Denver’s people problem takes big toll on open space
A decade of high-density development and population growth inside Denver is devouring breathing room: Open space per resident has shrunk to less than the national norm.
And people in the thick of it are chapped. “It is a new asphalt jungle,” said Allen Clark, owner of Clark’s Downing Street Auto Body, which he founded in 1998 north of downtown, where multistory condo and retail complexes are replacing homes featuring porches and yards.
“We’re looking at areas where you can barely walk between the buildings,” Clark said. “They don’t even bother to put grass in front of them anymore.”
The amount of open space per resident in Denver dwindled to less than a third of the space in neighboring Aurora and less than half the space in Colorado Springs, according to data provided by the Trust for Public
Land, which promotes preservation of natural land.
Denver parks and greenway space decreased to 9.3 acres per 1,000 residents, below the national median of 13.1 acres in the 100 most-populated cities, the data show. While open space inside cities increased nationally since 2010 by 1.5 percent, open space in Denver decreased by 6 percent. Denver’s population increased from 603,421 in 2010 to more than 693,060 in 2016, census data show, and city officials issued developers permits to install more than 33,000 new housing units, mostly rentals.
The result is an increasingly packed place. The population density — people per acre — across Denver’s 154-square-mile area increased from 4.7 in 1990 to 6.1 in 2010 to more than 7 today. (Back in 1950, before suburbanization, when the city covered 66 square miles and trolleys still clacked down streets, population density hit 9.8 people per acre.)
For urban planners, the current densification without breathing room stands out as a lesson on failing to keep pace with population growth by acquiring open space — before land values shoot astronomically upward.
“This is a case of adding more people than parks,” said Brad Calvert, regional planning and development director for the Denver Regional Council of Governments. “The sheer volume of population growth makes it hard to catch up on the open-space side of things.”
There are benefits of the densification that happened under Mayors John Hickenlooper and Michael Hancock. These include less need for road-building, reduced vehicle miles traveled, increasingly viable mass transit, less land consumption beyond metro Denver, rising tax revenues and economic vitality.
Some environmentalists favor a shift toward denser development — if cities somehow incorporate enough natural space that residents aren’t compelled to escape in their cars every weekend.
Denver’s parks and planning directors weren’t available to discuss the trend. However, current two-year planning projects, half done, will emphasize open space, although no target for total acres has been set.
“Denver needs and wants more parks and open space,” planning department spokeswoman Andrea Burns said. “The conversation from here is: Where should it go? What does it look like? And how do we pay for it?”
Over the past decade, the construction of massive residentialhousing blocks, combined with retail outlets and restaurants, has razed older communities and filled open space.
North of downtown, Clark observed that houses with yards rented or sold for payments around $900 a month, whereas smaller new “units” with no yards cost $1,500 a month.
“And it is not kid-friendly anymore,” he said.
Colorado voters established the Greater Outdoors Colorado program in 1992 to preserve open space using money from lottery ticket sales. But Denver since 2010 has sought and received only $1.3 million in GOCO funds for acquisition of open space, mostly for one park along the South Platte River north of downtown.
In the past, Denver officials have been able to point to federally managed public land in the mountains as a place where residents can be in a natural environment.
But popular public mountain areas such as Rocky Mountain National Park increasingly are swamped, requiring user fees and reservations for camping. Congress has been slow to create new national parks and wilderness to keep pace with population growth, forcing federal land managers to try to buttress existing areas — installing more bathrooms, parking areas and revenue-generating visitor centers — so that more people can visit those open spaces.
The TPL team that gathered open-space data from cities have developed an overall ranking system for parks. Denver has fared well, ranking 20th, based on relatively good geographic dispersal of and access to existing parks. About 86 percent of residents can reach a park by walking for 10 minutes. But Aurora has surpassed Denver with its above-median open-space acreage per resident. At one extreme, residents of Anchorage enjoy maximum breathing room with 2,992 acres of open space per resident. At the other, open space in Chicago and New York hovers around 4.7 acres. Seattle (9.8), Los Angeles (9.5) and Minneapolis (12.4) all offer more open space per resident than Denver.
“People need a chance to get back out into nature. … As we continue to densify, outdoor spaces — parks, plazas, even pedestrianfriendly streets — give people a chance to connect with each other,” said Charlie McCabe, director of TPL’s Center for City Parks Excellence. “Look at your trails along Cherry Creek and along the South Platte River. Look at the huge usage of those trails. You obviously have to think about economics being a leader of the city. But you also have to think about how a city works overall.
“Having big healthy vibrant city is great. Having industry is great. But you have to balance that with taking care of the people.”