The 50 is a four-year multimedia initiative led by The Fulcrum, traveling to communities in every state to uncover what motivated Americans to vote in the 2024 presidential election. Through in-depth storytelling, the project examines how the Donald Trump administration is responding to those hopes and concerns—and highlights civic-focused organizations that inform, educate, and empower the public to take action.
Across Colorado, the growing homelessness crisis is forcing communities, service providers, and policymakers to rethink not only how they measure housing instability, but also how they respond to the forms of homelessness that rarely make headlines.
Colorado is confronting one of the steepest rises in homelessness in the nation, with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reporting a nearly 30 percent increase in the state’s unhoused population between 2023 and 2024. The point‑in‑time count jumped from 14,439 to 18,715 in a single year, a surge driven by rising rents, the expiration of pandemic‑era supports, and widening economic precarity.
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The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless (CCH) anchors Denver’s response to rising housing instability, maintaining essential housing and healthcare programs despite months‑long delays in city reimbursements. Its model of permanent supportive housing paired with integrated mental and physical healthcare has been shown nationally to reduce chronic homelessness and improve long‑term stability.
"The Coalition for the Homeless is focused on lasting solutions to homelessness. And so from our perspective, that means long-term affordable and supportive housing," said Cathy Alderman, Chief Communications & Public Policy Officer with CCH.
Alderman said that CCH owns and operates 23 residential properties, making up about 2,000 units of housing. All of them are affordable, but some of them are supportive. "We're also a healthcare provider. And so we operate as a federally qualified health center providing fully integrated health care. We do that through our clinic sites as well as through mobile units and street medicine teams. Essentially, what we believe is that housing is healthcare and that your health care is absolutely dependent on your housing status," she said.
For David Heitz, who spent years cycling through homelessness, the Coalition’s blend of permanent housing and mental health support has become the foundation of a stability he once thought impossible.
"I'm more stable now than I've been in many years, to be honest," said Heitz. "When I was on the street, there was way too much stimulation for somebody that had mania and paranoia. I mean, I was constantly in a state of duress. I mean, it's hell when you don't have a roof over your head, and you're outside. I mean, it's terrible, you know? I can't even describe how bad it is."
Heitz shared that once he came indoors, he no longer had the stimulation that had been causing him to feel paranoid or threatened. He has struggled with mental illness for many years. "Part of the housing is healthcare. I mean, you automatically start to heal when you become housed," he said.
Denver’s permanent supportive housing vouchers offer long‑term rental assistance and voluntary services for people experiencing homelessness and for families with disabilities, a model that has helped stabilize residents like Heitz. But he says he is increasingly worried about the direction of federal housing policy.
"The Trump administration wants to limit housing vouchers for permanent supportive housing, which is what I am on. I do worry a little bit because I do not make enough money to get a market-rate apartment," he said.
A recent shift in HUD’s funding priorities has raised the possibility of significant cuts to supportive housing programs—changes that housing advocates warn could jeopardize the very services that allowed Heitz to rebuild his life.
Sarah Parady, a member of the Denver City Council, has become one of the most vocal and policy‑driven figures pushing the city toward a more prevention‑focused, rights‑based approach to homelessness. Her work centers on the idea that Denver cannot meaningfully reduce homelessness without addressing the upstream forces that push people into housing instability in the first place — especially eviction, wage theft, and the lack of legal protections for renters.
"They're (the Trump administration) cutting housing vouchers. And of course, we've had far fewer vouchers than we've had people who qualify for vouchers for decades. Like that's been an ongoing problem. Cutting them just means essentially pushing people into homelessness," noted Parady. "Adding two-year limitations, that gives the idea that we have some kind of functioning economy where if someone's in voucher housing for two years, suddenly then they can come out of that and make enough to pay for market-rate housing in the Denver market. That's not reality. Market-rate housing in Denver costs far more than minimum wage in Denver. So, that's just not a realistic expectation."
Parady believes Denver needs to get into the business of owning and operating housing, as the federal government has traditionally done through housing authorities. "The only way for us to sort of get around the problem of voucher cuts is for us to actually own housing ourselves and set the rents and operate it. So, that can sometimes be referred to as social housing. But that's the direction that my office is driving in, because it's really the only choice that's left to us if the federal government's going to get out of the business of housing people," she argued.
