Denver’s recent shift to a pay-for-performance contract model has improved day-to-day operations across the city’s seven noncongregate homeless shelters, but has struggled to deliver promising numbers on its most important metric: getting people out of shelters and into housing.
However, city officials still plan to expand the model to five additional city shelters while working to improve and adjust metrics to drive housing outcomes, which the city’s Department of Housing Stability states is the program’s biggest constraint.
Due to limited housing opportunities, officials said, the number of long-term shelter stays increased, as did the average length of stay for all properties from 166 days to 229…