Someone has to change the name of the Denver Planning and Development Department. It calls itself the “Community” Planning and Development Department but it is abundantly clear that the department’s only interest or ability in regard to communities is their destruction.
There have been numerous downzoning efforts in Denver. I can think of seven in my part of the city in which there was absolutely no negative community testimony. These downzonings changed the zoning of hundreds of properties while adding to the sense of community in the areas where they took place.
In contrast, the Denver Planning Office managed to destroy two communities in northwest Denver in order to develop the kind of zoning change which ecologists and biologists decry as the Petri dish of ecological disasters.
Uniformity is always a bad idea when it comes to organic communities. The eventual demise of such communities can be traced to the universal susceptibility to single cause disasters.
Denver lost its tree canopy to the Dutch Elm disease in the 1970s and 80s. The Midwest suffered crop failures when monocultures of a single crop suffered countrywide infections.
The disaster which will claim single family ghettos is as yet unknown. Whether it will be a change in our energy use, a plague of sub-prime mortgages, an economic shift or something brand new, the time will come when neighborhoods made up exclusively of single family homes will face disaster.
When that time comes, the latest planners will advocate a uniform zoning change which will allow a Hilliburton-type developer to buy, destroy and rebuild the entire neighborhood under a new uniform plan.
The only force which can resist this disastrous cycle is a viable community which loves its neighborhood and itself enough to hang in through the hard times.
Denver has suffered through numerous booms and busts on the backs of it committed community neighborhoods.
City Council has obviously outsourced its thinking to the Hickenlooper Administration. Council members who are term limited could not possibly care less what any community wants.
Comparing the disastrous northwest Denver downzonings to the wildly successful, if less uniform, downzonings in South City Park and Congress Park, suggests that the upcoming Planning Department redo of the Denver Zoning Code promises to leave hard feelings in communities across the city.
