Denver is asking small organizations to bid on contracts to operate or provide supportive services at the “micro-communities” that Mayor Mike Johnston’s plans to open as part of his homelessness reduction strategy, although the city can’t provide estimates on costs or where micro-communities will exactly be located.

Johnston and his senior homelessness adviser, Cole Chandler, provided an update on the administration’s homelessness initiatives on Wednesday, when they also said strategies they have deployed to improve the conditions of encampments have proved successful.

The city’s deployment of trash pickup and providing access to bathrooms at encampments has improved public safety and health conditions, Johnston said.

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More than two dozen people took advantage of additional services, as the city ramped up outreach to prepare people to move out of encampments and into housing, the mayor said. One person who has never had housing in his adult life was connected with housing, while another woman who was pregnant and living in an encampment was able to move into a hotel, the mayor said.

The emergency operations center has been running daily with its staff of more than 50 and is celebrating “a transition from planning to action,” Johnston added. The emergency operations center launched after Johnston declared a state of emergency and vowed on his first full day in office to get 1,000 homeless people into housing units. 

A request for proposals will be issued on Wednesday, seeking service providers and operators for micro-community sites. The RFPs are specifically designed to attract small, local and community-based nonprofits, the mayor said.

Organizations do not need to be based in the Denver metro area to bid.

To date, one organization has run micro-communities in Denver – the Colorado Village Collaborative, Chandler said.

Chandler previously served as executive director of the Colorado Village Collaborative, which helped open the city’s first tiny home village and launched “safe outdoor campsites.”

“We are excited about the opportunity to open this up and allow other nonprofit organizations to bid on it,” Chandler said. “We know that it’s going to take a whole ecosystem of service providers to really scale this effort related to micro-communities and to provide key wraparound supportive services.”

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The administration is not restricting the number or organizations that can bid on the contracts, only asking that operators be willing to work with communities that serve between 40 and 100 people. The city is aiming to open between seven and 10 micro-communities.

No cost estimate

But the cost of Johnston’s homelessness initiatives remains murky.

The city did not specify a contract amount in the requests for proposals. Instead, the requests for proposals will ask nonprofits to submit bids based on what they believe it will cost to run the micro-communities effectively, and contract negotiations will proceed from there, Chandler said.

“No particular dollar amount assigned per individual or per community at this point,” Chandler said.

The city will be sending out requests for proposals for the construction of micro-communities in the near future, Johnston added.

The administration wants to take services that have historically been concentrated in a few areas and for a large number of people – and decentralize them, so that people are served in smaller communities that are spread throughout Denver, Johnston said.

This strategy will also allow Denver to find providers that have a specialization and can cater communities to needs by certain groups, such as veterans, couples or members of the LGBTQ+ community, Johnston said.

The administration is still tightening and refining its list of potential micro-community sites and has not released a final version.

The city came up with list of 197 sites where the micro-communities could be located in. The list is preliminary, and it simply shows the publicly-owned sites in Denver that had not gone through any vetting and was created by the mayor’s team prior to the activation of the emergency operations center.

A city spokesperson said Johnston’s homelessness team has been working to vet the sites to significantly whittle it down based on several criteria, notably proximity to transit, access to utilities, distance from schools, “equitable distribution” throughout the city, as as well meeting basic zoning, permitting and other criteria.

Staff are in discussions with private landowners who are interested in providing space for micro-communities in addition to considering publicly-owned land, Johnston said. 

“We are really focused on distribution all around the city. That initial list coming out was just a preliminary list of where public land is. We know that there is historic reasons why that land is vacant in those areas within the inverted L,” Chandler said in response to concerns that the nearly 200 publicly owned sites are concentrated along the city’s inverted L and in historically underserved communities.

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