Category: Homeless Shelter

Nearly a year after the city of Denver spent millions on a move-in-ready motel in order to house the homeless, no one is living in the now-boarded-up structure — and the city is unable to provide a timeline for when it will be occupied. The city paid $9 million for the 96-room former Stay Inn at 12033 E. 38th Ave. on Aug. 11, 2023, saying at the time that the building would be turned into “supportive housing,” which provides on-site services in addition to a residence, for the homeless. The building was furnished. The city’s purchase agreement for the property specifies it was sold with “keys, beds, mattresses, microwaves, refrigerators, cooktops, washers, dryers, nightstands, dressers, and televisions” included. The deal had been in the works for years. Then-Mayor Michael Hancock and Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D-Denver) held a press conference at the property in May 2021 to announce the city would be buying it. So much time elapsed before closing that Denver ended up paying $1.2 million more than the $7.8 million it had originally planned. Mayor Mike Johnston, who assumed office last July, has made combatting homelessness his signature issue. He was in Paris last week to discuss “innovation solutions” to address the issue. Hotels and motels have been a key part of Johnston’s plan. In December, the city began moving the homeless into an Embassy Suites in southeast Denver. The city bought the property in early April. Denver has also signed master leases for multiple other hotels so it could move in the homeless.  The deals have left areas such as Arapahoe Square free of massive tent encampments for the first time in years. But they’ve also left some City Council members concerned about a lack of transparency and spending far exceeding the budget previously disclosed by Johnston’s administration. All the while, no one has moved into the former Stay Inn, which sits along Peoria Street south of Interstate 70. On the parking lot outside, a network of shed-like structures, erected by the city and dubbed a “microcommunity,” provide basic housing for some. Asked Thursday why the motel structure sits boarded up, Jose Salas, a spokesman for the mayor, said in an email that “we are fully committed to transforming this property into affordable housing and are in the early stages of making necessary renovations.” Salas did not respond when asked when individuals might move into the building. He referred a reporter to multiple other city spokespeople, who also did not answer the question. The former Stay Inn at 12033 E. 38th Ave., seen in 2022. The previous owner bought it with plans to reopen it as a Travelodge, although it never operated under that name. (Eric Lutzens/The Denver Post) Katie Ross Wamsley, a spokeswoman for Denver’s Department of Housing Stability, or HOST, said in an email that the city “is currently working to convert this property to supportive housing, including looking at any infrastructure work that needs to be done.” “We are still in the evaluation and planning phase of this project but we are happy to share more when we have specifics,” Wamsley said, later adding “possible renovations include structural repairs to walkways and railings and electrical system repairs.” There was no active construction underway when a BusinessDen reporter visited last week. Hugo Weinberger, whose firm sold the city the motel, told BusinessDen last year that he made a number of upgrades to the building, including adding kitchenettes and a sprinkler system to bring the structure in line with current fire code. When Denver closed on the purchase, a HOST spokesman told BusinessDen the motel property would need to be rezoned to allow for the city’s intended use. Rezonings must be approved by the City Council. No application has been submitted to rezone the property, another city spokeswoman told BusinessDen Friday. https://businessden.com/2024/06/25/year-after-9m-deal-denver-hotel-bought-for-the-homeless-sits-boarded-up/

It leaves families living in squalid conditions, trapped in segregated neighborhoods. Rather than spending billions on socialized shelter, we need to put money in their pockets to give them choices. President Biden’s nearly $2 trillion infrastructure package calls for doubling down on public housing. Projects are in “disrepair,” the plan rightly observes, with “critical life-safety concerns” and “imminent hazards to residents.” Biden proposes investing $40 billion to clean and green them. This is roughly 14 times the federal government’s current capital spending on public housing agencies, and it’s likely just the beginning. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is now demanding at least $80 billion in federal public housing funds. But why stop there: Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have joined other progressive activists calling for a Green New Deal for Public Housing costing as much as $172 billion — or $230,000 per unit — to retrofit public housing for energy efficiency and greenlight new projects. Is the public housing we have really the affordable housing we want? This question matters to the 2.2 million residents of more than 1.1 million units of public housing managed by more than 3,000 public housing agencies across the country. The Biden administration’s housing agenda represents an opportunity — not to redo public housing, but to rethink whether it was a good idea in the first place and to consider policies that give lower-income families the kinds of choices that better-off Americans have long enjoyed.     