Denver mayor’s homeless hoax: Shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic

Denver Mayor Johnston has played a brilliant hoax on voters.

Pledging to move 1,000 homeless persons off the streets by the end of the year, what the mayor really did was count the number of homeless folks who registered to be part of his effort.

He would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those rotten kids over at Denverite and other media outlets who busted Johnston’s charade.

To be counted on the dashboard, people experiencing homelessness simply had to leave an encampment and be brought inside to one of the city’s House1000 facilities, and have a caseworker enter their name into the seven-county Homelessness Management Information System.

House1000 facilities could include a room in a hotel or motel the city purchased, a group shelter like Crossroads, or the home of a relative or friend.

There were no requirements for how long people stayed inside after data was entered. If someone went back to the street the same day the information was entered, the city would still count their housing outcome as successful on the dashboard.

The cost of this charade — $48 million taxpayer dollars. Then the city tried to cover it up. You can read more about that here.

What the homeless dashboard cites is the “total people moved indoors.” But who knew it was through a revolving door?

Currently, the dashboard claims a total of 607 homeless people are no longer homeless.

That number includes permanent housing for 182, another 110 have been sheltered longer than a month, and 287 for 15 minutes less than 30 days, which adds up to 579.

The dashboard claims the total number for folks “still indoors” is 583, so, their math still seems a little fuzzy.

Even with an average length of stay of 28 days, that is not getting people off the street, it’s just rearranging who gets to go indoors for a period of time.

Of the 600 the city claims towards its 1,000 goal, only one homeless person has entered a treatment program.

That’s the real tragedy of the mayor’s charade.

Johnston said Tuesday he’s ordered several more homeless camps cleaned up over the Christmas holiday in order to reach his bureaucratic goal of hitting a random number with no actual meaning or permanent outcome.

It took them long enough, but numerous reporters asking questions and challenging the bogus dashboard are what finally exposed the numbers game being played by Johnston and his team.

We expect Johnston will claim by New Years Day that he hit his bogus target of 1,000 homeless people off the streets.

But like the emperor who has no clothes, we will still be able to see the homeless problem when the camps pop back up, and Johnston’s bare ass is flapping in the wind.