Just days after San Antonio City Council members approved a $15.9 million plan to use a downtown hotel as a 200-room, low-barrier homeless shelter, the childcare center next door says it is “outraged.”
– to lease the Holiday Inn at Cesar Chavez Boulevard and Santa Rosa Avenue for two years and pay San Antonio Metropolitan Ministries to operate it, using federal dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act. The non-profit already runs the Days Inn on Houston Street and Bowie Street as a 45-room low-barrier shelter for the city but plans to transfer its operations to the larger Holiday Inn by Thanksgiving.
In a letter addressed to council members Monday, Discovery World Learning Center CEO Jason Jauregui wrote that “stakeholders” like the childcare center “were sidelined from this decision-making process” and urged the mayor and city council to reconsider the shelter’s placement. To back up his concerns, Jauregui pointed to the time Haven for Hope previously used the 313-room Holiday Inn during the pandemic. A spokeswoman confirmed the homeless shelter housed people at the hotel between March 2020 until late August 2022 - roughly two-and-a-half years - to help with social distancing.
The city had been closely involved with Haven’s operations at the Holiday Inn during the pandemic, Woosley said but had not heard the complaints laid out in Jauregui’s letter from the childcare center or any other nearby business. SAPD records requested by KSAT show more calls for service to Discovery World while Haven was using the hotel next door as a shelter. The average number of calls each month went from an average of 1.8 in the six months before Haven for Hope took over the hotel to 3.7 during the 30 months it was running it.
The San Antonio Fire Department confirmed two fires during that time frame at the nearby building Jauregui had mentioned,. However, an SAFD spokesman wrote in an email “There is no direct correlation to the use of the Holiday Inn to these fires. The issue of fires in vacant buildings is a city-wide issue, and not just in the downtown area.”
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