and Jefferson) to build a homeless crisis response system that gets people back into housing as quickly as possible. Learn more at mdhi.org.

Homeless Youth Needs Assessment and Media Toolkit Released

The Needs of Unhoused Youth through a Lens of Data, Equity, and Lived Expertise

The purpose of the Homeless Youth Needs Assessment is to provide meaningful insight into the nature of homelessness for unaccompanied and parenting youth aged 24 and under. The first of its kind in metro Denver, it examines six data sources to depict the overall issue of youth homelessness as it occurs across systems for a deeper understanding of the problem.

This report includes Community Outreach conducted in the Spring of 2023 with youth and providers across metro Denver to better understand their needs and experiences. While the ‘Causes’ and ‘Disparities’ identified in this report use all of the available data sources, the ‘Needs’ section that follows relies heavily on this outreach data.

We hope that by the end of this report, readers understand homelessness as a matter of systemic failures rather than personal shortcomings, by and large; recognize the disparities that exist for specific populations of youth; and use our findings to help guide decisions about housing resources and improvements to make the homeless system better for youth.

Homeless Youth Awareness Media Kit

We wanted to make our youth Needs Assessment as accessible and impactful as possible. That’s why we developed a social media toolkit to help you promote #HomelessYouthAwareness and #YouthHomelessness in the month of November and beyond. Explore the full content suite.

The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless Challenges a Recent Report by the Common Sense Institute Regarding the Economic Impact of Homelessness in Denver

Press Release
Friday, October 21, 2022

Alexis Whitham
Director of Communications, Colorado Coalition for the Homeless
970-541-9048, awhitham@coloradocoalition.org

Cathy Alderman
Chief Communications and Public Policy Officer, Colorado Coalition for the Homeless
303-312-9638, calderman@coloradocoalition.org

For the second year in a row, the Common Sense Institute (CSI) has released a misleading and loosely-informed report on the economic impact of homelessness in the Denver area. Instead of taking the advice of experts in the field, service providers on the ground, and government agencies supporting the homeless response system who offered solutions to the flawed assumption about unhoused individuals and an unsound methodology for calculating costs, CSI has released a report with inflated and inaccurate numbers in order to generate “shock value” conclusions about the “total cost of homelessness” and an ill-advised “cost per person experiencing homelessness.” Despite advising CSI multiple times that their assumptions and methodology failed to accurately capture the complex issue of homelessness and how the response and resolution system actually works, CSI told the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless (CCH) that they still “elected” to overcount funds, include unrelated costs in their total costs, and create a conclusion that can only be described as reductive.

“CSI’s report does a substantial disservice to the providers of homelessness services working day in and out to resolve the crisis of homelessness by attempting to reduce the complexity of these services into a single number,” said Cathy Alderman, Chief Communications and Public Policy Officer for CCH. “Further, the report perpetuates a stigma against people experiencing homelessness by asserting that all people experiencing homelessness are somehow one in the same with the exact same needs. And, while we all know that housing is the solution to homelessness, the report fails to demonstrate how best practices in the homelessness response system like Housing First, Denver’s Social Impact Bond Program, or the Denver ReHousing Collaborative might offset some costs to the current system.”

Although CSI made minor adjustments to its methodology in response to multiple experts in the field and service providers on the ground, these changes did not address many of the most egregious flaws identified including:

• The inclusion of costs of services like healthcare, housing, meal delivery, domestic violence assistance, and others provided by service providers to both housed and unhoused individuals. These costs are not attributable to the “footprint of homelessness.” CSI’s contention that they are comfortable overcounting some of these costs, as they did for Denver Health, because they also excluded some other potential costs doesn’t rectify the flaw of overcounting.

• The inclusion of people living in supportive housing and the costs of supportive housing cannot logically be said to relate to the costs of responding to homelessness. These individuals are housed and many people who live in supportive housing are people living with disabilities, seniors, and individuals and families escaping and recovering from domestic violence.

• Overestimating the number of employees and volunteers who operate in the homelessness response system to arrive at the conclusion that there is “one job related to every person experiencing homelessness” is inflammatory and insulting to the community. While many of these employees and volunteers are dedicating time to assist the unhoused community, they are also serving in other roles to assist housed individuals. Further, for those of us in the nonprofit space, we know that volunteers often offer services more than once to an organization or offer their service to multiple organizations.

• Although the Stout Street Health Center (SSHC) is owned and operated by CCH, healthcare services are provided to both housed and unhoused individuals (much like the healthcare services at Denver Health). Therefore, including all SSHC costs significantly inflates the costs included in CSI’s numerator. In fact, the inclusion of all of CCH expenditures is flawed since as a housing and healthcare provider, the Coalition spends the majority of its funds to keep people in housing and to provide healthcare to the community

• The report doesn’t account for any offsetting cost-savings associated with the proven benefits of providing people experiencing homelessness with housing, services, shelter, and other supports as demonstrated in the Denver Social Impact Bond program evaluation.