Squalid Conditions Concordia Place Apartments in Chicago’s impoverished Riverdale neighborhood appears almost idyllic, surrounded by wide green lawns and built with a tidy sloped roof. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspectors seemed to agree on their most recent visit, granting the public housing complex a score of 94, far above the passing grade of 60. Perhaps the inspectors missed the mold or the mice droppings. “You can hear them at night crawling on the walls,” one tenant said of the rodents. “We shouldn’t live like this,” said another tenant. Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth seem to agree, writing in a March 2021 letter to HUD that “no one should be subjected to living in the conditions reported by the residents of the Concordia Place apartment complex.” What these public housing residents face in Chicago should be seen less as an aberration and more as a shocking norm, where the government in serving as a landlord of last resort gets away with behavior that could land a private landlord in jail. Nearly 10 percent of public units recently inspected by HUD received failing scores and, according to 2010 HUD analysis, likely many more nearly failed inspections, rates that are far higher than for privately owned units. Even when HUD certifies housing as decent, safe and sanitary — as required by federal law since 1937 — it’s often later revealed to not be so, as the residents of Concordia Place know all too well. HUD inspectors often gave passing grades to public housing complexes showing clear signs of toxic mold, asbestos and lead paint, or where raw sewage regularly backed up and furnace boilers gave out in the dead of winter. As early as the 1950s, maintenance woes were already appearing in public housing. By the 1960s, rent from poor tenants was often falling far short of the costs of management or maintenance. Time — and need — has not brightened this picture. In Philadelphia today, tenant rents cover just 6 percent of the housing authority’s budget. And no wonder: The typical household in public housing pulls in an annual income of just $14,444, with minimum rents of $50 a month. The reality is that deeply affordable housing is unaffordable to maintain or sustain on rents alone, which impossibly demands ever-increasing levels of federal subsidy across time and presidential administrations.   As recently as 2009, experts were boasting that New York City had “one of the best housing authorities in the nation.” In truth, tenants in New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) apartments too often lived in squalid conditions, and it was they who filed suit in 2018 claiming the agency “failed to provide tenants with heat and hot water, keep residents safe from lead, involve tenants in policymaking and hire residents, as required under federal law.” In June of the same year, after NYCHA’s chairwoman resigned amid intense scrutiny of the agency’s failures, federal prosecutors filed their own complaint against the authority for “violating basic health and safety regulations” and exposing children to lead paint. NYCHA quickly admitted to the truth of these allegations and agreed to oversight by a federal monitor. Yet one critic labeled this measure the “equivalent of nailing a two-by-four to a collapsing building.”NYCHA is hardly alone. Baltimore’s public housing authority paid a multimillion-dollar settlement in 2013 to residents living with lead paint; HUD estimates that more than 62,000 public housing units nationwide require lead abatement. And the problems don’t stop there: Many more tenants suffer for want of heat and hot water or suffer health issues from invading mold. Boston’s public housing residents, for instance, were more likely to report poor health than the surrounding population or similar residents found in nonpublic housing, and children living in NYCHA complexes were found to be twice as likely to suffer from asthma as their classmates in private housing. Government-Backed Ghettos Atlanta’s Techwood Homes, built in 1935 as the first federal public housing project in America, evicted hundreds of Black families to house a whites-only neighborhood. NYCHA’s earliest housing developments built from the ground up were also segregated by race, one in Harlem for Black tenants and another in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) for whites; it took the city’s housing authority until 1964 to end its practice of setting aside apartments for white tenants. Richard Rothstein, author of the 2017 book The Color of Law, describes these New Deal-era housing programs as a “state-sponsored system of segregation.”  Techwood, an early example of public housing built in Atlanta, Ga.(Library of Congress) Public housing’s racist roots didn’t end there. In the decades that followed World War II, low-income Blacks were continually relegated to urban housing projects far away from white neighborhoods,