Denver’s $38 million solution for youth homelessness triples shelter beds and looks like a college dorm

via The Colorado Sun. Written by Jennifer Brown.

A four-story Urban Peak youth shelter, where residents will be grouped into “neighborhoods,” is scheduled to open this summer in south Denver.

Urban Peak CEO Christina Carlson looks at the in-progress campus in Denver. The new building opening this summer will house young people age 15-24. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

The four-story building rising in south Denver has giant windows, high ceilings with exposed wooden rafters, and a terrace with a view of the downtown skyline and the snow-dusted Rockies.

It looks like any of the soon-to-open apartment buildings in the city, with the added bonus of being less than a mile from a light-rail station. But that’s not what it is, at all.

The building, scheduled to open this summer, is Urban Peak’s new homeless shelter for teenagers and young adults up to age 24, a $38.6 million project funded by the city, state, federal government and donations. It will replace a dark and dingy one-story building where staff feared the roof would cave in and young people were crammed into stacked bunk beds. 

The old shelter, which was torn down last year to make space for the new one on the same property, could fit 40 people. The new one makes a huge jump to 136. 

“There is nothing like this in Denver. There is nothing like this anywhere,” said Urban Peak CEO Christina Carlson as she gave The Colorado Sun a tour of the building on a chilly morning when melting snow dripped through the unfinished roof onto cement floors. “It needs to be open today. If you’ve driven around, you’ve seen the need.”

A view from the in-progress campus of Urban Peak on Nov. 9, 2023, in Denver. The new building will have room for 136 teens and young adults. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

The number of young people who are homeless in the city is rising, evidenced by the latest “point-in-time count” in which volunteers attempt to count everyone sleeping in shelters or outside on a designated night in January. The number of young people living on their own on the streets or in shelters was 469, up from 375 the previous year. 

About one-third of the teens and young adults who find shelter at Urban Peak were in foster care. Nationally, one out of every three kids in the foster care system becomes homeless when they turn 18. 

Between 30% to 40% of young people who come to Urban Peak are LGBTQ, and the organization has seen a major increase in the number of teens who are transgender and gender-nonconforming who run away from their families or are kicked out. 

Every kid who ends up at Urban Peak grew up in an unstable family — parents who were homeless or on the verge of becoming homeless, parents who were in the criminal justice system, parents who had mental health issues, or parents who were poor. Family instability is the core issue. 

“Honestly, it’s just another way to talk about poverty and the cycle of poverty,” Carlson said. 

More than 900 young people got services through Urban Peak in 2022, including 260 who slept in the shelter, according to the organization’s annual report. Urban Peak is the only licensed shelter in Denver for teenagers, and the new building is the first in the city to designate shelter beds for the 21-24 age group.

While the new building is under construction, Urban Peak is operating a temporary, 30-bed shelter in downtown Denver. The organization’s outreach team is on the streets daily talking to teens who are living in tents and in parks, asking them if they’d like a shelter bed, or just a pair of socks or underwear. That’s step one in Urban Peak’s attempt to break the cycle. The goal is to eventually help a young person complete their education, find a job and move into their own apartment. The organization has three apartment buildings, with a combined 68 units, and places young people in about 100 apartments scattered throughout the city. 

The new building on Acoma Street — intentionally far from downtown, the center of increasinging adult homelessness, sex traffickers and drug sales — was designed not just as a place to keep people off the streets, but as a space to heal and move forward. 

A reading nook at the under-construction campus of Urban Peak. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

The first floor will have large dormitories that hold multiple beds, plus a storage room for bikes and other belongings, and a “bed bug” room where mattresses and bedding will go for high-heat sanitization. Teens 15-17 will live separately from young adults, ages 18-24. A spacious kitchen will serve three meals a day, and young people can use it to cook their own food. Circular wooden cubbies will become safe spaces to curl up with a book. And a courtyard in the center of the building is flooded in sunlight. 

The second and third floors of the building are arranged in “neighborhoods,” individual and double bedrooms surrounding shared living rooms. These are for young people who want to stay longer, taking part in on-site therapy, art and music classes, attending school or studying for their GED, and signing up for job training. 

Some of the neighborhoods will be organized as “affinity groups,” joining young people who have things in common. One is planned for young women who have babies, who can live with them at the shelter. The group can help each other babysit and use their common area as a playroom. Another neighborhood is for young adults dealing with addiction. Another might group together people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. 

“They need community,” Carlson said. “Where do you find community? In your neighborhood, and so it’s building off that.”

The bedrooms inside the “neighborhoods” are large enough to fit a bed and ample furniture. “That’s what these young people deserve — they deserve space,” said Carlson, a social worker who became CEO at Urban Peak in 2017 and counted 900 meetings about the new building before construction began, including giving Colorado’s U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette a tour of the old shelter and worrying she would get injured by a caving roof. “They’re people who often haven’t had it. Sometimes having a space is how you learn to take care of it.” 

