Volunteers were rescuing Venezuelan families with young children from sleeping outside this week as Denver has scaled back migrant services and the time people were allotted to stay in city-funded hotel rooms expired.
The city, in response to complaints from volunteers that children were ending up outside, decided Thursday afternoon to reopen a city building in Civic Center park to house migrant families with nowhere to sleep.
Denver Human Services officials said they were rushing to reactivate the McNichols Building on Colfax Avenue, including sending staff and ordering meals. They expected up to 10 families Thursday night, and possibly more during the next few days as a weekend storm approaches.
The re-opening of the congregate shelter in a civic building meant for arts and culture was not part of the plan as the city scales down migrant services that have already cost $61 million. But Mayor Mike Jonhston and his staff have said multiple times that they would prevent kids from ending up on Denver streets.
“Nobody ever said this was going to be easy,” said Jon Ewing, spokesperson for Denver Human Services. “You are going to have families who haven’t figured it out yet. There are a lot of factors competing against them. It’s not a problem of their own making.”
The city is in the process of decreasing the number of hotels it has used to house migrants to three from seven, closing about one each week for four weeks. The third one closed as a city shelter on Wednesday.
And after a pause on hotel room time limits, the city is sticking to the policy of allowing adults to stay 14 days in city-funded hotel rooms while families have 42 days.
The number of migrants in city-funded hotel rooms is now about 940, down from more than 4,500 in January. Hundreds of families have left hotels in the past month, and many have moved into apartments with financial help from nonprofits.
But Wednesday night, multiple families were stranded throughout Denver as they had to vacate hotel rooms.
The families sat in hotel lobbies, hoping that nonprofits or Denver Human Services outreach workers would tell them where they could go. Hours passed, and the families began to panic, in some cases sending requests for help on Facebook pages created by grassroots volunteers.
Lydia Flynn runs a Facebook group to help migrants in northeastern Denver. She had 40 followers when she started it in October. Now, she has 1,400.
Flynn found a volunteer to pick up two of the families in different hotels, then drive them and their belongings to a McDonald’s, where she met them and bought them dinner.
“We are talking about 9 p.m.,” she said. “It’s late. It’s cold. These kids haven’t eaten.”
One family includes a 7-year-old and a pregnant woman. The other is a couple with a 3-year-old, and the father was just released from the hospital and his leg has an infection, Flynn said.
With no help from nonprofits or the city, Flynn ended up paying for two hotel rooms. “I am eating spaghetti for the rest of the week,” she said. Flynn was advised by one local organization to take the families to an encampment, but she refused.
“I am not putting a pregnant mom in a tent,” she said. “I’m not putting kids in a tent.”
The only bright spot is that the families became fast friends and are now hoping to find an apartment or a basement to rent together. What they want most are work permits, so they can legally find jobs in Denver, Flynn said.
While Flynn was helping those two families, a city outreach worker was working late into the evening to find temporary shelter for seven other families.
The city occasionally uses the McNichols Building as an emergency shelter for the chronically homeless population, including last week when Denver received about a foot of snow. The city also used the building as a shelter when it cleaned up a giant migrant encampment near Speer Boulevard and Zuni Street in January, offering people in tents to hop on buses for a ride to the congregate shelter.
This week, city outreach workers are trying to move about 50-60 people out of a migrant encampment in a parking lot at Elitch Gardens. Tents are lined up in the shadow of a roller coaster, and the amusement park is scheduled to open in April.