Jazmine Webster needs just a little more time.

Time to find a new job. Time to find a new school for her children. Time to find a place to live she can call her own.

She’s been living at a Motel 6 in Greenwood Village for a month — her husband and son in one room, she and her three daughters in another — after being evicted from an apartment in Aurora less than a year ago.

That puts Webster up against a city-imposed 29-day maximum for anyone visiting a non-extended-stay hotel in the affluent south suburban city of 15,000. If she is made to leave, the 29-year-old mother of four who grew up in Centennial said she’ll be back out on the streets.

What’s worse, the Greenwood Village City Council this month did away with a longtime exception to its hotel stay limit for “families in crisis” who are receiving housing assistance from a governmental or charitable entity. Webster was referred to the Motel 6 in July by the Community Economic Defense Project, a nonprofit born out of the COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project that fights for renters facing removal from their homes.

Her son suffers from anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and ADHD, making the instability of being homeless even more challenging.

“Think about kids with disabilities, think about single mothers struggling to make ends meet,” said Webster, sitting at a table beside the motel’s outdoor pool on a recent afternoon. “Have an understanding that we don’t have it all. It takes time, it takes patience.”

Neza Bharucha, whose husband owns the Motel 6 at 9201 E. Arapahoe Road, said Greenwood Village has shown little patience toward the hundreds of families — many with disabilities — that she has provided temporary refuge to over the last few years. The city, she said, has targeted the motel with extra police patrols while allowing guests at other Greenwood Village hotels to stay more than 29 days at a time regularly.

It has led Bharucha, who along with her hotel duties is a licensed psychiatrist, to a singular conclusion.

“They do not want this group of people in Greenwood Village — people who are unhoused with mental health troubles and those who are in recovery,” she said.

Earlier this month, Bharucha and the Community Economic Defense Project sued the city in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, alleging Greenwood Village is violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. They are asking for economic damages and for a judge to strike down the 29-day limit or grant exceptions to people with disabilities.

“Differential treatment by a governmental entity and its agents on the basis of disability cannot be justified by an arbitrary and irrational reason,” reads the lawsuit, filed by well-known civil rights attorney David Lane. “Defendants have arbitrarily and irrationally applied and enforced the 29-day ordinance on the basis of discrimination against people with ‘mental illness and/or addiction issues,’ which are disabilities as defined by the ADA.”

Greenwood Village spokeswoman Megan Copenhaver said the city won’t comment on the situation because of the active litigation. The Denver Post reached out to Mayor George Lantz and the two councilwomen — Libby Hilton Barnacle and Donna Johnston — who represent the district where the Motel 6 is located.

They either didn’t respond or said they were unable to comment.

“They were not going to stop”

Greenwood Village’s involvement with the 129-room Motel 6 at the busy East Arapahoe Road interchange with Interstate 25 goes back at least a decade. In 2014, city leaders passed their controversial 29-day hotel stay limit.

Amie Mayhew, president and CEO of the Colorado Hotel and Lodging Association, said the only other city in the state she is aware of with a stay-limit in place is Wheat Ridge, which passed a 30-day maximum in 2021.

The rationale at the time of the measure’s passage in Greenwood Village was that conventional hotels and motels are not equipped to operate as long-term living facilities. Potentially dangerous use of hot plates and cooking implements in rooms not wired or designed to handle such items posed a fire hazard.

According to the new lawsuit, the city also said there were more calls for service by police to the Motel 6 and to a couple of other hotels where homeless people would typically stay.

Bharucha, who with her husband has helped run the motel her father bought in 2008 for the last several years (her husband took possession of it in 2021), said she doesn’t allow hot plates or other kitchen appliances in rooms. But she does have sympathy for those who find themselves in a tough spot and she wanted to use a portion of the property to help them.

“I work with this population,” she said of her job treating those with mental health challenges. “I see the problems when they don’t have housing.”

