Cindy still does not understand why her roommate became cruel over time, but she learned to keep her distance. He once attempted to hit her, and became increasingly emotionally abusive toward her, she said. Overall, though, Cindy felt grateful. She had a home, and a job that paid the bills.

That was until her roommate moved out unexpectedly. Then she learned he had not been paying his portion of the rent, and, although she tried, Cindy failed to persuade her landlord to let her take over the lease.

At 56, never expecting that one day she would experience homelessness, Cindy had nowhere to go. She found a shed in the backyard of a property that looked abandoned. For one year, she made the shed her shelter.

“I had a hard time sleeping. You know, I got beat up twice. Nobody’s asked to be in this situation,” she said, choking on tears. “It was bad out there. I wouldn’t wish this on nobody.”

Cindy, who asked to be identified only by her first name, said a friend found her and took her to a Denver motel called the Rodeway Inn that had been converted into non-congregate shelter.

There she found stability and started receiving mental health support. She had lost her job when she lost her housing, but, at Rodeway, Cindy began to believe in herself again, she said.

She got a mailing address and found a new job as a concession stand cook. The shelter became her home, and the people there, her community.

But, by Wednesday, more than half of the people who found refuge at Rodeway were already gone, moving on to new places after the city announced in the spring that the shelter would shutter on Aug. 24.

Cindy was waiting for an apartment she had lined up, which she expected to be move-in ready the following week. She felt relieved and eager to be on her own again, but Rodeway’s closure was a tumultuous turn of events for the close-knit community and the people who experienced immense anxiety about where they would go when it finally closed, she said.

To her, finding Rodeway was a matter of life or death.

“If it wasn’t for places like this there’d be a lot of dead people out there,” Cindy said. “It’s just awful, awful being homeless. And it’s really bad, too, because people stereotype you.”

The Rodeway Inn and the Best Western

The Rodeway Inn, located near Rocky Mountain Lake Park, was one of the only non-congregate shelters in Denver to specifically serve women, transgender and nonbinary people who are homeless. “Non-congregate” means locations where each individual, or family, has living space that offers some level of privacy, such as hotels.

The news in May that it would close shocked and terrified many of the 71 people staying there. Frustration, and for some anger, brewed, saying it felt the city had no plan to transition people into new housing or service providers.

Advocates held protests and called on the city to let people stay at Rodeway until they could find new housing, something they feared would take more than three months.

Come August, city and nonprofit officials celebrated that 90% of the people staying at Rodeway found new shelter or housing — but many expressed concerns about the cycle repeating itself and around gaps in care the Rodeway’s closure thrust into the spotlight.

Rodeway’s closure confirms the complexity of Denver’s homelessness woes and the city’s struggles to manage the crisis. A January count put the number of homeless people at 5,818 in Denver, and, at $254 million in allocation this year, that means the city is spending nearly $43,700 for each homeless individual.

Erin Clark, the Denver Housing Authority’s chief real estate investment officer, said the authority was always open to extending the lease for Rodeway further into 2023.

In mid-August, the city and DHA announced that people who had not been able to secure new housing or shelter by Aug. 24 would be able to stay until at least mid-September, when a new hotel the authority acquired would be ready for use as more non-congregate shelter.

Nearly 40 people were still at the shelter as of Thursday, including Cindy, with 10 of them slated to move out that week and others trying to finalize their plans.

The housing authority recently closed on a 194-unit Best Western hotel, which will serve as a temporary, non-congregate shelter just as Rodeway did, owned by DHA and leased to the city. Denver contracts with service providers, such as The Salvation Army, to operate shelters.

The terms of the Best Western’s lease agreement and operating contracts are not yet available. The lease agreement will not need city council approval, but the service agreements will likely be up for city council approval in September. The city’s Department of Housing Stability will also request that the city council approve roughly $16 million in pandemic recovery funds to support the authority’s acquisition of the Best Western.

Just like Rodeway, the Best Western site will eventually be targeted for affordable housing development or conversion into permanent supportive housing. The housing authority could lease the site to Denver as a shelter option for 18 months or up to three years if the lease is renewed annually.

Amid tensions surrounding the shelter’s closure, city and housing authority officials stressed that converting Rodeway into non-congregate shelter was always temporary.

The city and the authority partner on a program called D3, which has a twofold mission. Half of that mission requires the authority to buy property and then partner with developers to build permanent supportive housing.

