Colorado is one of the last grand states. If you ask Coloradans why they live here, most will give you “quality of life’ as their top answer. It’s beautiful, uncrowded and the climate is ideal.
Thirteen years ago, I moved to Denver from Baltimore, where the grocery store aisles were so narrow and crowded, we had to wait until 10 p.m. to shop.
We left behind the beauty of Atlantic Ocean waves crashing on the beach – and traffic and car exhaust fumes – and embraced Colorado’s rolling vistas, fringed with mountains. On Colorado 93, between Golden and Boulder, a craggy outcrop of rock rises abruptly on the east side of the highway. It holds an old mine entrance. This rock, pierced with a piece of history, says Colorado. Not far away stretches a line of wind turbines, a sample of the new energy consciousness we voted in November to support, and this too speaks of Colorado, of its future.
The wind turbines don’t look bad to me, possibly because they are distant from the road and I don’t see them outside my living room window. For the residents of Massachusetts beach communities, however, the prospect of permanent propellers dotting Massachusetts Bay is horrible. Beauty may be in the eyes of the beholder, but quantity and proximity multiply the effect.
I live in the Jefferson County foothills, in a picturesque valley between the Hogback and the Rockies. A neighboring landowner uses his property as storage for decrepit buses. Another has built a lighthouse, which he keeps lit all night long, drowning out any vision of the stars for his neighbors.
We can’t do anything about our neighbors’ bad taste. And is it in fact bad taste, or simply their own unique taste? It was surprising to half of our neighborhood recently to discover that the other half thought RVs and trailers in the front yard were picturesque. We reached a compromise.
If we disagree violently with our neighbor’s vision of beauty, we can always move – farther west, until we run up against another population center spreading eastward, or to the middle of a covenant-controlled neighborhood.
Or we can become NIMBYists – those who say, “Not in my backyard.’ This shouldn’t be such a derogatory term. Who better to appreciate and protect Colorado’s quality of life than those of us who know firsthand the crowds and pollution of elsewhere? We know how bad it can get.
Denver’s suburban dilemma is that a continuing housing boom is outstripping retail building. But not for long. We’re going to get those businesses, malls and restaurants – along with the infrastructure necessary to support life in the suburbs.
aps differ over which businesses and architecture are acceptable. We have some bad examples. Our early development includes Bandimere Speedway and the federal prison. As with the new housing developments, some say those were bound to be built somewhere. Others say “not in my backyard,’ but at the time they were built, there weren’t so many defenders of backyards.
There are lots of backyards now, and Jeffco is a place where many of their defenders have managed to agree. It started with growing communication between the neighborhoods. The South Jeffco Community Plan called for a loose housing density west of the Hogback, but the plan is only a guideline, and as such is continually under pressure from developers.
For the past several years, we’ve been threatened with a university complex. Do we want a huge new university west of the Hogback? Can we accept it if the architecture is tasteful? Where will all the displaced wildlife go? And the clincher: How will we stand the traffic?
I think we mostly agree that stores and restaurants have to come, but we’d like the university to build on somebody else’s patch. The county has accommodated us with a series of meetings soliciting our input on roads and development. It’s a good start for the county to take its residents’ wishes seriously. We finally have a voice in the compromise between development and defending our quality of life.
Danielle Steinfeld (danielle.steinfeld@comcast.net) lives in Morrison.
