The Landing, Destiny’s home for five months before she graduated from Thompson Valley High School in Loveland, had a warm shower, a bed and food. But it also offered one thing that the other shelters didn’t: reassurance.
Destiny is an 18-year-old woman with a lot of life to experience. A few days out of the house is not enough time to develop the hardened street smarts she thought she needed to feel safe. The adult shelters where she stayed a couple days after her mother kicked her out for arguing with her boyfriend were not a good fit.
“They were very scary,” said Destiny, who only wanted to use her first name, fearing the stigma of being identified as homeless at a time she’s trying to find a job and get established.
The shelter also made her wonder if this was what she could expect from her future. But that’s not the vibe she got from The Landing in Loveland. She compared it to a college dorm, even though she’d never been in one before. A dorm must feel like that, she reasoned, with others close to her age studying, eating snacks and chatting.
“It’s a place to hang out,” Destiny said. “It’s nice to know you’re not the only one.”
She isn’t, and the numbers are growing. Denver saw a 10% to 25% increase in youth homelessness between 2017-21, according to a peer-reviewed journal Pediatrics. That got the attention of a resident and associate professor of internal medicine, both at the UCHealth and University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus. And the numbers aren’t especially reliable, they wrote in an article for The Conversation in March.
“The number of youth experiencing homelessness in Denver is many times greater than what traditional methods find,” the article states.
The Landing hopes to dent the problem by being the first shelter to open in northern Colorado, and the first new homeless youth shelter to open in the state in 18 years.
Part of the reason the numbers of homeless students are rising is simply because of the efforts of organizations that care for them: The homeless problem is one that becomes larger when you dig into it because you start to discover many more homeless people who didn’t necessarily want to be discovered.
“The numbers increasing means we are just identifying more of them,” said David Reyes, assistant director of the Greeley/Evans School District 6 Family Center. “It’s a good thing the numbers are going up. We want to be approached. We want them in school.”
Reyes said at the end of the year, District 6 had identified 855 homeless students, or around 3%, but that number doesn’t mean a lot. When Reyes started four years ago, the district identified nearly 600 students. He knows there are more. The Landing also believes there are many more students who need help.
“We know the need is high,” said Aaron Brown, the youth and young adult director for The Matthews House, a nonprofit in Fort Collins that opened The Landing as a part of its overall services. “It’s far more than we initially discovered. It’s pretty hidden. It’s not something the students want to talk about.”
Empty beds and a growing need
As proof, The Landing, which can house 28 people, isn’t packed right now. It takes a long time for a youth shelter to start to attract the people it wants to serve, Brown said, especially the younger ones. By the time they are 18 and close to graduating or have graduated, people like Destiny will seek out help.
But younger teens don’t necessarily want that help because they don’t want to admit they have a long-term problem, or they don’t want their friends finding out they’re staying at a shelter, a connotation that fresh paint has a hard time solving. Being homeless can be embarrassing enough for adults: Just imagine what self-conscious teenagers who worry about their Instagram page must feel.
“We didn’t realize that at first,” Brown said. “We thought we’d fill up right away. But they don’t want to be embarrassed.”
The main reasons kids are homeless are things no one likes to talk about, including poverty, an obvious cause, and foster care. More than 35% of all kids in foster care end up homeless. Sometimes bad luck just happens. District 6 had three families last year whose homes burned down. But more often than not, kids flee a home where they’re being neglected or abused. Some adults, Brown says, just aren’t meant to be parents.
Parents will kick kids out of their homes because they aren’t getting along, as in Destiny’s case. Conflicts with new partners or stepparents are common, and there are always religious or political disagreements. The National Network for Youth, an organization dedicated to supporting and preventing homeless youth, said up to 40% of all homeless kids are LGBTQ+. This is even more shocking, the organization points out, given that just under 10% of the youth in America are LGBTQ+.
“There’s always a reason,” Brown said, “and many of them are sad.”
Given this, younger teens may simply not trust a place like The Landing, given that many adults who promised to keep them safe actually did the opposite, Brown said.
“Finding them and connecting with them is hard,” he said, “and it’s even harder convincing them that this is a safe place.”
Kids, especially, prefer to crash with friends for a few days, sleep in a car or find a cheap motel room. All of these methods seem safer than a shelter, both physically and socially, than a place like The Landing, Brown said, which is frustrating and confusing.
Reyes and other school districts have developed systems to identify homeless students. Sometimes it just means reaching out to students who can’t provide proof of an address during enrollment. Other times school employees find them, especially observant teachers. Local shelters will report students to the district if they show up looking for a place to sleep.