The Rodeway Inn site was one of those acquisitions, purchased in May 2020 with the longer-term intention of transforming the property into permanent supportive housing, in which half of units would be affordable for households earning between zero and 30% of the area median income.

Before development could take place, Denver and the authority struck a deal that leased the old motel to the city for use as an emergency non-congregate shelter. The hope was to maximize the site’s use before it could become permanent supportive housing.

The lease has been extended annually since, but as talks began earlier this year about renewing the lease once more, the city and the authority mutually agreed it should come to an end, Clark said.

“Rodeway Inn was having roof issues, consistent plumbing issues, that is tens of thousands of dollars every month going into that property,” Clark said.

In addition to weighing the cost of operating the shelter, and the building’s poor condition, the authority was feeling the pressure of development costs. There is a large grade reduction on the site and additional development work that needs to happen before the property could be built on, Clark said.

The cost of construction now — compared to 2020 — compounded those problems. In terms of bringing very low-income housing to the Rodeway site, which would still take a few years, “economically, that was feeling very difficult,” Clark said. 

The decision was made to close Rodeway, sell the site, and roll those dollars into another permanent affordable housing project. The money used to acquire the Rodeway Inn, and proceeds from its sale, is still obligated to the D3 program and affordable housing, Clark said.

The future of the Rodeway Inn site remains uncertain.

“We don’t have specific plans right now,” Clark said, noting that letters of intent for Proposition 123 were recently due and that organizations, such as the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, might be able to take over the Rodeway Inn site with that funding. Approved by voters last year, Proposition 123 directs about $300 million per year in Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights refund revenues into affordable housing programs.

It’s possible that market-rate housing developments could replace the Rodeway, but, at a minimum, 20% of units would have to be affordable — up to 80% of the area median income. The housing authority would want to achieve more than 20% affordable units in that scenario, Clark said.

“The goal is to keep affordable housing on this site, but we have to structure a deal in a way that it can actually work. We might partner with other developers as well, so there are opportunities to maintain affordability and keep deep affordability there,” Clark said.

‘Not the final stop’ 

Angie Nelson, the deputy director of housing stability and homelessness resolution for the city’s Department of Housing Stability, said the agency has been working with its operating partners to help people living at Rodeway find housing resources and case management services.

“The city, DHA and Salvation Army have worked together to arrange that those remaining at Rodeway are able to continue to stay at Rodeway until we can transfer them to a new shelter the DHA recently purchased,” Nelson said, referencing the Best Western.

Nelson echoed Clark in saying that the maintenance and operational costs specific to the Rodeway structure were making running the shelter difficult.

“We absolutely recognize that this shelter has provided a bit of stability and a place where they can connect and be supported and that the announcement of its closure has been difficult for many people to process, and most importantly those staying there,” Nelson said.

In response to criticism that people staying at Rodeway were not given sufficient time to find new accommodations, Nelson said the department is “always open to learning and changing and pivoting and take the criticism to heart.”

“The most essential piece that we’ve found in the opening and closure of non-congregate shelter throughout all of COVID is that one of the most important things we can do from Day One is communicate the expectation that this is not home,” Nelson said. “This is a platform for gaining stability and that this is not the final stop on your journey.”

Rodeway was one of about four non-congregate shelters in converted hotels. Two of the other converted hotel shelters are dedicated for families. The Best Western site will keep that number at four, Nelson said. 

About a quarter of the city’s homeless population is living “unsheltered,” Nelson said, which means the city must continue finding creative solutions to bring people indoors, particularly following Mayor Mike Johnston’s oft-stated goal of moving 1,000 homeless people off the streets and into shelters by the end of the year. “Unsheltered” refers to homeless people who sleep in public places, such as parks or under bridges.    

“We are absolutely looking to continue expanding this model at other locations,” she said of converted hotels.

Nelson promised the department will continue working with partners to find shelter options for specific groups and said there are multiple other programs that are available to serve women, transgender and nonbinary people. In the meantime, the Best Western will be all-inclusive, Nelson said.

“I want to acknowledge the feedback and the lived expertise that has been shared by those guests, that Rodeway has felt extremely special,” Nelson said.

Saying goodbye

The closure at Rodeway affected not only the dozens staying there but about 20 staff at The Gathering Place, the nonprofit agency that was operating the shelter. Among them, 10 full-time staff were laid off.

