TRANSCRIPT: Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s State of the City address

DENVER, CO — Below is the prepared transcript of Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s State of the City address, provided by the mayor's office and delivered on Monday, July 22 at the Paramount Theater in downtown Denver.

MAYOR MIKE JOHNSTON’S 2024 STATE OF THE CITY TRANSCRIPT

I remember a year ago the first encampment I visited as mayor. The first man I talked to showed me the sores all over his back from being bitten by rats in the middle of the night while he was sleeping. He told me how hard it was to hold a job because when he left for the day to work a shift, he would come back and all of his stuff would be stolen from his tent. He talked about the people that would show up with a gun and take over his tent to turn them into a temporary home base to sell drugs before they disappeared again. He talked about how many times he had been pushed from block to block or place to place, each time forced to start all over again.

The crisis was not only affecting him, it was affecting all of us. Around the corner I went to visit businesses that were thinking of closing because the encampments had cut off the foot traffic and revenues were plummeting, we had a post office that had notified us they might close service because their staff couldn’t get access to the building due to encampments, we had hospitals that patients couldn’t get in and out of. On some blocks of downtown there were more tents than open businesses. And the encampments were magnets for crime, including a young Rangeview High School graduate and army veteran who got shot in the middle of the night trying to take care of his sister.

To many, there was no problem that seemed more unsolvable than street homelessness. Many cities had given in or given up, believing after COVID that homelessness and large encampments were the new normal for every American city.

There were a thousand reasons people said we couldn’t succeed.

No Denverite will accept a new facility to house the homeless in their neighborhood.

You can’t find enough land or units fast enough to solve this problem.

Construction timelines take 18 months not 18 weeks.

People wanted to be homeless, they wouldn’t take housing if you offered it to them.

But in those stories we saw hope, in every conversation we found neighbors who wanted to help, in every tent we found a person who just needed someone to believe in them, we believed that no one was unredeemable, and no problem was too big for a city committed to change. So we went to work.

We listened to neighbors at more than 60 town halls across the city.

We called on leaders from all sectors to help, including faith, and business and non-profits and the unhoused.

We partnered with the city council to identify, build, and open 1,200 units of transitional housing in 8 different council districts across the city, and at each of those sites we have offered the wrap-around services people need.

And as of today, one year later, we have moved more than 1,600 people off the streets and into transitional housing.

In these last 12 months Denver has housed more people faster per capita than any city in America.

And in finding them a home, we created a better home for all of us.

I remember more than a year ago, before I took office, walking down the street with my daughter, and we rounded the corner and saw someone sleeping on the street and she said, “Dad, why don’t we do something?”

We did do something, and today you can walk out this theater, take your daughter’s hand and walk down the mall to union station, or over to Coors Field, through the businesses in Five Points. You can walk past the Post Office to the Denver Arts Complex or Convention Center or Civic Center Park, and when you make that walk today you will not see a single tent or a single encampment in all of downtown Denver, because all those people who were living on these streets are now living indoors in dignity.

A dream that seemed impossible a year ago, that we could find a path to end street homelessness in the next four years, now feels more possible than ever.

And this year we will mark a major milestone toward this journey to end street homelessness by focusing on one of our most vulnerable populations: veterans.

Those who have risked their lives for our country deserve the decency of stable housing. That is why we are proud to share that by the end of 2024, Denver is on the path to become the largest American city ever to end street homelessness for veterans.

But our work is not done. We have much more to do to bring more people off the streets and to help people in transitional housing get placed into permanent housing. This historic effort has not been easy and it has not been without mistakes. But in it you can see the blueprint for what our city can do.

We will be bold about what is possible and humble about what it takes to get there.

We will be relentless in our focus and collaborative in our process.

We will make mistakes from sprinting fast but never from standing still.

We may fall short by dreaming big, but never by thinking small.

I would always rather be disappointed by believing in each other, than affirmed by doubting each other.

That is the story of All In Mile High, and it is the story of Denver.

As we were working to get 1,000 unhoused individuals off the streets, 30,000 newcomers arrived in our streets in the last year. Many of them arrived in the middle of winter with sandals and a t-shirt, hungry, and thirsty and tired, without money or a job or shelter.

Individuals like Daniela, who was a teacher in Venezuela and her husband had a small plastic manufacturing company. He had spoken up against the repressive government, was arrested multiple times, and their family was threatened. After he was released the last time they decided to take their 9-year-old daughter, leave their business, their house and everything they owned, and walk 3,000 miles to America.

