Four sets of bunk beds hardly fill up the room, where sunlight streams from a window near the top of the high ceiling and paint divides the walls into two colors horizontally to make it feel more like a bedroom and less like a homeless shelter.
Pale-green and teal lockers line the wall, and a fresh towel and a new bottles of shampoo sit on a bunk bed. Signs on the bulletin board remind children living here that breakfast and chores are from 8-9 a.m. and lights out is at 10:30 p.m.
This section of Urban Peak’s dorm-style youth shelter on Acoma Street in Denver is for minors, ages 12 to 18. Other sections, including six “neighborhood” pods that are like apartments or college suites and other dorms with bunk beds, are for young people through age 24.
There has been a waitlist at the four-story, 136-bed shelter since it opened a year and a half ago, replacing a dilapidated, 40-bed shelter where kids were crammed into dorm rooms crowded with bunks.
The need has only increased since the opening of what Urban Peak calls the “Mothership,” as two other homeless shelters for youth — the PLACE in Colorado Springs and TGTHR’s Chase House in Boulder — closed their doors in the past five months. There is now just one other homeless shelter in the state with designated space for youth, a 28-bed shelter called The Landing in Loveland.
“As both of those closed, our waitlists exploded,” Urban Peak CEO Christina Carlson said as she gave The Colorado Sun a tour of the completed Mothership. “We are feeling the pressure.”
Teens and young adults are showing up at the shelter after riding public buses to Denver from other Colorado cities. Homeless outreach workers in Colorado Springs, Boulder and elsewhere are calling Urban Peak to see if they have space for more teenagers. Schools, child welfare caseworkers and police departments send kids as young as 12.
Since it opened in August 2024, the shelter has helped 866 young people, providing overnight shelter, meals, help with permanent housing, support groups and life skills classes. About 130 minors have lived at the shelter in the past year, and only two of those left the shelter to go into foster care. The rest were reunited with family, Carlson said.
The shelter is the first in Denver to designate shelter beds for people ages 21-24. “We have had a waitlist since the day we opened,” she said.
It shows that young adults, who could stay in adult shelters, want to stay with people their own age. “They are choosing to be here,” Carlson said. “It’s an environment that’s more conducive to healing.”
It’s a pattern visible on the streets, too, according to Urban Peak’s outreach workers, who walk the city asking young people if they need food, supplies or a place to sleep. “Youth have always hidden in a different way, and tend to be in smaller groups,” Carlson said. “Youth find each other and are purposely putting themselves separate. You may see them in the adult camps, but the younger youth really kind of pocket into their own groups.”
More than 90% are leaving for safe housing situations
Data so far shows that 92% of young adults who leave the shelter find safe housing situations, which includes moving in with relatives or friends, but not couch surfing or going back to the streets, a car or to an unhealthy relationship. About 80% moving out are working or looking for work.
At the shelter, there are art classes, cooking instruction, laundry rooms and an outdoor basketball court. Young people can take music therapy, join support groups and relax inside oval-shaped reading nooks built into the wall of a common area. The cafeteria that looks like one at a summer camp offers three meals daily, including a breakfast of pancakes, eggs, sausage and bacon on a recent December day.
In the neighborhood pods, with names including “Lupine,” “The Spark” and “Nest of Hope,” teens and young adults have separate bedrooms but share kitchens and living rooms. They’re grouped together based on what they have in common — two neighborhoods are for young people who are working or going to school, one is for people with developmental disabilities and another is for young mothers with children up to age 3. The next neighborhood to open will house young people dealing with substance use issues who can take suboxone or methadone as they recover from addiction.
Five young moms live together in a neighborhood with brightly colored couches and a small kitchen stocked with Cheerios and spaghetti. The sixth resident was due to have her baby any day.
The pod, and the entire building, has a “trauma-informed” design, with high ceilings, natural light, no dark corners and no blind corners so residents can see what’s ahead down the hallway.
The shelter 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. It has an annual operating budget of $12 million, about 40% of which is federal, state and local government funding.
“One of the only safe spaces that I’ve known”
Three years ago, when MaKayla was 16, her mother dropped her off at the front door of the old Urban Peak shelter.
That shelter was torn down to make way for the new one, but MaKayla remembers how crowded it was and how much she didn’t want to stay there. “My mom dropped me off after a really bad conflict,” she said. “It’s kind of like being dropped into a bucket of cold water, but when you start to swim, the water becomes not as cold anymore.”
MaKayla, who didn’t want her last name used to protect her privacy, stayed for three weeks, then returned to her mother, who had been homeless but then found an apartment.
“My mother and I, we’re like oil and water, and if we’re left on fire for too long, there’s gonna be a grease fire,” MaKayla said. “So when I was 17, I ended up running away.”
MaKayla went to an Urban Peak shelter for the second time, this time the downtown location that temporarily housed teens while the new Mothership shelter was under construction. After three months, she entered a Job Corps training program in office administration and then attempted to live with her mother again. It didn’t last.
In August, she moved into the new Urban Peak shelter, the Mothership, and in October, she got into her own apartment, with the help of her case manager, who assisted in securing housing subsidies. MaKayla, now 19, has been looking for a job, applying for about 15 in the span of two weeks.
She credits Urban Peak — all three of the locations where she has lived — for helping her get through the past three years.
“There are a lot of people that struggle in the world, and a lot of times we don’t see it,” she said. “A lot of those people fall through the cracks, and a lot of people look down upon the homeless population. They call them lazy. It’s not fair, because the reason I ended up homeless was because my father stopped paying for our rent while my mother was unemployed. There needs to be safe havens for people like that. I feel like this space is honestly one of the only safe spaces that I’ve known.”
