The City of Boulder is weighing an updated strategy to end unsheltered homelessness as soon as 2028.
The goal comes as at least 140 people sleep outside in the city, according to the July 2025 point-in-time count. That number is slightly higher than last summer’s but below 2023 levels.
City officials estimate Boulder would need an additional $11 million each year for services and housing to achieve the goal. Such an investment is unlikely given the city’s projected budget shortfall for 2025, flattening sales tax revenue growth and uncertainty around federal and state funding.
Under the plan, the city would scale up existing programs, including “diversion” efforts that reconnect people to prior housing or social networks rather than offer subsidized housing. The plan calls for prioritizing people based on how long they have been homeless, among other factors, without setting strict residency requirements, according to a consultant who helped draft the plan.
The plan also calls for larger investments in permanent supportive housing that combines rental assistance with support services, as well as affordable housing more generally.
New priorities include short-term rental subsidies for one year or less; encouraging private development of lower-cost microunits, boarding houses and hostels; and partnering with the county and state on residential programs for people with a mental illness or addiction.
These ideas come as Boulder also ramps up enforcement of its camping ban near downtown and continues to clear out encampments under its Safe and Managed Public Spaces program, which costs about $4 million annually, according to the city. Recently, enforcement has focused along the Boulder Creek path, with the city preemptively posting no-camping notices, a shift from the previous practice of giving 72 hours’ notice. The new strategy would likely build on these efforts.
At a Boulder Chamber event on homelessness this week, Police Chief Steve Redfearn said the police department is working with the city attorney’s office to adjust its strategy for people who refuse to vacate certain areas. This could include banning somebody from a location as part of a municipal court sentence.
Police officers have said they typically direct unhoused people to the shelter or services. But Redfearn acknowledged there is a “severe lack of backup places” when the shelter is full. Separately, the city’s only youth shelter recently closed, citing funding challenges.
The new strategy does not call for an increase in emergency shelter beds. All Roads, the city’s largest shelter in North Boulder, has a capacity of about 180 beds in the winter. The new plan calls for reducing the average length of stay in the shelter from 73 to 46 days to allow the existing beds to serve more people.
It also proposes centralizing food and supply distributions at the Day Services Center in North Boulder rather than downtown parks. The city has previously raised concerns about providers using Central Park. Feet Forward’s Tuesday events that distribute hot meals in Central Park continue to draw dozens of people.
City officials said they intend for the strategy to guide Boulder City Council’s discussion of the city manager’s recommended 2026 budget later this year. The new strategy comes as Boulder prepares to host Sundance, one of the world’s largest film festivals, expected to draw tens of thousands of visitors, timing that could bring added attention to the city’s approach to visible homelessness.
The Boulder City Council held a study session on Aug. 14 to discuss the new strategy. Some councilmembers said they were concerned the city doesn’t have a plan for how to pay for it. Still, others indicated they generally supported it.
“I appreciate that this framing really encourages us to refuse to accept homelessness as an unsolvable tragedy,” Mayor Pro Tem Lauren Folkerts said. “It really pushes for finding and moving towards a solution.”
Brooke Stephenson contributed reporting for this story.
Respectfully, did anyone look at the big picture here? This proposes $11m per year to address a point count of 140 people, or ~$75,000 per person per year. This seems inappropriately expensive and there must be better ways to spend this money.
Oops, mine crossed with yours, same message – but is it any wonder we have a budget shortfall if our planners seriously think about money management in this way?
Oh My, do we need to send our planners back to math school?
$11M to solve a problem for 140 individuals is $78,571 per individual…IF you even take it to zero, which is unlikely and completely idealistic. Oh, and that is $11M is EACH YEAR according to this article. Please help me understand how that makes sense.
Put a mill levy raise on the ballot to pay for this. In the grand scheme of things, what’s 11 million to get our public spaces back? I think we’re all sick of the status quo with this situation.
The plan doesn’t account for surrounding areas diverting their people to Boulder. So, it appears that if we divert 60 percent of our folks, more will be diverted in. Shortening shelter stay to accommodate more people is a novel concept when we have no where for them to go. The city is broke and it’ll be interesting to see how this “plan”, more of an idea plays out, especially amid the current federal budget appropriations.
This proposal is nuts. Besides being unaffordable and incredibly expensive, it is /will be unpopular. Democrats are being drummed out of office on issues like this. The city / CC care more about homeless issues than the care of the citizens , infrastructure and every day safety. Folks are feed up with this group!
I recently read, and support, the idea that we focus efforts on the unhoused who have lived housed in Boulder County for at least one year. The fact, that we are re-housing people and yet our unhoused rate remains the same, suggests that we are housing many more people from around the country. Boulder can’t house or support the entire population of unhoused persons.
Give them all $3,000 a month to pay for rent and food and save $6 million.
Then another 140 replace them, or more because they know if you come to Boulder you get paid $3k a month. Doesn’t work.
And how do you decide who gets it? Oh, just camp here for at least 30 days and we pay you?
The city’s only proposal of $11 million works out to over $78,000 per homeless person based on 2025 statistics of 140 people. That does not seem reasonable given how many working citizens in Boulder get by for a lot less. Can we not do any better and perhaps offer part-time employment as part of the deal?
That would require a new approach and some innovative thinking. The city has been very clear for many years on how it wants to handle the homeless population and this new report doubles down on all that. No thinking outside the box in Boulder. This was all very predictable.
This plan also ignores the fact that many people won’t sleep at the shelter for a long list of reasons. Just turning the shelter into an assembly line for processing people quickly through beds is not apt to change that. I am also doubtful that 60% could be diverted through reunification or other diversion tactics despite Clutch claiming other cities are successful doing this. Probably most of that $11M will be used to hire an army of case managers who can process this large number of people through diversion each year before they would even go through Coordinated Entry. And that cost doesn’t even include all the new money they want for more PSH and Rapid Rehousing. Really, this plan is just a more coordinated and systematic approach to what they are already doing. Nothing new here just more of what they have been doing for years now.