Denver Mayor Mike Johnston celebrated his administration’s progress on some of the city’s biggest challenges during his first year in office on Monday while making a pitch for the first big initiative of his second — a sales tax increase to tackle affordable housing.
The mayor delivered his State of the City address a year and five days after he was sworn into office. It was a speech light on announcements of new programs, though Johnston previewed a few — including new on-foot “trust patrols” that police will use to reduce crime in neighborhoods and a volunteering initiative spearheaded by his wife, Courtney.
Instead, Johnston, 49, used the speech to press the importance of parts of his agenda he’s rolled out in recent months, including the housing tax, while taking stock of his first year.
Johnston talked about a homeless man he met last year when the man was living in a tent with visible rat bites on his back. The mayor’s All In Mile High initiative has now moved more than 1,600 people out of illegal encampments on the city’s streets and into shelters and housing units, he said.
“In these last 12 months, Denver has housed more people faster per capita than any city in America,” he said.
It’s an initiative that’s still a work in progress, with questions about how to house all those people permanently — and while downtown’s streets are largely clear of camping, people have set up tents in other parts of the city, including along the South Platte River.
Johnston also spoke about the people helped by the city as tens of thousands of migrants came to Denver over the last year, with some of them staying here. The Denver Asylum Seekers Program his administration launched this spring is dedicated to supporting roughly 800 people and their families with food, shelter, job training and legal support for six months as they await temporary work authorization from the federal government.
“Our work is not done, but our progress is dramatic,” Johnston said of his administration’s two signature programs thus far. “Our successes here have opened up new opportunities for even greater impact in the year ahead. Inside each of these struggles, we see the need for more work to be done.”
Johnston also spent time looking forward and asking Denverites for help, both by donating their time and through their tax dollars.
Earlier this month, Johnston and supporters on the City Council unveiled what they are calling the Affordable Denver sales tax measure. That 0.5% dedicated sales tax would raise an estimated $100 million a year, powering a raft of affordable housing efforts. They would be dedicated over the next decade to helping the city reach a goal of building or securing 45,000 more homes and apartments that are affordable to people struggling to afford to stay in Denver.
But ramping up the city’s efforts to that level will depend on support from voters.
“If we want to keep the (single) mom and the grandma and the college graduate in Denver, we can — but we have to choose it, and we have to fight for it,” Johnston said. He pivoted to what was the most urgent request in his speech, name-checking the initiative: “This November, I will ask you to choose it by voting for an Affordable Denver on your ballot.”
In a departure from his predecessor Michael Hancock, who gave his final State of the City speech in 2022 at the Montbello Recreation Center and tended to select city buildings for the annual address, Johnston on Monday delivered his remarks inside a privately owned venue. He spoke from the stage of the historic Paramount Theatre, 1621 Glenarm Place.
The nearly 100-year-old art deco theater is just feet from Denver’s still-under-construction 16th Street Mall rehab project.
One of Johnston’s key focuses since he was still on the campaign trail has been revitalizing downtown and breaking the “doom loop” of visible homelessness and crime, coupled with greatly diminished office worker foot traffic in the wake of the pandemic. In May, Johnston announced plans to expand an obscure special downtown taxing authority that he and supporters project could generate $500 million in new public investment downtown over the coming decade.
On Monday, Johnston noted that by the time he gives his State of the City address next year, most of the 16th Street Mall will finally be refurbished, with construction fencing gone. But that project is only part of his vision for the city’s core and what he thinks major public investment can bring to the area.
“We will use these resources to turn downtown from a central business district to a central neighborhood district, complete with affordable housing, public parks, child care, great retail, restaurants, art and music, and walkable, activated streets where you can get lost in a vibrant world you can only find in Denver,” he said.
To close his speech Monday, Johnston returned to the central theme of his inaugural address a year earlier: the role that he says belief plays in overcoming daunting problems.
“Those challenges that have overwhelmed other communities have only made us stronger,” he said. “Because the one thing you won’t find in Denver is that destructive, contagious belief that we can’t. Here in this capital of the New West … people believe in each other and they lean on each other and they fight for each other — fortified by the deep belief that all our problems are solvable, and we are the ones to solve them.”
This is a developing story that will be updated.
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