An upward skylight view on the campus of Urban Peak in south Denver.(Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

The building was designed with “trauma-informed” architecture, meaning its aim is to heal. Large windows of all different shapes not only provide sunlight, but they open to allow for fresh air — unlike the small slits in residential treatment centers where many former residents likely spent time as foster kids. Windows placed at the end of long hallways eliminate dark shadows. A 90-degree corner is angled off with extra wood to banish the idea that someone is hiding around it.

The staff of more than 100 needed to operate the building — called the “mothership” because of a joke that it was the “mother of all projects” — is trained in trauma-informed care, which is focused on helping people understand how abuse, neglect and other traumatic events affected their behaviors.

“When you start working with someone, you shift the narrative from ‘What’s wrong with you?’ to ‘What happened to you?’” Carlson said. 

The building setup is also designed in a way that young people can pick up life skills that they might have missed out on. There will not be laundry instruction classes, but residents are free to use the laundry room. They can store food and prepare meals. Young parents will learn to protect their babies with gates and plastic covers for electrical outlets. And the residents can make appointments and discuss medical care at the on-site clinic. The idea is to help young people prepare to live independently, which other shelters typically do not do.

Carlson recalled one young woman who lived in 15 foster care placements before getting help from Urban Peak to move into her own apartment at age 18. When staff visited, they found that she had neatly folded and stacked her sweaters in the oven, which she was using as a cabinet, unaware of the fire hazard. “We were like, ‘Oh! Don’t burn down the building!,’ and she was like, ‘Well, I just want my space to look clean.’ And she had never had access to an oven,” Carlson said. 

Jeremiah Berndt, who got housing through Urban Peak at age 22 after moving out of his parents’ house and living on friends’ couches, was among those who offered input on the building’s design. Berndt, now 35 and a board member for Urban Peak, said that while he knows the building will change lives, it was the people — not the building — that set him on the right path. 

“The time and simply the relationships I had with staff were the most important,” Berndt said. “That was invaluable. There was no replacing that.” 

Berndt left his parents’ house because he was addicted to heroin, then spent months couch surfing. “My parents were still in the picture but they had enough of my entire lifestyle and what I put them through,” he said. At Urban Peak, he met a social worker who always said, “Trauma happens in relationships and trauma is healed in relationships.” He still lives by the phrase. “That really rang true for me,” Berndt said. 

The new Urban Peak youth homeless shelter is scheduled to open this summer in south Denver. (Rendering provided by Urban Peak)

For some, their stay at Urban Peak’s new building will last a few days or a couple of weeks — perhaps until they reconnect with an aunt in Texas or elsewhere and move away. Others will stay for years. There is no time limit, at least until age 24. 

One man, now in his 30s, stopped by recently to pick up his mail, which he still has delivered to the Urban Peak address. Another man, now 26, always visits wearing a suit, telling Carlson he will become the next CEO. At age 9, he was thrown out of a window, suffering a brain injury, and by the time he came to Urban Peak in his teens, was addicted to drugs. He left and returned multiple times over seven years, eventually staying long enough to graduate from the old shelter and into an apartment. 

Urban Peak helped that man move into permanent supportive housing, funded through a federal voucher, because of his disability, but that’s not the path Carlson pushes for most young people. She met one teenager in her early days at Urban Peak who had been released from the juvenile justice system at 18 and into homelessness. He had just gotten in trouble for an outburst at the shelter and told her his plan was to “stay calm” for nine months until he was approved for his permanent housing voucher. 

“I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’” she recalled. “He was working. He was going to school. I said, ‘You want the government to tell you what to do for the rest of your life?’ If we set the goal low, that is where people work toward.”

A rendering of the new Urban Peak shelter under construction in south Denver depicts the building’s two terraces. (Provided by Urban Peak)

The 66,578-square-foot complex was funded by $16.8 million from the city’s voter-approved RISE bond program, $11 million in private capital through a federal tax credit program called New Market, $3.8 million from the state, $3 million from the federal government and $4 million in private donations. 

The new building, Carlson said, represents a rethinking of the current model for youth homelessness, which is “deeply broken” and basically the same as the adult model.

 “We have taken bits and pieces of our history, we have taken lots of information from experts and other programs around the country, and we have created this,” she said. “This is really something that is not only good for youth experiencing homelessness, but we believe deeply can be a national model that can serve all types of populations.”

Urban Peak CEO Christina Carlson leads a tour of the in-progress campus of Urban Peak’s new shelter Nov. 9, 2023, in Denver. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)