Loveland has a population of about 81,000 people; only 180 people were tallied as homeless in the 2025 Point in Time Count, a federally funded exercise conducted every January across the country. Most of Loveland's homeless residents were in a shelter, according to the PIT count, with only 78 living on the streets. Larimer County's total count was about 580 homeless individuals, with approximately 190 of them living outside.
The City and County of Denver, which is almost ten times Loveland's size, tallied more than 7,300 homeless individuals, with 6,500 of them in shelter and about 800 living on the streets, according to the 2025 PIT count.
"It's a growing issue," says Michael Stein, lead pastor at the First Christian Church in Loveland and a member of the city's now-defunct Loveland Homelessness Task Force. "You've got people who are close to the streets themselves."
Loveland banned homeless encampments in 2022 as an emergency response to mounting business and public safety complaints. The homeless population in the city was slightly higher then, with 190 people counted in the 2022 PIT — but about 63 percent were living on the streets, compared to 43 percent now.
"We had a large number of business owners come into the chamber talking about how the homeless were affecting their businesses, people, employees and customers being afraid to go into stores, vandalism," Mayor Jacki Marsh told Loveland City Council at an August 5 meeting, describing why the city passed the 2022 ordinance banning encampments and allowing sweeps if shelter spaces were available. "We had a huge encampment. There was a reason this code was put in there."
The city had never dealt with large encampments before, and it was a "shock" to see them, Stein recalls. "The pandemic probably increased the amount of homelessness and also the visibility. One encampment in particular had gotten really large by standards in this area. The city had moved to close that or disperse those folks, but it didn't really have any place to send them, so it established temporary solutions to that issue."
Then in June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Grants Pass v. Johnson that local laws ordering fines or jail time for people sleeping outside don't count as cruel and unusual punishment. That opened the door to adopting stricter enforcement bans; in December, Loveland City Council directed staff to look at cutting the cost of its homelessness response and rewriting its encampment ban.
"Some of us were working on permanent solutions or long-term solutions," remembers Stein.
They haven't found them yet.
What Is The Best Way Forward?
With 31,000 homeless residents statewide, Colorado municipalities are trying to determine the best path forward. But few agree on how to handle homelessness. Denver and Aurora have dueling approaches: Denver relies on a "housing-first" model, which brings homeless individuals indoors and surrounds them with services. Aurora follows a "work first" philosophy, and wants homeless people to get a job in order to stay in housing.On July 24, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that cuts federal funding from housing-first cities and directs grant money towards cities that prefer stricter enforcement against homelessness. Trump's move is making it harder for nonprofits to serve the homeless, Stein says. "With the uncertainty of federal funding around certain programs, we're trying to compartmentalize and take smaller bites," he explains. "One of the nonprofits was providing services to homeless. Now they're narrowing their target to prevention."
Even before Trump's new order, other Colorado cities were taking a look at their homelessness laws in light of the Grants Pass decision. In June, Greeley City Council passed a camping ban that makes it a misdemeanor to sleep outside. Around the same time, the Glenwood Springs City Council revisited its laws to see where it could save money on its homelessness response.
In July, Longmont City Council discussed an ordinance making it illegal to sit or lie in public, which is very similar to a camping ban, postponing a vote until later this month. Colorado Springs City Council expanded a similar sit-lie ordinance in January.
Still, no one in Colorado seems to have found a perfect solution. Last August, Douglas County said it had reduced its homeless population to zero, even though this January's PIT count says it still had 58 homeless residents, 28 living on the streets. A few months later, Castle Rock, the county seat, had to pay $225,000 to the Rock Church to settle a federal case over whether the church could house people in RVs, as it wanted to.
A Step In the Right Direction?
When Loveland passed its encampment ban in 2022, the city didn't have enough shelter space. There was the Loveland Resource Center, a day shelter with lockers, showers and services, but it could only accommodate 22 people at a time for overnight stays, so the city had to rent out local motel rooms to house the others."The right thing is that we provide a place for people that have no place to be," Marsh recalled at the August 5 meeting. "Because of the municipal code we adopted, we actually moved forward. We kept people alive."
In April 2023, the city opened the South Railroad Facility as a taxpayer-funded overnight shelter for seventy people. That July, the city created the Loveland Homelessness Task Force to guide decision-making. But four months later, Loveland voters eliminated a 3 percent city sales tax, forcing Loveland City Council to begin considering where to make cuts.
"You had these budget cuts and 'Why are we giving money to the homeless when we can't have a fireworks display or we have to close this swim beach,'" Stein recalls. "If we have to start choosing what our priorities were for more limited resources, there was a feeling that spending $2 million a year on homelessness wasn't the best use of money."
In fact, in 2022 and 2023, the city spent more than $4.1 million setting up shelter space at South Railroad and paying for motel space. In 2024, the city spent over $2.2 million to operate the Loveland Resource Center and South Railroad, and it was looking at spending even more in 2025.
Loveland asked a handful of nonprofits in the area to take over the South Railroad Facility and the Loveland Resource Center, but "none were interested" because of the cost, challenges and the lack of a long-term plan, according to a report by Loveland city staff.
Meanwhile, between 2022 and 2024, Loveland swept nearly a thousand encampments, according to city data, and South Railroad often had to turn away people seeking shelter.
Last December, the First Christian Church asked Loveland City Council to rezone the church to allow it to host a resource center and 24/7 shelter for 500 people. The homelessness task force pushed for council to approve the rezoning.
When it came up for a vote in February, though, council voted 5-4 to postpone the matter indefinitely, and First Christian withdrew its application. While the shelter wouldn't have required city funds, council was opposed to the idea of having it in a residential area.
"People don't want it anywhere close to them, the homeless or the solutions," Stein says. "It honestly caught me by surprise."
The homelessness task force dissolved immediately after the proposal fell through. Stein, who had been with the group for nine months, says his colleagues were convinced Loveland was just trying to get rid of homeless residents, not help them.
"The problem that people want to solve is not that there's homelessness, but that it's visible," Stein says. "It seems to me a fair number of the council people want to encourage people to go somewhere else...what they want to invest in is not services for the homeless but bus tickets."
In July, Loveland announced that the South Railroad Facility would close its doors by September 30, leaving the city with just the few dozen shelter beds occasionally open at the resource center. By then, though, Fort Collins had approved plans by the Rescue Mission to build a $27 million shelter with 250 beds, which could help house overflow from Loveland.
With the Grants Pass decision, Loveland could also rewrite its encampment ban to allow sweeps even when no shelter space is available. So on August 5, Loveland City Council considered a proposal to do just that, with supporters evoking images of Denver to warn how bad it could get if the city stopped sweeping encampments.
"Denver and other large cities, there's an attitude of fearfulness that that's going to happen here," Stein says. "There's other people thinking that, 'Well, if there's other cities dealing with it, then we'll send our homeless there."
"We don't have the financing to continue moving forward even with the bare minimum sheltering that we're offering," said Councilwoman Andrea Samson. "I think about 16th Street Mall, and I won't take my kids there because there's encampments up and down the mall. There's individuals who might be experiencing a mental break or high."
"We are operating on a tight budget but I believe effective leadership requires balancing facts with empathy," Loveland Councilwoman Laura Light-Kovacs told her colleagues. "It's possible to do both."
So council voted 5-3 to keep the 2022 encampment ban unchanged. But with the only real shelter in the city closing, Loveland Councilman Patrick McFall predicted that the police will be "handcuffed" from making any sweeps.