They carried their daughter through the treacherous Darian Gap, more dangerous than Colorado’s most jagged 14ers, holding tight to her daughter’s hands on the faces where hundreds of families had fallen to their deaths, and holding her close at night in those places where thousands of young girls had been taken and sexually assaulted by cartels.

When she crossed the border, like many, she did not intend to come to Denver, but was sent here by a Governor who thought these brave newcomers would challenge our humanity, would break us, would divide us. He had decided they weren’t people, but problems. In this crisis, Denver saw not problems but possibility.

The people of this city responded in heroic ways. With the partnership of the City Council and the leadership of former President Torres and incoming President Sandoval, we rose to the occasion, working with incredible non-profit partners like Yoli Casas and community organizations like the Highland Moms. People stepped up, they cooked food for families, cleaned out their closets for clothes, they even welcomed families into their homes. City employees stepped aside from their current job description, and stepped in to do what our city needed them to do, setting up intake systems, opening shelters, providing meals and transit, launching legal clinics, placing people in housing, providing legal support and work authorization, and helping them find jobs. In this moment of crisis, our city employees were the highest ideal of public servants.

In this moment it would have been easy to blame someone else, to give up or give in.

But Denver did something different.

We rolled up our sleeves and believed even this problem was solvable. We put thousands of people through free legal clinics to get work authorization, we moved thousands of people into housing, and we launched the country’s first Asylum-Seekers Program that helps our newcomers get what they need most: a job.

Our program helps newcomers caught in a broken federal immigration system where they have to wait seven years for a court date without the ability to work while they wait. We found a new path, helping every newcomer in our program apply for asylum, then while they wait six months for legal work authorization, we used that as an opportunity to give them the skills they need for the jobs Denver needs. Our program, in partnership with Centro Trabajadores, helps them learn English, develop financial literacy, choose a high demand career that Denver employers can’t fill, earn career certifications, get on the job work experience, and be ready to be hired the day their work authorization arrives. What was meant to be a crisis that would divide us, we turned into an opportunity to unite us. Newcomers want a path to a job to support themselves, and our businesses are desperate for a talent pipeline of committed workers who can fill our hardest to fill jobs. So we built a program to do just that.

Thanks to Denver’s indomitable spirit of service, this historic effort has meant that in Denver, the city that has welcomed more migrants per capita than any other city in America, we do not have a single encampment of migrant families living on the streets. We have helped families find their way to housing, work, and the dignity they deserve.

Families like Daniela’s. After she arrived in one of our shelters, she and her husband applied for work authorization, which they both received. Her husband started working as a chef in a local restaurant, and she started this spring as one of the founding teachers at the school that Vive Wellness opened at the Mullen Home in Northwest Denver to welcome and teach the children of newcomers. She helps young people like her daughter when they first arrive in Denver prepare to make the transition to an American school, helping kids, some who have been out of school for years, learn the rituals and rules and systems. But she’s not done yet, this fall she will start as a paraprofessional at Denver Public Schools and continue her path to get certified to be a teacher. In Denver, the American Dream is still alive and well.

These challenges from year one were daunting, and they required an entire city to rally support to make them successful. That’s why we made sure that the people leading our city represented our city and brought new ideas to the table. Working together, we built one of the most diverse cabinets in Denver history, we built the first all-female executive team, and we did it with unprecedented public involvement, partnering with more than 500 people who served on the largest and most inclusive transition in Denver history.

Our work is not done, but our progress is dramatic. Our successes here have opened up new opportunities for even greater impact in the year ahead. Inside each of these struggles we see the need for more work to be done. Walking that encampment a year ago the challenges I saw were not just homelessness, but a larger ecosystem that needed attention: I saw the need for a citywide commitment to public safety. We saw a chance to connect each of us back to each other and to our communities, the need for economic revitalization of a downtown battered by the pandemic, and the urgency to make Denver affordable for everyone. These are the priorities that will drive the year ahead.

Often when we talk about public safety people think of crime. But the opposite of crime is not safety, the opposite of crime is joy. What we want for our city is a place where every neighborhood is brimming with joy, where your kids can ride their bikes, you can go for a late night run, your mom can walk to and from the store without you ever having to worry about safety. That is why we have launched an ambitious plan to make Denver the safest big city in America. We have held community meetings in every council district to listen to residents about what our neighborhoods need, and the feedback is clear that safety is about more than police work, it is about social work, and economic development work, and educational work. It is about street lighting, and arts activation, and youth summer jobs.

