More members of Denver’s homeless population are gaining access to health and behavioral services, according to city officials who briefed the Community Planning and Housing Committee on Tuesday.

They’re getting more services, and they’re sticking around longer.

Data from the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment presented at the meeting showed that from January 2024 to September 2025, 1,027 people received some type of health or behavioral service, with an average of 9.1 “encounters” per patient.

Tristan Sanders, DDPHE director of community and behavioral health, said the numbers are both surprising and encouraging.

“What that tells us is that any given patient is having a fairly significant engagement in health services, with an average of nine services per patient,” he said.

Sanders added that the “services” identified and tracked were more than just a conversation.

“They’re actually receiving something, whether it is counseling or dental services or health services or medications,” he said. “And so that’s telling us that not only are they receiving services, but it’s also potentially over a longer period of time.”

Numbers like these are of particular interest as the city moves from simple flat-fee agreements to performance-based contracts for its new providers of non-congregate shelter services. 

The switch means HOST will be scrutinizing how well vendors fulfill their contracts.

“We’ll be looking at: Have a certain percentage of the beds been filled each night? Have a certain percentage of folks completed their housing assessments? Have they had X number of case management touch points?” he explained. “And these sorts of metrics are what we will be paying out for.”

According to city documents, providers must meet metrics related to bed utilization, case management and individual progress toward more permanent housing as well as overall shelter safety.

“Right now, we’re seeing about 71% of households, on a regular basis, accessing social services, which is not bad, but it’s a little bit anemic, and this is why we’re moving to performance-based contracting,” Jeff Kositsky, HOST deputy director, said. “If that number doesn’t push close to 90, contractors, you know, will not be able to receive the full value of their contract.”

Kositsky said HOST has met with the city’s new shelter service providers, noting they are “excited” and plan to push those numbers up.

He added that while HOST is confident in the direction the process is moving, there’s room for improvement in the number of people exiting shelters into housing.

“The average length of stay (in a non-congregate shelter) was 205 days, and which is higher than we’d want to see it,” Kositsky said. “We want that to be below 180.”

As of Sept. 30, the city has sheltered 2,006 people toward its goal of 2,000, said Cole Chandler, the senior adviser on homelessness to Mayor Mike Johnston.

While the city was on track to place approximately 1,180 people in more stable housing, Chandler said, the city’s Office of Housing Stability faced setbacks due to the loss of state and federal housing vouchers, “making what was already an ambitious goal of reaching 2,000 people housed even harder.”

Earlier this year, HOST lost 180 housing vouchers from both state and federal sources.

Chandler projects that the number of people connected with permanent housing will be near 1,650 by the end of 2025.

Still, Chandler said that exits from the city’s non-congregate shelters to more stable or permanent housing continue to outpace exits back to the streets.

There were 1,026 shelter exits to housing for Q3 2025, with 482 exits to the street.

As of Dec. 2, HOST had resolved “vehicular homelessness” for 75 total people, with some moving into shelters and others into direct housing.

Nine of the 75 agreed to surrender their vehicle to the city’s RV or vehicle surrender program.