Although some people would be able to continue staying at Rodeway, The Gathering Place would no longer operate there past Thursday, when The Salvation Army was poised to take over. 

The Gathering Place CEO Megan Devenport said her first reaction was “anger, and some disbelief” at the city’s decision to close Rodeway, particularly because it served such a vulnerable population. 

Helping people attain the limited amount of affordable housing and housing resources in three months was daunting, she said. The Gathering Place leaned on social capital, making calls within its network to find its members resources, but Devenport questioned why so much of that responsibility fell on her organization.

“All of this should have been figured out” before the city decided to close the Rodeway, she said.

Her frustrations with Rodeway’s closure went beyond logistical hurdles.

Losing the Rodeway means losing what has been a safe place for women, transgender and nonbinary people to escape homelessness, Devenport said. Although officially other options are said to be inclusive, Devenport hears accounts about the assault and verbal harassment of people within the LGBTQIA+ community at other city shelters.

In the past few months, a number of women who are survivors of domestic violence or sexual assault felt petrified that Rodeway’s closure would return them to Denver’s streets, where they are vulnerable to violence, she said. People of all identities who had negative experiences in congregate shelters expressed a deep hesitancy toward returning to that setting.

She had several conversations with transgender and nonbinary members who worried about whether staff at their next shelter would respect their pronouns or be trained in working with LGBTQIA+ community members.

Moving forward, Devenport said she wants to have more negotiating power in The Gathering Place’s contracts to allow the organization to better advocate for its members’ needs.

Devenport said all entities involved with the Rodeway’s closure are committed to getting people into stable housing, but she was upset the city did not extend the lease this year and frustrated the city is not “committing to non-congregate units for women, trans and nonbinary folks” moving forward, she said.

She is also upset that The Gathering Place was excluded from discussions about closing the Rodeway Inn, that the city did not make a transition plan several months in advance — or when it opened Rodeway as a shelter, she said.

“I remain pretty befuddled at why things unfolded the way they did because the result has been that we’ve arrived at a solution or resolution to celebrate, but the cost over these last three-and-a-half, four months has been pretty grave,” Devenport said. “In terms of deterioration of mental wellness, additional stress, re-traumatization and triggering of both staff and members.” 

Starting over

That was the case for Zoe Avalon, who stayed at the Rodeway Inn for more than a year and said the sudden announcement of its closure had detrimental effects on her well-being.

“That was rough. Rodeway was the only security I had. I didn’t have job security. I didn’t have my own place, things like that. It was just sort of my base, my grounding,” she said. “The day that we found out, suicidal ideations came back pretty hard.”

Avalon relapsed that night in her struggle with self-harm, she said. A diabetic, Avalon said she cannot survive living on the street, which, as of early August, was still where she worried she might end up. Her stress level went “off the charts.”

“It felt like a death sentence,” she said.

Avalon moved to Denver while fleeing an abusive relationship and became homeless in her new city after experiencing more emotional abuse and a sexual assault in the places she lived prior to the Rodeway, she said.

“Anybody can become homeless at any time. I did not expect to be homeless. I was working. I was actually making decent money. I could afford to pay rent,” she said. “But here I am.”

At the Rodeway, she felt safe. Doors had locks. Security was on site. She trusted the staff there, saying they “did an amazing job.” They helped people attain documentation and find transportation. The Rodeway became a stable place for her to try and start again.

Avalon has extensive work experience in IT but has struggled to find a new job after trying to start over in Denver, she said. While at Rodeway, she spent dozens of hours each week applying for jobs and has been a finalist for multiple positions.

Nearly a month ago, Avalon was able to move from Rodeway to another non-congregate shelter in a former La Quinta hotel. She was nervous about the new place, in part because it is open to men and women, and also because she heard it experiences more crime than Rodeway.

Her concerns eased after she was able to move in, Avalon said, and she has generally felt comfortable there.

Since settling into her new room, Avalon said she is grateful to be there but walked away from her time with Rodeway feeling as though the system is broken. For now, job hunting remains her top priority.

“A job is the only thing I need to not be homeless. And like I said, it’s been rough being LGBT and having a service dog. There is a ton of discrimination,” she said. “I’ve sent out almost 200 resumes.”

Tom Hellauer contributed to this story.