Dear Friends,
I’d like to tell you a tale of the Sand and Sage—a saga still unfolding. Not because I’m an ‘ol cowboy (which I actually am, hailing from sagebrush country in rural Yampa, Colorado). Rather, because in this old-timey East Colfax motel, seeds of Joshua Station and Clara Commons were planted in our imaginations.
My heart lept the other day when I read the latest news of the Sand and Sage, and the nearby Westerner Motel. It seems those same seeds of imagination are sprouting again.
For about five years in the mid-1990s, MHM had a regular presence at the Sand and Sage. We rented a motel room a couple of nights a week, emptied the furniture, and used the space as a kind of drop-in resource center for unhoused teens. Many were kids we followed as they moved east in their nightly search for “squats.” We originally met them on Capitol Hill, but gentrification was gobbling up abandoned spaces, pressing our friends out both east and west along Colfax.
My own kids have special memories of outdoor Thanksgiving meals with Sand and Sage residents for several years that overflowed the tiny front yard. Turkey and fixins served up with singalongs!
That experience led us to try to purchase the Sand and Sage—or one of the other motels along the strip—hoping just to offer a clean, safe, and affordable alternative for the friends we were making.
We were small, with an even smaller budget. We knew the world of street-connected kids and were discovering more families without homes, but what did we know about real estate?
Not even knowing how much we didn’t know, we kept trying. Surely somebody on Colfax would be eager to unload a dilapidated hotel. Practically every block had one—leftovers from the long-departed golden age of Colfax Avenue as the gateway to the Rockies.
Nope, not so easy.
We reached out to nearly two-dozen motel property owners. That was in the time when the Anschutz medical complex was just coming into being on East Colfax, and most property owners would not even speak with us—much less consider selling. They must have anticipated that their land would become much more valuable if they held on.
Through a remarkable series of events, we ended up buying the Motel 7 at I-25 and 8th Avenue. The shift from Denver’s east side to the west side was big for us, and unexpected. If I’m honest, I do miss the miss the energy and drama of the community on East Colfax! Joshua Station’s semi-industrial location isn’t exciting, but the relatively dull surroundings actually provide exactly the tranquility needed for families to heal from the trauma of homelessness.
After extensive renovations, we re-branded our motel as Joshua Station. When we opened in 2002, our original intention was simply to operate a good motel for our unhoused friends. Little by little we started offering various kinds of support and resources for our renters. Before long that morphed into the two-year, richly supportive experience of caring community that continues to welcome families now.
Given the Sand and Sage’s role in our story, I’m so thrilled to see its future unfolding under new ownership by The Fax. I hope it can be a place of new life for many, offering permanently affordable and equitable housing along East Colfax.
