Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Community Planning and Housing Committee with Denver City Council.

Your community planning and housing committee starts now.

Community Planning and Housing Committee.

I'm Chair Amanda Sandwell representing Northwest Denver District 1.

We have a really exciting agenda ahead of us today.

Just one briefing, but let's go ahead and get started with introductions.

And I'll start with the council member online.

Hi everyone, Shanto Lewis, Council District 8.

Thank you.

And now I'll start.

All right.

Ronald Vives, Lucky District 7.

I'm Anna Solier, District 5.

Well, Cashman, South Denver District 6.

Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver, District 4.

Darrow Watson 5, District 9.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District 3.

Great.

And now our what we have our host annual plan, 2026 work plan, even though it's halfway through the year.

I do know that we have a new executive director.

So if you just want to give a little history on how you got here, Cole, that would be great for the public who may not know all of the intricacies of Denver.

But I'll pass it over to you.

The floor is yours.

Wonderful.

Thank you so much.

So I'm Cole Chandler, the executive director of the Department of Housing Stability.

Been in that role since April 13th, so just over three months now.

A little personal history.

I did a Master of Divinity degree.

I moved to Denver to join the Denver Catholic Worker Community and moved into the Catholic Worker House in 2014.

So I started to learn about housing and homelessness issues firsthand from the people I lived with, the people that I volunteered alongside of.

That work led to some advocacy work where I helped uh launch and co-found the Colorado Village Collaborative and started the Tiny Homes model here in Denver, worked with several members of City Council, past and present to bring that forward.

Spent a year after that at the state working on working on a governor's wildly important goal related to homelessness and then joined the Johnston administration as the senior advisor on homelessness in 2023 and am now very pleased to lead the Department of Housing Stability.

And so it's a little bit of my past.

But yeah, grateful to all of you for your partnership all along the way from my time in community to my time now leading this agency.

Alright, so we have a bit of our agenda here.

We'll look at some of our 2025 accomplishments, the current host organizational structure, just to give you an idea of kind of how we work and who we are.

We will uh look at our core departmental priorities and then uh 2026 goals as well.

All right, starting uh with a look back and a look at our structure.

I think you know, of course, as we think about what we have accomplished at host over the last couple of years.

We're really proud of the reduction that we've delivered in unsheltered homelessness, a 64% reduction since uh 2023.

We're proud of the fact that this calendar year we've delivered um Denver's first reduction in overall homelessness in more than a decade.

Um that was a 12% reduction in the last point in time count.

Um so those are some of the outcomes that we're really proud of on the homelessness side.

Um we're obviously oriented around our goals to uh increase housing affordability, uh decrease the number of uh low and middle income households that are living at uh cost burdened.

Um and some of the ways that we count towards that.

That's some of the inputs that we measure are the number of units that we're creating and preserving, um, as well as the number of households that we're serving in terms of prevention work and then the number of households that we're bringing out of homelessness through our homelessness resolution work.

So here's some of that key data from 2025, um, but happy to dive into that uh more as we go throughout the presentation.

Uh a bit about our structure.

You know, we really have two primary divisions delivering our work.

Um you can think of these as four pillars across our organization.

We have the housing stability and homelessness resolution pillar.

That work is led by deputy director Jeff Kazitzki, who you know.

He'll be in committee in the next couple weeks presenting on our performance-based contracts.

Our housing opportunity work is uh led by uh interim deputy director Laya Mitchell, and so that oversees the investments that we make in affordable housing, the work that we do to prevent displacement, as well as our preservation work and our asset management and compliance work.

So every time that we invest a dollar and creating a building, we ensure that that building maintains its affordability through our asset management and compliance work.

And so that's really the kind of the core functions of the organization.

Um then we also have an operations and impact division, that's where all of our finance lives, our contracts and procurement, and all of our data work.

Um that work is currently led by a couple of directors.

Um Amy Webb is our finance director, Brittany Aaron is our contracts and procurement director.