Ahead of Monday’s high-profile vote on the change to Denver’s group living policy, multiple council members – including those with substantial reservations – are predicting it has the votes to prevail.

“My headcount tells me it will pass,” said Councilman Kevin Flynn, who represents District 2 in southwest Denver.

The text amendment to the Denver zoning code would increase the maximum number of unrelated adults who live together to five, from the current limit in single-family homes of two adults. More controversially, it would reconfigure the way residential care and group living facilities are allowed in neighborhoods, expanding the availability for housing that caters to those experiencing homelessness or who are in the criminal justice system.

Safe and Sound Denver, the primary opposition group, has deemed the proposal a “massive overreach” and has debuted a video ad asking viewers if they would “support a recall of your councilperson if this passes?”

Councilman Chris Hinds, representing District 10 in the city’s central neighborhoods, observed that his constituency varies widely from affluent, single-family neighborhoods to younger, multifamily areas.

“At this point, I’ve heard that if I vote for this, I will get recalled. If I vote against it, I will get recalled,” he said. 

“I’ve been very disappointed in the opposition groups’ use of misleading and misinformation that appears to be intended to scare people,” added Councilwoman Kendra Black, the District 4 representative in southeast Denver. “Even though they’ve been corrected over and over, they continue to repeat the same hyperbole.”

Black said she opposed the original proposal, but the city’s Department of Community Planning and Development modified the amendment to the point where she is comfortable supporting it.

“I worked very hard with other council members and CPD to change the proposal so that these issues were addressed – and they were,” she added, referencing the size of households and the prevalence of community corrections facilities – colloquially known as halfway houses – that have both been pulled back in revisions.

Flynn called himself “genuinely undecided” the week before the meeting, saying there were elements he could support and parts he could not.

“One thing that is clear to me is that we should not have tackled all of these issues in a single bill, but rather come at it in bite-sized pieces,” he acknowledged. The pandemic, Flynn added, threw up obstacles to engagement.

He described his district as one containing group homes for sober living, developmental disabilities, people with senior assisted living, and three of Denver’s 10 community corrections facilities. Whereas some supporters of the group living proposal painted the opposition as white and affluent, Flynn disputed that characterization.

“I felt from the beginning that the suggestion that this is about undoing decades of discriminatory housing patterns was little more than a narrative to marginalize opposition,” he said. “Most of the people advocating for this are white, while we’ve heard from communities of color that they oppose this. Frankly, witnessing what densification has done to some of our now-gentrified and very expensive neighborhoods, my fear from the start was that parts of this proposal could end up devastating my more vulnerable and older neighborhoods.”

Hinds, who represents Capitol Hill, Cherry Creek, Congress Park and Uptown, received nearly 1,000 online survey responses on the group living changes, 86% of which came from residents of his district. Overall, he said during a Facebook live presentation on Jan. 29, 51% of respondents were supportive of raising the cap on unrelated adults to five, with people farther to the west and north of the district – closest to downtown – expressing more favorable opinions.

“In the comments we found there was a portion of the people who strongly disapproved because they wanted the cap to be eight or 10 or unlimited, and they were angry that the current proposal doesn’t go far enough,” Hinds said.

At the same time, he expressed frustration that the revised version of the group living amendment allows for community corrections facilities in 19,000 acres of the city, and in large portions of his district, but not in less dense regions that put up opposition.

Denver, which has a demand for 550 halfway house beds, currently has a gap following the council’s prior decision to end contracts with private prison operators. There will be a need for approximately 250 beds by June.

“I am a little frustrated that areas of the city that are primarily single-family somehow get a free pass. That doesn’t seem equitable to District 10,” Hinds commented.

Still, one council member, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the difficulty in predicting the outcome, believed there to be a “supermajority in favor” on the council.

“We’ll see how much the Safe and Sound folks can sway sentiment between now and Monday night,” they added.