• The report also mischaracterizes subsidized housing such as that provided through the Denver Social Impact Bond Program as “free housing” when in fact, participants are responsible for paying 30% of their income towards rent.

“CSI should go back to the drawing board if they want to publish a meaningful report on homelessness,” Alderman said. “For some people experiencing homelessness, a single month’s rent or security deposit would resolve their situation whereas other people may require a higher level of supportive services, housing assistance, and health care. Other cost per person estimates referenced in CSI’s report are based on actual, not assumed, identified populations of individuals experiencing homelessness. In this report, attempting to arrive at a ‘cost per person experiencing homelessness’ without identifying a specific population of people is the very antithesis of common sense.”

While CSI claims the report is intended to bring a “critical eye to the issue” by including results from homelessness response programs in other states, they fail to acknowledge that many of these programs were only possible with significant and increased investments in homelessness resolution. CSI’s report repeatedly infers that Denver and surrounding areas might be “spending too much on homelessness,” when increased financial investment in other states and cities is the very thing that achieved the type of decreases in the number of people remaining unhoused we would hope to achieve locally.

The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless is proud of the work we have done for decades to provide housing, health care, and supportive services to the housed and unhoused community and we are deeply frustrated at having our work and the work of our partners misrepresented. CSI’s flawed assumptions, questionable methodology, and failure to include off-setting cost savings and increased levels of investments from successful homelessness response programs should be a red flag for anyone questioning whether they should take this new report seriously.

The Coalition recommends the following resources in lieu of this report:

Denver Social Impact Bond Final Report from the Urban Institute

NLIHC summary of UCLA Department of Economics Working Paper

Housing First Impact on Costs and Associated Cost Offsets: Review of Literature

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About Colorado Coalition for the Homeless:

The mission of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless is to work collaboratively toward the prevention of homelessness and the creation of lasting solutions for people experiencing and at-risk of homelessness throughout Colorado. The Coalition advocates for and provides a continuum of housing and a variety of services to improve the health, well-being and stability of those it serves. Since its founding, the organization has earned state and national recognition for its integrated healthcare, housing and service programs. The Coalition’s comprehensive approach addresses the causes of homelessness, as well as the consequences, offering critical assistance to over 22,000 individuals and families each year. Learn more at

Housed Data: OneHome Coordinated Entry 2021

The following data represents the number of clients housed through OneHome Coordinated Entry in 2021. This does not include individuals housed through the Housing Stability Flexible Fund. Thank you to all of our partners who participate in this process; your continued support and collaboration make this possible.

Annual ‘State of Homelessness’ Report Released

MDHI Releases Second State of Homelessness Report

DENVER, COLORADO – January 20, 2022 – The Metro Denver Homeless Initiative (MDHI) released its second annual State of Homelessness report today, highlighting new data in the region related to homelessness.  

The report, for the second year in a row, demonstrates the overall issue of homelessness across multiple sources including the region’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), the 2021 Point in Time (PIT) count for those staying in shelter, as well as school district data on students experiencing homelessness.  

The HMIS showed 32,233 individuals accessed services related to homelessness between July 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021. Additionally, there is data from the HMIS on those staying outdoors or other places not meant for human habitation, commonly referred to as unsheltered.  

Consistent in this year’s report as compared to last year is the overrepresentation of BIPOC individuals in the population of those experiencing homelessness. “While there are differences in counts and definitions across the data sources, one thing remains glaringly consistent – racial inequity,” stated Jamie Rife, Director of Communications and Development at MDHI who will be filling the organization’s Executive Director role on February 1.  

Also included in this year’s report is further information on the region’s unsheltered population. Over the course of a year, 10,870 adults, 1,031 members of families, and 954 youth engaged in services while staying in an unsheltered location. “For the first time, our region is beginning to get more real-time data, including on those staying outdoors,” said Rife. “While the last full Point in Time count in 2020 showed 1,561 individuals staying in an unsheltered location, what we see now is that over the course of a year, this number is 12,855.”

In 2020, the last time a full Point in Time (PIT) count was conducted due to safety concerns related to COVID, it identified 6,104 people experiencing homelessness on a single night. The 2022 PIT is scheduled for Monday, January 24 and will include a full count of both those staying in shelter and those staying in unsheltered locations.  

Also included in the report are implications as well as information on successes in the region. “While homelessness continues to climb for many, the region has seen a 15% decrease in the number of veterans experiencing homelessness, in part due to the regional coordination and the incredible work done by providers in our region, as well as the enhanced resources available,” added Rife. “This is proof of the strides we can make when we work together and have more housing and services available for those experiencing homelessness.”