Denver’s newly elected Mayor Mike Johnston has launched a series of community meetings across the city, in partnership with Denver City Council members, running through the middle of August. Although there are no apparent limits on what can be discussed, the Montclair Recreation Center meeting, scheduled early on a recent Saturday morning drew more than a hundred residents to chairs placed on a basketball court for a discussion focused on homelessness. Also newly elected Council-at-Large members Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez and Sarah Parady accompanied Mayor Johnston in a city facility abutting Aurora that primarily serves the Lowry neighborhoods of east Denver.

Parady and Gonzales-Gutierrez are perceived as part of what may soon prove to be the Council’s progressive caucus. Both were repeatedly received with warm applause for their remarks. Denver’s homelessness crisis doesn’t lend itself to a sharp partisan lens. One of Mayor Johnston’s youthful advance team remarked on what a nice crowd they were drawing on a gorgeous summer day. I joked, “You can tell you’re not in trouble yet or there would be a standing-room-only mob crowding the gym. That’s when you would need to start worrying.” Acoustics were terrible as the cavernous room produced echoes making it difficult to understand speakers.

Those in attendance arrived simultaneously hopeful and skeptical. As one resident pointed out, “We heard another Mayor tell us 10 years ago here in this room that he could clean up Denver’s homelessness problems for $10 million dollars. Last year we spent $250 million and next year is budgeted at $350 million and the problem is worse than ever. John Hickenlooper went on to the governor’s office and now he’s serving in Washington as Colorado’s senator. What went wrong?” Implicit in this question, leaping over former Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, was whether you, the new guy, might do any better. Mike Johnston is both blessed and cursed by the fact that, at age 48, he still looks like he just graduated from high school.

Only when you see him with his teenage twin boys do you realize that indeed, he must be an adult. He is also extraordinarily bright. In fact, his opponents in the Denver mayor’s race often criticized him for having too many bright ideas. He was a Harvard graduate who did not choose to chase a profitable career in finance or law as did most of his classmates, instead devoting two years to stand at the front of a classroom in a Black Mississippi High School with Teach for America. Bearing in mind the admonition that the path to Hades is oft paved with good intentions, there is little doubt Johnston arrives in the mayor’s office brimming with good intentions.

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Adhering to the welcome brevity which characterized his inaugural speech, Johnston required just 20 minutes to describe his preliminary plans for curing Denver’s homeless blight. In the process he pointed out two indigents dying each week in Denver’s tent encampments – a data point that came as something of a shock. Each homeless camper cost the city $44,000 last year in support services, including policing. Entire families survive on salaries matching this expenditure. Johnston asserts, credibly, there have to be better, cheaper outcomes that can be achieved with this much funding. While he acknowledges the root of the problem is linked to Denver’s exploding cost of housing, where the average home sale now exceeds $600,000, he’s intent on moving a thousand homeless individuals into temporary shelter provided with hotel purchases, refurbished commercial buildings and newly erected tiny homes by the end of 2023.

This is stunningly ambitious. Voters will forgive their mayor if he falls short with 700 or 800 placements, but he’s set a marker where relocating just a few hundred will feel like a failure. Watch for Denver’s “Home for the Holidays” campaign. Johnston’s audience departed unconvinced this would succeed yet more hopeful than when they arrived. Concerns were raised about the growing number of individuals living in their vehicles and sleeping on city streets, many of whom hold jobs and were likely missed in the homeless census. Others expressed fear a successful housing initiative risks attracting even more homeless from less hospitable communities.

Mayor Johnston took a swing for the fences with his response that if such immigrants were coming to Denver because they’re seeking housing – even a secure, private tiny home for example – then, “We want those folks. We need them.” You can’t help admiring his ability to glimpse the silver lining in any cloud. Occasionally, he slips into the policy weeds where his audience has difficulty following him. His reference to Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” (shelter among them) slipped over the heads of more than a few residents.

While acknowledging public camping is accompanied with health and safety issues, including an “urban wildfire” risk, he defended his hesitance to simply move campers from one location to another. “Moving the problem to another block solves nothing,” he noted. By declaring homelessness a public emergency, Mayor Johnston has tackled his toughest challenge first. It’s hard not to admire that kind of courage.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.