So we have gotten right to work:

We started by putting 700 young people to work this summer through our Mayor’s YouthWorks program.

We will launch 25 community events and pop up activities that bring joy and vibrancy to streets that could otherwise be dark and dangerous.

We have aggressively targeted auto theft through license plate readers, easy vehicle registration, enhanced deterrence and swift investigation.

We have started an office of neighborhood safety, to align all the services that make our community safe and vibrant without needing an officer, making it easier for communities to engage with city services without the pressure of a law enforcement contact.

We will step up patrols in places where the risk of crime is high, knowing that when a patrol officer visits a site for 10 minutes, the chance of a crime being on that site drops dramatically over the next two hours.

We know that the best way to stop crime is to prevent it, and the best way to prevent crime is to build trust. So we will start a new practice of trust patrols, where officers can get out of the patrol car and walk into a business or a rec center or a park, and talk to neighbors to find out what’s working, what’s not and what we can do better. By the end of next year, we will have run more than 6,000 trust patrols this year, and anyone who has a business or an event or a location can request them from the Denver Police Department website.

And the great news is, we are already showing results. After a dark decade where Denver had the highest violent crime increases of any city in America, our strategies are already making a difference. Crime is down across the board, auto theft is down 31%, shootings and homicides are down 27%, property crime is down more than 27% and we are just getting started.

Whenever I talk to someone about their dreams for their neighborhood, the first thing they do is offer to help. With every challenge we have faced this year we have seen the selfless evidence of Denverites called to serve. Whether it was getting up early to cook breakfast for 20 migrant families, or showing up to prepare toiletries and welcome bags for folks coming out of homelessness, what has remained clear is that Denver is a city motivated by a spirit of service. We all believe these problems are solvable, and we want to do our part to solve them, and we know that we are far more powerful when we work together in service of a purpose that is greater than ourselves.

My wife Courtney has always shared that same deep call to serve others. She and I first met as school teachers in the Mississippi delta. While I worked as a teacher and a school principal and a nonprofit leader, she served as teacher and a social worker, a therapist, and then a District Attorney protecting those who had the most to lose.

When we took the oath of office a year ago, Courtney had a vision to bring Denver together around that spirit of service, and today, we are proud to launch the effort she has committed to make part of our legacy. This program, Give5 Mile High, is based on a simple idea: we all can serve, and our city is better when we do. We will ask every Denverite to give 5 hours of their time each month to serve our city and our neighbors.

Each month we will focus on a different citywide need, and partner with nonprofit organizations across the city to make it easy for Denverites to serve together. On the third Saturday of every month, we will host our Give5 Mile High service day. Our first service day will be August 17th where we will partner with Denver Public Schools to ensure every child is ready to start school with the resources they need to succeed. In September we will move our focus to Beautify Denver, launching a city wide clean-up day to make sure every block of Denver is beautiful. When you walk out of the historic Paramount Theater today you’ll see Courtney at a table with information you can send to friends, neighbors and coworkers to join you for our first Give5 service day.

Nearly 100 years ago this majestic Paramount Theater opened, designed by Temple Buell. It is a historic icon of the Art Deco era, and when it opened 20,000 people gathered to celebrate the art and life that it would bring to downtown. We wanted to host this state of the city here today to join the chorus, 100 years running, that this can be the heart of the most vibrant city center west of the Mississippi.

Downtown Denver is the economic and artistic engine of the city, and we cannot have a vibrant city without a vibrant downtown. Downtown Denver is the living room for every Denverite, and the playground for every Coloradan.

That is why this year we will launch our Vibrant Downtown campaign to make the largest ever investment in downtown without raising taxes. We will use these resources to turn downtown from a central business district to a central neighborhood district, complete with affordable housing, public parks, child care, great retail, restaurants, art and music and walkable activated streets where you can get lost in a vibrant world you can only find in Denver.

The catalyst for the success of downtown will be the final reopening of the 16th street mall. Every Denverite has their own memory of 16th street. I remember playing street chess at night when I first moved to Denver, I remember writing my wedding proposal to Courtney in lipstick on the window of our first apartment on 16th street. You can already feel the energy from the first few blocks we opened this summer, and we are just getting warmed up. By the next state of the city, 16th street will be open from union station to the pavilions, buses will be running, people will be strolling down our new broad sidewalks, brand new stores will be open and a whole new generation of Denverites will be coming downtown to make a new generation of memories.

