Council discusses homelessness

Task force has been meeting for 6 months

The city of Loveland has faced numerous challenges in its response to homelessness in the last year, but enhanced data collection, the new task force and the completion of St. Valentine supportive housing are notable high notes along the way.

At a Loveland City Council study session on Tuesday, a panel of city staff members and representatives from Homeward Alliance delivered an update on current efforts to address the issue and long-term solutions under consideration.

The presentation opened with a discussion of the Homelessness Information Management System (HMIS), a statewide data protocol for tracking homeless individuals and families as they access services. Until this year, Loveland providers and nonprofits were not using any data tracking, making the scope of the issue difficult to measure, according to Sandra Wright of Homeward Alliance, the city’s lead agency for homelessness.

The city started using HMIS at the Loveland Resource Center or South Railroad shelter earlier this year, Wright told the council, as did nonprofits House of Neighborly Service and Community Kitchen. Combined, those facilities served 1,059 separate people between January and September, with 559 of whom defined as active, meaning they had received services in July-september.

“The number of people experiencing homelessness is a very fluid number,” Wright told City Council. “It’s not that Loveland has a set 200 people experiencing homelessness and as soon as they all are housed, we’re done. So it is a very fluid number of people entering and exiting homelessness quite often.”

David Rout of Homeward Alliance explained additional data collection efforts among the population, including coordinated entry, a system that helps connect specific people to specific housing opportunities. Such data was

used to select residents for the St. Valentine Apartments, a supportive housing development that will take dozens of locals out of the shelters, he said. The first residents are scheduled to move in next week.

“The result is that the overwhelming majority of people who are moving into St. Valentine are people who are known to the Loveland Resource Center, to the SRF, to the Community Kitchen…other agencies in the community,” Rout said.

The discussion then moved on to activities of the Loveland homelessness task force, an ad hoc group of nonprofit staff, business owners, city staff and others exploring the idea of a permanent shelter in Loveland that also provides food, case management and counseling services.

The task force has been meeting for six months, said Leah Johnson, a local consultant and former city councilor. Johnson explained that the group has identified infrastructure challenges as the top obstacle to getting a brick and mortar facility in Loveland, and will work in 2024 on overcoming it.

Johnson was followed by senior city planner Kerri Burchett, who talked about how a homeless shelter would fit in the city’s development code and potential locations within the city suitable for such a use.

Following the presentation, City Council members were generally supportive of the panel during questions and discussion, though many sounded a skeptical note about the development code and the future bureaucratic processes required to get a facility built.

Later, council members revisited a prior discussion on homelessness held in September and the process of crafting a “vision statement” on the issue.

Because it was a study session, City Council did not take any action on the issue.