Bharucha, 34, has teamed up with several homeless advocacy groups over the last five years, including the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and SAFER, to provide rooms in her motel for those without a home. Her father lived in “charity housing” in India when he fell on hard times and she’s thankful someone was there for him.

“Someone gave him a hand up when he needed it and I want to do that,” she said. “I wouldn’t be here if someone hadn’t done that for him.”

The penalty for a hotel owner caught violating the ordinance is a $499 fine, though Bharucha said the city has neither booted anyone from her motel nor tagged her with a fine. But Greenwood Village has long attempted to impede her efforts to reach out to the homeless and disabled community in other ways, including asking to check the hotel’s guest lists for anyone with active warrants, the federal lawsuit states.

In 2022, a Greenwood Village municipal judge ordered the motel and the nonprofit organizations it worked with to provide documents about the rooms they were renting to clients with disabilities, the lawsuit said. And last year, Greenwood Village served Bharucha with a criminal summons for violating the 29-day limit, according to the suit.

The charge was later dropped.

“I realized they were not going to stop,” Bharucha told The Post in an interview.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether Greenwood Village has enforced the ordinance against any other hotels; when asked, the city told The Post to file a public records request for the information.

At the heart of the case is what the city itself has allegedly said about its ordinance. Bharucha’s lawsuit states that city attorney Tonya Haas Davidson wrote in a 2021 letter to the motel that the city’s families-in-crisis exception wasn’t meant for those “suffering from mental health and/or addiction issues,” but more typically was meant to address victims of natural disaster.

That interpretation of the exception, the lawsuit alleges, forced motel management to “choose between discriminating against its guests with disabilities or seemingly violating the ordinance.”

Maddie Lips, an attorney who worked alongside Lane on the case, said because of the statement from Greenwood Village’s attorney in her letter to the motel, the city “has made this a novel case by being so blatantly open about the discriminatory intent of the 29-day ordinance.”

Making matters worse, according to the lawsuit, business travelers often stay at the city’s other hotels for longer than permitted by city regulation “and have not been subject to enforcement actions by the city.”

“There is no non-discriminatory distinction between a person staying in a hotel for an extended period of time because of business reasons as compared to a person staying for an extended period of time who has disabilities,” the lawsuit reads.

Cesar Jimenez, head of supportive housing for the Community Economic Defense Project, said the organization uses up to 10 rooms at the Greenwood Village Motel 6 to house clients temporarily. They’ve had a contract with Bharucha since February at a cost of $70 a night per room.

“Our main objective is to keep them safe while we find a home and services for them,” Jimenez said. “What Neza has created is a refuge for our clients.”

Homeless numbers up in 2024

Arapahoe County’s homeless population leaped dramatically from 2023 to 2024, according to recently released data from the Metro Denver Homelessness Initiative’s point-in-time survey taken on a single night in January.

The data shows the number of unhoused people in the county up from 442 in 2023 to 650 this year — a faster pace than the 10% growth the metro area as a whole saw in that same period.Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed said alcohol or substance abuse played a key role in their situation, the top contributor to homelessness in Arapahoe County.

Another 23% of respondents pointed to mental health issues or “disabling conditions” as chief reasons for their homelessness.

“We house some of the most vulnerable community members,” the defense project’s Jimenez said. “Our primary objective is to just provide them with temporary safe housing as opposed to them being in shelters or literally homeless.”

To Greenwood Village’s elected leaders, Jimenez said he would just say one thing.

“I would invite them to see the families,” he said. “You yourselves have families — would you want to be in this situation?”

Webster, the displaced mother of four currently living on the third floor of the Motel 6, said she doesn’t know how much longer it will be before she obtains a more permanent housing situation. But that day can’t come soon enough.

“Our kids are stuck in a room pretty much 24/7,” she said. “Nobody wants to be stuck in a hotel with kids.”

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Originally Published: August 27, 2024 at 6:00 a.m.