Ballpark neighbors won a round in court Thursday in a fight over a new homeless day center that’s nearing completion next to the Denver Rescue Mission’s downtown shelter.
A Denver District Court judge sided with the Ballpark Neighborhood Association, ruling that city officials wrongly granted a permit to build the city-subsidized Lawrence Street Community Center.
But it remained unclear whether the ruling would affect the Rescue Mission’s ability to open the $8.6 million center on Oct. 16, as planned.
“The fight is not over,” said David Broadwell, an assistant city attorney, who is among those considering an appeal and other legal steps to defend the permit decision.
Ballpark residents in recent years have intensified their fight against the expansion of homeless services in their neighborhood. Two sometimes-conflicting dynamics define the friction: the area’s longtime status as a homeless haven and its more recent rapid gentrification, sprouting high-rise apartments and condos.
“Frankly, we wish that the millions of dollars that the city is spending on this center would have been spent on transitional housing, which is the real issue,” said Dennis Ryerson, a neighborhood association board member.
While the lawsuit has been argued, city officials and the Rescue Mission have met repeatedly with the neighborhood advocates. They’ve brainstormed ways to reduce the impact of the new center and the people it might draw to Ballpark, where police also have struggled to protect the homeless from criminals who prey on them.
But while the Rescue Mission says the center likely will reduce the visibility of the homeless by giving them a place off-street to spend the day, neighbors worry it’ll only attract more people.
The center will have an outdoor courtyard, a dining room, showers and restrooms, but no beds.
The crux of the court case is whether the Rescue Mission intends to use the new building, located on Lawrence near Park Avenue West, as a true community center — or merely as an extension of its existing men’s shelter. The zoning code doesn’t allow shelters to occupy any more land in the area.
“The facts substantially support the contention that DRM changed the name of the project from an expansion to a community center to circumvent zoning requirements, and therefore the (zoning appeals board) committed an abuse of discretion in upholding the permit approval,” wrote Judge R. Michael Mullins.
Ryerson sees the ruling as a broad victory since it “deals with the credibility of the process. There are going to be other issues that come before zoning boards, and they’ve got to go by the letter of the law.”
But Rescue Mission president and CEO Brad Meuli called the ruling “shocking and dismaying.”
“We don’t believe it’s really an expansion,” he said. “When you talk about an expansion, to me, that means more beds.”
