Denver added two more hotels to its collection Monday to help reach Mayor Mike Johnston’s goal of housing 1,000 homeless people, even as his administration has come under fire for how it is tracking that target.

The council scheduled a special public hearing at the tail end of Monday’s meeting amid vehement opposition from some residents in the southeast part of the city to plans to convert the former Embassy Suites hotel at 7525 E. Hampden Ave. into a shelter. The 205-room property will serve families with children under the administration’s plans.

Some speakers on Monday referenced fears of public drug use and negative impacts on businesses in the area. Others said they felt burned by the speed at which the hotel purchase and conversion came forward without time for adequate input or consideration from nearby residents. The Johnston administration first announced the city’s interest in the property in late November.

Cheris Kline Berlinberg was among the area residents who urged city leaders to slow down and commit to a phased approach to turning the building into a shelter, welcoming only 50 families at first.

“In fact, by bringing too many people into a hotel they’re not even going to be adequately assisted and the neighborhood suffers,” Berlinberg said.

Those concerns aside, the council voted 12-0 to approve the city’s purchase of that property. Councilwoman Sarah Parady was absent.

A majority of residents who spoke Monday were in favor of the city’s plans.

“It’s always a great time of year to get people inside and to give people a helping hand to get back on their feet … but especially in these winter months, these cold winter months,” said Christopher Miller , who family lives near the hotel. “I can’t think of anything better than to house so many families in that building.”

The Embassy Suites property will be the first House 1,000 shelter in District 4 in the far southeast corner of the city.

District 8, on the city’s northeast side, has shouldered much of the load for the mayor’s initiative thus far, hosting two hotels and a forthcoming micro-community for a total of 537 housing units. District 8 Councilwoman Shontel Lewis has urged her colleagues in other districts to answer the mayor’s call to contribute in the same way her district has.

Members on Monday night lauded District 4 Councilwoman Diana Romero Campbell for doing just that by championing the Embassy Suites shelter in the face of, at times, withering criticism from some constituents.

“The investment we make today has a generational impact,” Romero Campbell said Monday. ” This issue of homelessness is an issue nationwide issue, statewide and in our city. And now is the time for us to do something.”

The contract the council approved Monday committed $21 million to purchase the hotel. The sale is expected to close in March but the city will lease the hotel for $825,000 per month — or $134 per room per night — until that closing date comes.

The leasing period is expected to add another roughly $2.5 million to the city’s bill if all goes as planned, said Lisa Lumley, the city’s director of real estate, but the resolution the council approved Monday set aside $10 million for lease costs in case the sale falls apart and the city needs time to move families back out of the property.

Lumley expects to be back before the council in February seeking approval to issue a certificate of participation — a form of public financing that puts up city assets as collateral for new debt — to pay for the purchase.

Earlier in the meeting, the council approved a $10.4 million, one-year lease for the 220-room former Radisson Hotel at 4849 Bannock St. That was handled via the council’s consent agenda without controversy or discussion.

City officials in November said that the Embassy Suites property was being considered as a shelter that would cater to families with kids and also transgender and nonbinary individuals. Those plans changed. A micro-community coming to a parking lot at 1375 Elati St. will focus on supporting trans and nonbinary individuals. The Embassy Suites will be used to house families for as long as it serves as a shelter, administration officials confirmed at Monday’s meeting, responding to one of the major concerns brought up by neighborhood opponents.

Both the Embassy Suites property and the former Radisson could welcome residents before the end of the year.

It did not come up at Monday’s meeting, but the Johnston administration has also faced criticism in the waning days of 2023 after Cole Chandler, the mayor’s top homelessness adviser, revealed last week that the dashboard tracking the city’s progress toward the 1,000-person goal counted someone even if they spent just one night in a shelter before returning to unsheltered homelessness.

The administration’s public messaging when the dashboard was launched was that someone would have to remain in a shelter or housing for at least 14 days to be counted as a successful housing outcome. That was never the case, administration officials now say, but internal miscommunication in the mayor’s office led to inaccurate information being released.

“There was no intentional effort to mislead the public,” Johnston spokesman Jose Salas said Friday. “All the information on the dashboard has been consistent and accurate since its inception, the confusion was when people were counted and whether length-of-stay was a qualifying factor.”

An updated dashboard was launched last week. It includes much more information about unhoused people served through the initiative.

That updated dashboard counted 550 total people who have been moved off the streets since the House 1,000 effort began in July. Of those, 171 have moved into housing, including 129 who have moved into leased housing units. Another 368 people have been placed in non-congregate shelters, mainly converted hotels. Nineteen people have returned to the streets, according to the dashboard.

The 14-day threshold is not the only controversy that has dogged the House 1,000 effort. Homeless advocates have taken issue with how the administration has used “house” to describe an effort that has so far focused on short-term sheltering.

Johnston pushed back on that criticism in an interview with The Denver Post in October.

“There’s these academic debates around what term you use. The focus for us is what are the actual services and amenities we’re providing to someone,” he said. “Of course we believe that we have to get them on to their own permanent unit where they’re paying their own rent and supporting themselves. That is entirely the goal. This is the first step along the way.”

Monday was the last City Council meeting of the year, though committee hearings will continue this week.

As of Monday, the Denver Office of the Medical Examiner counted 286 deaths among people experiencing homelessness in the city in 2023. That’s 60 more people than in all of 2022 and more than twice as many deaths as were counted among people experiencing homelessness in the city in 2018, according to the data. The medical examiner has attributed 66% of those deaths this year to drug overdoses.

Updated Dec. 19, 2023, at 10:54 a.m. This story has been updated to reflect that the city’s plans for how it will employ the Embassy Suites property as a shelter have changed since the hotel was announced as a possible site in November. 

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