It’s not difficult to forecast the future from the second floor of the house
Jeff Johnston is building in University Hills.
Just peer out any window, in
any direction.
The landscape, north of Hampden Avenue and east of Colorado
Boulevard, is flat so you can see for several blocks. The neighborhood was
developed in the 1950s with single-story ranch homes. The houses and yards
run the gamut from immaculate to neglected to abandoned. On every sixth lot
or so, a brand-new, two-story house towers above the rooftops.
The new houses are less than a year old and three times the size of the
older homes in their shadows.
The wide streets bustle with pickup trucks and
construction equipment. Roll-away dumpsters, porta-potties and chain-link
safety fences dominate most blocks. For-sale signs seem to adorn half the
lawns in the neighborhood.
It’s easy to envision that in a few years all the
neighborhood’s original homes and yards will vanish, replaced by newer,
bigger models.
University Hills, like many urban neighborhoods throughout the nation, is in
transition. And in today’s housing market, transition often means scraping
off older homes and replacing them with newer, larger homes more suited to
today’s consumers.
Scrape-offs are nothing new in the metro area. The trend started more than
15 years ago in Cherry Creek, then migrated to the Washington Park and
Bonnie Brae neighborhoods. Today you’ll find scrape-offs all over the metro
area, from the most exclusive neighborhoods in Denver to established
suburban communities in Lakewood, Littleton and Englewood.
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