CITY REJECTS PLANS TO MOVE TINYHOME VILLAGE TO RIVER SITE

Plan to move cottages for homeless to river site denied; permit at current site over soon

The permit for the cottages for people experiencing homelessness expires in January.

The city of Denver has rejected a plan to place a tinyhome village for people experiencing homelessness at a development site along the South Platte River.

Beloved Community Village is on a deadline: Its permit for its current site at 38th and Blake expires in January. The group had planned for months to move its cottages to Taxi, a campus run by Zeppelin Development on Ringsby Court.

The village organizers issued an open letter Thursday demanding that city leaders figure out an immediate solution, and one council member immediately called for action.

“We were going to have a oneyear lease there with the ability to renew it if things went well. We were going to be able to tap into water and sewer — and we were going to be able to add additional homes,” Cole Chandler, an organizer for the village, said in an interview.

The village officials had discussed Taxi with the city since April and had selected it as their site by June, with intensive review beginning in July, according to Chandler.

“We went through this whole process,” he said.

Then, in midOctober, city officials said they had discovered potential flooding issues at the Taxi site, according to Chandler. There was no viable path to build the new village there.

The current village is home to 14 people in 11 cottages, along with communal facilities.

It’s the second time this year that the Colorado Village Collaborative has lost out on a potential site. A commission rejected a separate plan to build a new women’s village near downtown, saying it didn’t fit the area’s historic character.

Chandler agrees with the city’s flooding concerns, but he is frustrated by the process.

“We’re frustrated because this came up six months into the process, when we already have a ticking timeline on an arbitrary timelength permit, and we have limited resources we’re expending — and then it finally falls through in the eleventh hour,” he said.

Andrea Burns, spokeswoman for the city planning department, said the flooding risk arose during the “deeper analysis” that comes toward the end of the city review process.

The flooding issue surfaced when the group applied for sewer and drainage permits in September, she said.

“To build anything there right now would probably have to be pretty heavily elevated,” said Nancy Kuhn, spokeswoman for Denver Public Works. “It’s going