The Life’s Work of John Parvensky L’79: Helping the Homeless

n 2015 in Denver, Colorado, former President Bill Clinton toured a new health center site that would serve the homeless. Use of the New Markets Tax Credit made the facility a reality, and Clinton, who crafted the tax credit program in his final year in office, wanted to see his work in action.

“I pointed out a window to the parking lot across the alley and basically told him that once we got this one done, the next project was to build a recuperative center to meet the needs of people being inappropriately discharged from hospitals,” said John Parvensky L’79, who was then the CEO of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. “His words were, ‘I bet you will.’”

Clinton’s words proved prophetic. On the cusp of his spring 2023 retirement, Parvensky oversaw the crowning achievement of his 38-year career at the Coalition: the Renaissance Legacy Lofts and Stout Street Recuperative Care Center opened in October 2022.

The center addresses the problem of hospitals discharging homeless people who need recuperative care but are ill-equipped to recover on the streets or in shelters. “There have been horrendous cases of people being dropped off on a park bench still in hospital garb,” Parvensky said, adding that both medical complications and hospital readmission occur at higher rates for discharged patients.

The lofts and care center comprise a nine-story building with 75 beds and 24-hour nursing, medical, psychiatric, and clinical staffing to assist the homeless recover from hospital stays or acute conditions on the first three floors, he said. Ninety-eight units of supportive housing top the structure on the next six floors.

When the project opened, Parvensky met a new resident in the lobby who was having open heart surgery the next day. “He told me, ‘I’ll be able to come out of the hospital and go to the Recuperative Care Center before I go back to my housing unit,’” Parvensky said. “It was crystal clear what we had done was exactly what was needed.”

Parvensky began his legal career in Philadelphia, where he worked with the Community Resources Center on mortgage discrimination and housing law affecting people with low incomes. In 1985, he moved to Colorado for the mountain environment and joined the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless as CEO. “I took on the task using my legal skills to create lasting solutions for the homeless and stayed there until my retirement in May,” he said. “When I started, we had a staff of six and budget of $60,000. When I left, we had 750 staff and a budget of a little over $110 million.”

During his tenure, Parvensky renovated Denver’s 24-hour shelter to increase capacity. He also oversaw the expansion of a two-room healthcare clinic for the homeless to multiple facilities with more than 85 clinical rooms.

Healthcare and homelessness were deeply connected, Parvensky found, and the Coalition operates on a three-pronged approach of integrating the two with advocacy.

“We found pretty quickly that if we were providing healthcare to people and then sending them back on the street, the likelihood of their life status improving was pretty minimal,” he said. “We were able to acquire and build over 2,000 housing units and expand not only the health clinic but integrate behavioral health, substance treatment services, and social work … to address the whole issue.”

Over the decades, the Coalition has housed thousands of Denver’s homeless population. “We’ve had a pretty high success rate in terms of keeping people in housing,” Parvensky said. “There have been a number of studies that looked at our work that demonstrated it was not only effective but also saved the community money in terms of emergency costs, jail costs, and hospital costs — and that’s driven a continued focus on a holistic approach.”

Other American cities like Seattle and Portland have used similar approaches with success, he said, and Baltimore recently began attempting to replicate the Coalition’s work.

Permanently solving the problem of homelessness, Parvensky said, is possible but improbable. “It’s not that we don’t know how to do it, it’s just that there has never been a commitment of resources commensurate with homeless,” he said.

When the Recuperative Center opened on October 6, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock proclaimed it “John Parvensky Day” in Denver, according to a press release. “No one has done more for our city and for the people of our state than you have,” Hancock told him.

In March, Parvensky was recognized with the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2023 Lifetime Service Award. Now retired, Parvensky said he looks forward to spending more time with his young grandchildren and also wants to continue advocating for the homeless population.

“As I look forward, I still want to work in the area of social justice and continue to work consulting with other groups in other cities and help them learn from our experience — and maybe replicate some of that work.”