Denver Heading into the new year, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston graded his administration's 2024 goals, which included improving downtown, public safety and ending homelessness.The mayor celebrated the voter approved measure that allowed the Downtown Denver Partnership to invest $570 Million into downtown. Looking ahead, some of that is expected to do toward changing commercial space into residential space."We want your favorite server at the restaurant you go to downtown to be able to walk three blocks and live in an apartment downtown as well. That turns it from being just a business district to a real neighborhood district, and so we want more housing downtown, and these commercial buildings that are vacant are a great chance to use that space to both make it more active and more affordable," said Mayor Johnston. Denver mayor one-on-one: How to retain businesses in DenverThe Mayor's Office also reports what they said was the steepest drop in homicides in a decade. A priority in 2024 was to cut down on gun violence. The number of deadly shootings in the city went down 29%, the number of non-deadly shootings went down 22%.Another safety goal was to bring people who were living on the streets, indoors. According to the city, 2,233 people were brought indoors. Throughout the year 3,022 unites of affordable housing was opened as well.As of publishing, about 12% of the 2,233 people were listed as no longer indoors. Denver mayor one-on-one: Goals to reduce homelessness in 2025"We do know there are some people that have significant needs. You know, you can't come into one of our sites and steal or commit crimes or or threaten other individuals. So there are rules. If you don't meet those rules, you can't always stay, so we do want to hold people accountable that they're going to take responsibility for themselves, to help better their situation in life. We will do more housing support, more workforce support, to get people into jobs, and mental health and addiction support where it's needed. So we'll increase the amount of services we provide on those sites, while still holding people to the expectation that they're going to be good stewards of public dollars and deliver on results for themselves and for the city," said Johnston. The mayor said because the influx of migrants was unexpected at the beginning of last year, there were no official administrative goals as to how to respond, but did say he believed their strategy was a success. All nine migrant shelters have been closed and the mayor's office reports that the budget for migrants has been cut by 90%."We view ourselves as good regional partners, but we also know that each city gets to control the policies and practices in their own city. We think we've built a very successful strategy to respond to the need. It's a combination of providing services, getting people connected to jobs and they can support themselves and get housing, and also focusing on law enforcement to make sure that no one is breaking the law or committing violent crimes. So that's what's worked for us," said Johnston. Denver mayor one-on-one: Immigration and widespread impacts