On the council, she has also championed policies that strengthen tenant protections, expand eviction defense, and increase rental assistance — all of which are central to preventing homelessness before it occurs. She has been a strong supporter of the Community Economic Defense Project (CEDP), which provides legal representation and emergency financial support to residents facing eviction.
"Eviction is an attempt to collect a debt. Is putting someone into homelessness or threatening to put someone into homelessness the best way to collect the debt?" asked CEDP Co-founder and co-CEO, Zach Neumann. He says the cost of homelessness to a community is much more expensive than possible remedies. "Oftentimes, these eviction notices are being put on doors for $500, $1,000, like money the state can afford, the city could afford, that a nonprofit like us could pay." The CEDP intervenes in two ways. "One, it's providing counsel. So, eviction legal defense, we can help you in the court process. But also financial assistance...to pay that debt so that you can keep your house and stay out of homelessness."
CEDP’s efforts inevitably collide with a deeper, largely invisible dimension of the crisis that slips past official counts.
Doubled‑up Homelessness
When housing instability moves into the living room, the crisis slips out of public view and beyond the reach of most city data. Doubled‑up homelessness occurs when people who can’t afford a place of their own take refuge with friends, relatives, or acquaintances — a fragile form of shelter that rarely appears in official counts.
In Denver, this hidden homelessness is far more widespread than the numbers suggest, particularly among youth and families. A study published in Pediatrics found that one in four Denver teens aged 14 to 17 experienced some form of homelessness in 2021, and many were not sleeping outside or in shelters but staying temporarily with others — the federal definition of “doubling up.”
Researchers noted that this instability is routinely missed by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) point‑in‑time methodology, even though it is one of the most common ways young people experience homelessness. Their findings underscore that homelessness in Denver “takes many forms,” from couch‑surfing to overcrowded apartments, and much of it never shows up in the city’s annual count.
Sometimes people who are “doubling up” end up in situations that make matters worse. "A client who was living with an extended family member ever since she lost her job. She experienced a trauma that really impacted her mental health, her ability to maintain a job," recalled Jacob Wessley, Director of Outreach and Engagement with the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. "She was staying with this extended family member, and unfortunately, the relationship became abusive. And really, the struggle there was she needed to keep a roof over her head. And the barrier we kept coming up against was since she wasn't literally homeless, there was some housing that she wasn't eligible for."
Denver’s experience also mirrors patterns seen in other cities, where Latino communities have developed their own culturally rooted responses to housing insecurity. Reporting from Illinois Latino News has documented how Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Central American families in Chicago rely on multigenerational living arrangements and dense networks of mutual support to survive rising rents and unstable work. These stories echo a long tradition in Puerto Rican and Dominican communities in New York City, where compadrazgo—a system of godparent relationships, extended kin, and fictive kin—has historically functioned as an informal safety net.
Compadrazgo networks have helped families navigate displacement, unemployment, and migration for decades. Oral histories from the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College describe how these kinship ties allowed families to pool resources, share housing, and avoid eviction during periods of economic upheaval. In Washington Heights and the South Bronx, tenant cooperatives often emerged from these same networks, transforming cultural practices into civic power. These examples offer a parallel to Denver’s doubled‑up households: both represent communities using their own social infrastructure to survive when formal systems fall short. Future reporting will explore how compadrazgo continues to shape responses to housing insecurity in New York City—and what lessons cities like Denver might draw from these longstanding traditions of mutual care.
Still, neither formal nor informal systems are without limitations. The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless faces financial uncertainty as it waits for delayed city payments, and the planned closure of the Park Avenue Inn shelter in 2026 leaves residents unsure of where they will go next. Doubled‑up families remain uncounted in federal data, making it harder for organizations like CEDP to secure funding proportional to the need. Compadrazgo networks, while resilient, can mask overcrowding and delay access to formal assistance, and tenant cooperatives rooted in kinship ties face legal and financial barriers that limit their scalability.
Prevention must be prioritized, as eviction defense and rental assistance can stop homelessness before it begins. Housing and healthcare must remain linked, as the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless has demonstrated. And cultural resilience—whether in Denver’s doubled‑up households or New York’s compadrazgo networks—should be recognized as a resource rather than an afterthought. These kinship systems reveal how communities innovate survival strategies that policymakers often overlook.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network