Reyes works year-round to track students he knows have either been homeless or currently are homeless, and it’s his goal to ensure none of them is sleeping in a park.
“No one,” he said, “sleeps outside.”
A new beginning
Urban Peak was founded 35 years ago to address youth homelessness. But nothing in its history had the same kind of impact as the Mothership opening in August 2024. The building gives Urban Peak the ability to give 24/7 access to housing to more than 135 youth in the Denver area.
The nonprofit worked on the project for nearly 10 years before the Mothership opened, and part of that was raising money to build it, but much of that time went into designing it. They wanted the campus to be beautiful and bright and even fun. Windows welcome daylight spilling through the hallways. The colors are vibrant, and the materials are natural. All of it has a purpose other than looking like an ultra-modern college dormitory: Experts call it “trauma-informed design.”
That sunlight, for instance, shoos away the dark from any corner. The rooms are open and free-flowing, obliterating the chances of someone jumping out at you. There are pouches in walls where an overwhelmed teen can curl up but still be part of the action instead of hiding in a room.
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Shopworks Architecture started researching trauma-informed design years ago as a company project and used what it learned to design the Mothership, said Chad Holtzinger, president of Shopworks. The work pinpointed how architecture “can act as a first responder.”
“You don’t see the trauma-informed design,” Holtzinger said. “You feel it.”
When the Mothership opened, Christina Carlson, CEO of Urban Peak, could tell the difference right away between an adult shelter and a place for teens just by the way the kids reacted when they walked in on move-in day. Since it opened, statistics have proved her instincts were dead-on. Critical incidents, which include breakdowns and fights, were down 60%.
“And we have three times as many students on site as we once did,” Carlson said. “It’s like everything changed overnight.”
Since then, Carlson admits to randomly crying over the joy of providing the space for teens, even as she knows the circumstances why they are there aren’t pleasant. She loves teenagers and wanted for so long to give them a space they deserve.
“They’re funny,” Carlson said. “They’re all the things that are funny and gross, and then you just throw in a lot of trauma and there you go.”
Teens also provide the kind of opportunity that nonprofit directors live for: the chance to provide transformational change. Most homeless adults were homeless as teens, Carlson said, but giving them shelter can break that pattern.
“Their brains are still developing,” Carlson said. “It’s a real privilege to get to work with them.”
The Landing also called on Shopworks Architecture to design their Loveland place, and it is similar in the concept and the lighting and the conscious removal of anything that could make someone on edge uneasy, Brown said. Some of those touches include lockers where kids can leave their knives and protection, a “don’t ask/don’t tell policy,” Brown said, that doesn’t include guns. If they see a student has a gun, they take the gun and ask the student to leave.
“We asked around to groups about what feels safe,” Brown said, “even how sound moves in a building.”
The theme of The Landing is designed to resemble a harbor in the mountains. There are rooms named after the Colorado’s 14ers. The rules also offer the kind of freedom the trails in the mountains can inspire, with free resources open all afternoon, even showers and laundry, and three meals a day, some of them grab-and-go if they want. Kids just need to fill out a short referral form. The doors don’t lock. They can leave or stay. There’s also a closet stuffed full of supplies and clothes.
“The first time they are here, we just want them to have a safe space,” Brown said. “But if we see them regularly, we may start to do case management. Right now priority number one is to be that trusted space.”
Keeping them in their communities
Urban Peak is proud of its facilities, but it doesn’t want to be the only place serving the Front Range and up and down the Front Range. That’s why they were so glad to see The Landing open.
“Sending everyone to Denver,” Carlson said, “is not a good solution.”
There’s little doubt that Urban Peak has a greater impact. The Landing can house far fewer people than the Mothership. But it’s vital to northern Colorado, Carlson said, because it allows people to stay in their places.
Even people without homes have communities, Carlson said, and moving people out of their communities will make them feel disconnected, even with a roof over their heads and others to live with. It may even take them away from their schools and, therefore, their friends, an especially hard move for any teenager.
Sometimes there’s no choice. A roof is better than no roof, after all, but this is why shelters should be available in many cities.
“Neighborhoods are important,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to stay connected in places where we have the bus route or a library. All the things that make us a community.
“I’m so grateful there’s an expansion of services across the state. We need to keep working as partners and serve in a community where people are.”
As for The Landing’s fretting about being used, Carlson says something that is both reassuring and a little sad.
“They’ll be full in no time,” she said.