Denver City Hall has put up the homeless in tent towns it has built as well as in hotels it has purchased. So, the administration of Mayor Mike Johnston must reason it’s no big deal to take the next step — buying and building longer-term “affordable housing.”

Using taxpayers’ dollars, of course. Which, to City Hall, might as well be Monopoly money.

Hence, its pending purchase of an old Goodyear shop downtown for $2.5 million, as reported last week by The Denver Gazette.  The city plans to tear down the structure near the Denver Pavilions and the Webb Municipal Building and build new affordable housing on the site. 

Exactly how the deal will play out, the city doesn’t seem sure. Once the sale closes, the city hopes to find a developer to build the project and then will weigh options such as selling the land to a developer or perhaps leasing it. 

Other details don’t even appear to be on the drawing board.

Like, what about the extra remediation cost for any environmental issues involving a former auto-repair shop?  Or, the added cost of complying with the city’s stringent — and costly — new green-energy building mandates on a structure that eventually replaces the Goodyear?

The city evidently hasn’t even resolved what kind of “affordable housing” project it has in mind. Apartments, with City Hall as landlord — heaven forbid? Condos that are (somehow) priced for those of modest means? Or, just long-ish-term housing for the homeless who used to live in the city’s hotels?

The only inkling was an alarming one, offered to City Council members last week in a presentation by a Johnston administration official.

 “We are talking about true affordable housing, not just a development with market affordable,” said city real estate director Lisa Lumley.

That’s right, the administration isn’t about to settle for mere “market affordable” housing. It aims to charge even less. Might that be a hint at permanent subsidies? Anyone for public housing in downtown? Where’s the money for that sort of ongoing endeavor?

Who knows? 

It’s reminiscent of last year’s pitch to voters by this same mayor to hike the city’s sales tax to create affordable housing for 20,000 Denverites over the next 10 years. It was long on vision, short on concrete plans. Wide-ranging critics said the proposal sorely lacked specifics. Former three-term Denver Mayor Wellington Webb publicly expressed surprise Johnston pushed ahead with it. Voters shot it down last November.

Could this be a baby step toward that same goal? Modest enough in scale to rationalize dipping into a city contingency fund — it still raised some eyebrows on the City Council — but enough of an affordable-housing precedent to sate the mayor’s ambitions for now?

The project looks like a precedent, all right, but not a good one. A couple of scenarios loom. It could backfire on downtown by turning into an extended-stay hostel for the homeless. Or, more likely, it could backfire on the intended beneficiaries of affordable housing instead when a developer eventually convinces the city its numbers don’t add up — and the whole project turns into “market affordable” housing after all. 

Either way, it looks like a financial sinkhole for taxpayers. 

It’s easy to play a swinger in the real estate world when you don’t have to stake your own money. It’s a lot harder to make a development actually work — and harder still when too little forethought was put into it in the first place.