The city of Denver has ended an experiment.

In May 2017, the city paid $30,000 to install 10 large storage lockers for use by people experiencing homelessness. Standing alongside a busy road in the city’s mission district, the 4-by-6-foot cabinets were meant to give people a safe harbor for clothing and other possessions.

Now, they’re gone — though they may return eventually.

“We started seeing issues of folks remaining in them, both day and night,” said Chris Conner, the director of the city’s homelessness agency, Denver’s Road Home.

Also concerning, he said, were unconfirmed reports that people were selling narcotics inside the storage lockers. There also were allegations of prostitution, according to city spokesperson Julie Smith. But no one was charged with any prostitution or drug crime that may have occurred in the storage lockers.

Sleeping in the lockers is dangerous because they are not ventilated, Smith said. Separately, about half of the units have been damaged beyond reuse by vandalism and break-ins.

The city stationed the lockers near Park Avenue and Lawrence Street, a busy intersection where large crowds of people congregate and wait for access to services at the Denver Rescue Mission and other nonprofits. Ultimately, nonprofit employees and police officers complained that the program wasn’t working, according to Conner.

“There was a feeling that they had crossed a threshold and were making the area less stable and safe for people,” he said. The intersection has been a particular focus for the city, with cleaning crews and outreach workers visiting daily.

The storage lockers were a “pilot,” the kind of small test that city government frequently uses to test a new or controversial idea. The city offered up the lockers for individuals to use for months-long stretches. At the time, city officials warned that “misuse of the lockers, vandalism, or other unanticipated results,” could force them to cancel the project.

Initially, the city said that the program would run for at least 90 days. It ended up lasting closer to a year, but only about a dozen people used the lockers during that time. The program was run by Denver Public Works — the department in charge of the city’s streets and sewers.

The nearby St. Francis Center still offers smaller, indoor storage spaces, some of which are funded by the city, as do DRM and other nonprofits. Those spaces are generally smaller and less immediately accessible than the outdoor lockers. Instead, people usually need to check in with a nonprofit’s staff.

Many of the center’s clients want to store ID cards, family pictures, birth certificates and clothing, according to St. Francis director Tom Luehrs.

“So, just staying connected to some stuff is really important for part of their well-being, as it would be for any of us,” he said. “And it certainly helps, as people are trying to get off the streets, that they have a clean set of clothes to appear at a job interview, or warm clothes for winter.”

Ray Lyall, an advocate with Denver Homeless Out Loud, reacted with frustration to the removal of the outdoor lockers. It wasn’t surprising, Lyall said, that people would sleep in the lockers. “If it’s cold, it’s wet, I’d have slept in those things too,” he said. “I can’t blame them for that.”

The episode illustrates Denver’s “pilot” approach to homelessness solutions. Some experiments, like the Denver Day Works employment program and the city’s portable restrooms, are met with public acclaim and rewarded with new funding.

Others, like the storage lockers, are rolled back with less fanfare. Josh Geppelt, a vice president for Denver Rescue Mission, said in a written statement that the program was “a good concept overall,” but that it had become complicated and unproductive.

Still, Conner said that the city may try again. He’s in talks with another nonprofit that could allow the city to move the surviving lockers to another location. The new location would likely be on a gated property, he said, and it would only be available to people seeking jobs.

Other cities have hosted similar programs: A Chicago program has installed 755 storage units of varying sizes, including micro-sized lockers, while the nonprofit-run Transitional Storage Center in San Diego serves about 400 people per day. San Diego’s government also funded a new center this year.

Meanwhile, a community effort to host outdoor lockers continues in Denver. Sexy Pizza hosts four school-style lockers at its Cap Hill location. The project was recently awarded a $15,000 grant by Bonfils-Stanton Foundation, the Hemera Foundation and Colorado Creative Industries to expand the effort.

The need for storage is a symptom of the city’s failure to prioritize housing, said Kayvan Khalatbari, a mayoral candidate who co-owns Sexy Pizza. He added that stationing the lockers near a business in a residential neighborhood seems to have helped.

“You have more eyes on these around the day,” he said. “We haven’t had a single issue in almost a year that these have been installed.”