Born and raised in northern Colorado and living most recently in Adams County, Joseph Valdez didn’t see many homeless people in his neighborhoods.

But when his family became homeless recently, he felt no one saw him, either.

“I thought someone, something has to be out there,” Valdez said. “It felt like they were turning their backs on us.”

While the need remains in the Denver suburbs, there are those who think funding to help homeless families is not enough of a priority. Organizations have taken it upon themselves to form their own networks of support.

Valdez, like most homeless people, did not stand visibly on street corners asking for money. For a few months, he lived at his older daughter’s home, along with his girlfriend and their two children.

When that situation didn’t work out, the four spent almost a week living out of their Nissan Xterra as shelters placed them on wait lists or asked them to travel to Denver to stand in line for a spot.

With two children — one has autism — and running low on gas, which still had to get Valdez’s girlfriend to her job in Arvada, those options didn’t work.

Overall, there were 11,167 homeless men, women and children counted in the 2013 point-in-time survey conducted by the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative (MDHI) across the seven-county Denver metro area.

A county-by-county breakdown of MDHI’s 2013 survey shows that families make up the largest percentage of homeless in the suburbs. In Broomfield County, the rate of families among the homeless is 85 percent; in Adams County, 80 percent; 78 percent in Douglas County; and 73 percent in Jefferson County. In Denver, just 50 percent are families with children.

“We all have a huge issue, and certainly everyone deserves a home,” said Terry Moore, executive director of one of Adams County’s three shelters, Almost Home.

“Sixteenth Street merchants and businesses can put a lot more pressure on Washington than the communities can.”

Opening Doors plan

According to the federal Opening Doors plan, which started in June 2010, the government’s goal is to end chronic homelessness and veteran homelessness by 2015 and among families and other populations by 2020.

“We see that chronic homelessness is usually a small percent, but they can take up a lot of resources,” said Gary Sanford, executive director of MDHI. “They can be in and out of jail, in and out of emergency rooms. They are front-end users, or frequent users, and it really does become very expensive. The federal government’s idea is how do you lessen the impact to free up some of those dollars.”

In fiscal year 2012, Colorado received $21.1 million from the federal government for homeless programs, slightly up from about $20.2 million in 2011.

Family Tree operates shelters in the suburbs and other programs for the homeless across the metro area. Its director says they don’t worry about funding changes because they have developed a complete network of care within their programs.

But they have seen less grant opportunities for their work.

“It has become more of a fractured sort of system in terms of how the resources are allocated,” Family Tree chief executive officer Scott Shields said. “It’s incumbent on providers like Family Tree to build programming that creates a network.”

A lack of shelters, beds and resources in the suburbs push some to leave for bigger cities like Denver. Home prices are rising, and wages haven’t kept up for the majority of jobs available in the suburbs, officials and advocates say.

“I think we see a large number of folks on the edge of homelessness throughout the metro area,” Sanford said. “I know that in some of our suburban communities, not all of them, they don’t have enough resources to prevent these folks from tipping over, or there isn’t the affordable housing stock that they need.”

B.J. Iacino, vice president of public policy and communications for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, said the numbers are skewed because people go to where they find services.

“The fundamental issue is there are limited resources, and people migrate to where they can find assistance,” Iacino said.

“There are homeless-service providers that operate different services, but there is a continuum of care in the Front Range. It does take a community to work together.”

The Denver Rescue Mission, which has programs specifically for families, tracks the last known address for participants in one of their family programs, the Family Rescue Ministry.

According to that data, 51 percent of the families served in 2013 were from outside of Denver. Of those, most reported their last address in Aurora or Englewood.

“We help men, women and families. Families are still the most in need in the metro area,” said Alexxa Gagner, spokeswoman for the Denver Rescue Mission. “But also one of the great things that’s happened in Denver is different service agencies have gotten out of their silos. We’re not going to turn anyone away. We can connect them to other services.”

Less federal cash

Dana Scott, coordinator for education of homeless children and youth at the Colorado Department of Education, said this year they funded 16 grants, down from 17 last year.

She estimates the federal pool that funds the Colorado grants amounts to about $28 per homeless student per year.

Adams County School District 50 in Westminster, Adams School District 14 in Commerce City and the Englewood School District each report around 10 percent of their students are classified as homeless — the majority living in “doubled-up situations.”

Denver Public Schools, by comparison, has 2.4 percent of its students classified as homeless.

“There seems to be a very big gap,” said Adams County commissioner Eva Henry. “Homelessness in the suburbs looks different, and we don’t see it.”

Advocates say newly homeless families, like Valdez’s family and those who make up a majority in the suburbs, often find friends or family to stay with, although the placements don’t usually work for long.

Shields said that people in the suburbs increasingly are seeing homeless on the streets and are slowly learning that homelessness is not just an urban issue.

“We do need to be putting pressure on the federal government,” Henry said, “to start changing how they think about homelessness in the suburbs.”

Yesenia Robles: 303-954-1372, yrobles@denverpost.com or twitter.com/yeseniarobles