Denver Mayor Mike Johnston responds to homelessness data controversy

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said Tuesday that he and staff members had conversations only in recent days about how the administration has been reporting progress — and numbers — in an online dashboard for his House 1,000 homeless sheltering effort.

The mayor’s office has come under fire in the last week for counting people moved indoors for any length of time rather than only those who have been sheltered for at least 14 days. That is the threshold Johnston and his team had said they would use to report progress toward their goal of moving 1,000 people off the streets by Dec. 31, ending a five-month blitz aimed at greatly reducing street homelessness and illegal camping.

“I think it wasn’t until, I don’t know, three or four days ago that those conversations came up around where that data was shown,” Johnston said during a news conference.

He was referring to counts of people participating in the initiative as well as counts of those who may have already exited hotels or other temporary shelter provided, returning to the streets.

As of Tuesday evening, the dashboard’s thermometer graphic showed 607 people had been moved indoors since Johnston declared an emergency over homelessness upon taking office in mid-July. That leaves nearly 400 people to relocate to hotels or a micro-community that’s due to open by Dec. 31 in order to meet Johnston’s self-imposed deadline.

Last week, Denverite and 9News reported that the thermometer has counted each person the day they were enrolled — not after 14 days.

Administration officials have insisted there was no intentional effort to mislead the public, placing blame on a communications breakdown within the mayor’s office.

Johnston said the thermometer was drawing data directly from the state’s Homeless Management Information System. The system was tracking people at enrollment and keeping tabs on where they went next — whether it was into a network of hotel shelters, leased apartments, or, in a handful of cases, back into unsheltered homelessness.

But the thermometer did not tick down to reflect negative outcomes, and it also had reflected people staying in more traditional group shelters, Denverite reported. An update to the dashboard late last week, following the news reports, reduced the count by 34 people.

As the mayor’s team launched a third, more detailed version of the data dashboard Tuesday, he sought to shift the focus from the overall count to how the dashboard would keep track of outcomes for each person. It still counts people on the day they enter the program.

“It’s not as if it’s a great win if (participants in the program) exit on Day 15 and they exit unsuccessfully,” Johnston said. “We wanted a way to capture that permanently — so if there’s ever a bad exit, that should be known and should be distributed.”