A vibrant Denver has to be one that can include all of us. Denver has to be a place where the ushers who welcomed you in, the chef in the kitchen next door, and the teacher who will welcome your child back to school this fall, can all afford to live.

Tonight, a girl will wake up scared in the middle of the night and walk into her moms room expecting to find her fast asleep. But her mom will be wide awake, staring at the ceiling wondering how she's going to find a way to pay the rent that just went up $200 this month. She already added an extra shift a week to pay the last increase. Where will she go? She would have to take her daughter out of the school she loves and away from the friends she’s known her whole life. She would have to find a new job or manage a long commute, she loves this city and this neighborhood and this life that she has built, and she’s terrified she’s going to lose it. When her daughter asks what’s wrong, she stops for a moment, she can tell her daughter anything, but she can’t bring herself to answer this one.

She is not the only one awake, down the street there is a grandmother who retired from 40 years of teaching school to move to Denver to be close to her grandkids. She gets to see every flag football game and volunteer in their classrooms, help pick out a dress for the middle school dance, and host dinner and sleepovers when her daughter has to work late. But the rents keep going up and her fixed income retirement does not. She can feel the lump growing in her throat wondering how she will tell her daughter that she has to move back home because she can’t afford to stay in Denver anymore. What will she do when the baby girl holds on to her leg and says please don’t go?

Or the girl across town who should be out with her friends. She has a brand new college diploma in her hand and a job offer right here at home. She's in her childhood bedroom, and her heart warms as she looks at the photos of all her friends that summer night at red rocks and the one of her at age seven in a tiara at her first pride parade. But the warmth recedes into fear because she's looked at the rental costs and done the math 100 times, even with this new job and what she thought was a great starting salary, she can't see a way to afford a place of her own. If she can't afford to rent here, how could she ever afford to buy a home here. Maybe she should take the other job offer in the midwest where it's cheaper. But her dream was always to come home, to raise her own kids here, to watch them do mutton busting at the Stock Show and see their desks fill up with photos of memories you can only make in Denver, but she suddenly feels alone, like her hometown has left her behind.

There will be all the same doubts about this hard problem that we have heard about the others.

The problem is too complex.

Solutions are too expensive.

This is just what happens when cities grow up, they become unaffordable.

People don’t want affordable housing in their neighborhood.

Our commitment is to see every problem as solvable and stay with it relentlessly until we find a way. That is why we will partner with members of City Council this week to send a measure to the ballot this November to support our plan for an Affordable Denver. This measure, funded by a half penny sales tax, would only cost Denver families about $2 a week, but it would put us on the path to bring on the 45,000 units of affordable housing we need to fill our entire gap of affordable housing over the next 10 years.

If we want to keep the mom and the grandma and the college graduate in Denver we can, but we have to choose it and we have to fight for it. This November, I will ask you to choose it by voting for an Affordable Denver on your ballot.

Finding a way to reverse the economic impacts of a global pandemic on our city center is hard, replacing cycles of violence with centers of joy is hard, living on the streets in a tent in a freezing Denver winter is hard, leaving everything you have and walking 3,000 miles with a nine-year-old to an unknown future is hard, and finding the resources and strategies to bring on enough housing to keep a growing city affordable is hard, but if there is one thing we’ve learned in the past year, it is that the single hardest problem we will ever face, is the belief that we can’t solve these problems at all. Once we have defeated that, anything is possible.

In these uncertain times, the world will flood you with examples of hatred and division and dysfunction. It will ask you to doubt, it will tempt you to distrust, it will invite you to pass judgment, it will beg you to walk away. In those moments you will long for proof that we are right to believe in each other, that we are right to think we can find a way, that we are right to trust that we can try one more thing one more time that we haven’t tried before and breakthrough.

In those moments when your friend or your neighbor or your parent has given up, let them look to Denver and see that those problems that have torn other cities apart have brought us closer together. Those challenges that have overwhelmed other communities have only made us stronger, because the one thing you won't find in Denver is that destructive contagious belief that we can’t. Here in this capital of the New West where the mountains are tall and the rivers are deep, people believe in each other, and they lean on each other, and they fight for each other, fortified by the deep belief that all our problems are solvable, and we are the ones to solve them.