As Denver’s neighborhoods gentrify, the poor are pushed to new pockets of poverty
When Josie Cosio’s historic home in Five Points needed a new roof, the Denver Urban Renewal Authority gave her a low-interest loan to finance the construction and stay in the home her parents had purchased in the 1920s.
“Oh, Josie, keep that chimney up there — it’s the character of the house,” Cosio, 80, fondly recalls one man telling her during construction on the historic house. “I told him, ‘No, I am the character of the house. Take it down.’ ”
Cosio is one of many longtime residents of the historic Five Points neighborhood working hard to stay in the community.
“It makes me cry that we can’t stay here and keep these roots that we have developed here,” Cosio says. “It was wonderful growing up here.”
Cosio doesn’t mince words. When the time comes, she knows it’s unlikely one of her daughters or grandchildren will move into the well-kept house near Curtis Park on a tiny 2,500 square-foot lot that the city now estimates is worth $381,900, up from $279,000 last year. Zillow estimates the home is worth closer to $458,000 in this insane market and would rent for $2,200 a month.
Despite more than a dozen different organizations working to keep people like Cosio in their homes — an effort dubbed “maintaining” affordable housing units — the demographic change in the three census tracts that encompass Five Points has been drastic between 2000 and 2015. Median income has climbed to $87,212 from $43,082 (adjusted to 2015 dollars), and the community with a substantial public housing presence now has 23 percent of households living in poverty compared to 31 percent in 2000.
If that data from the U.S. Census Bureau didn’t represent a mass exodus of the poor, then it’d be a model community of improved conditions and quality of life for its residents. Instead residents are pushed out by gentrification to new pockets of poverty developing elsewhere.
This inevitable march of progress into neighborhoods that once were affordable for a city’s lowest-income workers was dubbed “a racial and class diaspora” by Portland’s director of housing at Denver’s housing summit last month. And that’s no exaggeration. Class segregation was first driven by racist zoning and planning policies, then deepened by middle-class flight from urban cores during integration, and sustained by banks “redlining” poor communities and refusing to lend
money to businesses or homebuyers in the area.
Now class segregation is being driven by a “new urbanism” hunger for historic houses, walkable communities, and a short commute. Five Points is no longer gentrifying … it’s gentrified. And the worst part of gentrification — involuntary displacement — is thriving.
Five Points didn’t qualify as vulnerable in the city of Denver’s 2013 gentrification study. The neighborhood’s demographics had already shifted enough that it failed to meet two of three criteria: median household income lower than Denver’s, percentage of renter-occupied units higher than Denver’s, and percentage of residents with less than a bachelor’s degree higher than Denver’s. That’s despite a massive concentration of public housing in the heart of Five Points, including the city’s hugely successful Hope VI project that used federal dollars to turn run-down subsidized housing projects into attractive subsidized, low-income and market-rate housing.
But even Hope VI displaced residents — among the poorest of the poor — at the time reducing the overall number of public housing units.
According to Denver’s 2013 study, Globeville, Elyria-Swansea, Cole, Clayton, Northeast Park Hill and a huge swath of southwestern Denver from Baker and Lincoln Park to Westwood, Mar Lee and Harvey Park were all considered vulnerable to gentrification and involuntary displacement. A 2015 update stretched the pressures even farther to the northeast and northwest.
It’s an especially bitter irony that these communities of extreme poverty, some of them created by design, are now benefiting from long-overdue public and private investment, but at the expense of those who weathered generations of injustice. But Cosio isn’t bitter. “I love all my neighbors,” says the woman known for helping others avoid parking tickets on street-sweeping days and championing an unsuccessful effort to save the underperforming neighborhood elementary school now scheduled for transformation to a charter school.
For Cosio, love is the only solution to what ailed her community in the days of gang violence, racism and poverty, and now it’s the only solution to the frequent clashes between wealthy newcomers and historic stalwarts.
Unfortunately, love isn’t a driving force for most developers — although there are a few notable exceptions — and make no mistake, it’s developers who are driving the class divide and the only ones who can solve it.
Through a combination of both the stick and the carrot, developers must be cajoled into including truly affordable housing in their developments. After all, in 2015 about 50,000 Denver families, or 37 percent of the city’s households, made less than $50,000 a year.
If that smacks as a call for government intervention in the free market, that’s because it is. But cities, including Denver, have long meddled with the free market, propping up developers who claimed urban renewal was too expensive — infill and remediation too costly — to allow for private development in Denver without some type of public subsidy.
And many developers balked at the now defunct inclusionary housing policy that required 10 percent of new for-sale construction be “affordable.” Instead developers paid a fee — The Spire developers paid $3 million — to forgo including lower-income units in their high-end developments.
Developers refused to work toward a societal goal of incomediverse communities — presumably because at more than $200,000 a unit, affordable housing is just too expensive.
Under the leadership of the current mayor and City Council, Denver moved away from that ineffective mandate, to a hefty fee on developers and a half-mill property tax on everyone that combined will raise $150 million over the next 10 years. The city hopes that’s enough to create or preserve an estimated 6,000 affordable housing units. It’s a wonderful start. But the city could lose that many affordable houses in 10 years through gentrification.
Investors are pouring cash into land in Elyria-Swansea, Globeville and RiNo. Much of the property there has been marked for high-density development through zoning and the area surrounding the new 38th and Blake commuter rail station is poised for private investment that could eclipse Union Station in LoDo.
It’s become a perfect storm of making the once-undesirable now very desirable. So much so neighbors are donning shirts and posting yard signs: “My barrio is not for sale.”
The state is on the verge of a $1.2 billion first-phase reconstruction of Interstate 70, an unsightly viaduct that split the north Denver community asunder when it was constructed. The derelict National Western Stock Show will get an $856 million revamp. Brighton Boulevard’s transformation from a once industrial thoroughfare to a walkable community street is underway.
One solution to relieve pressure on this area is afoot.
Brad Buchanan, executive director of the city’s planning and development, is behind a proposal that would add a carrot to developers near 38th and Blake to provide even more affordable housing or funding than is required under the new fee.
If the plan is adopted by the City Council — it’s in early stages now — a developer of a residential building in the RiNo area could go beyond allowable height restrictions if they built five times more affordable housing for the extra stories than is otherwise required, and Buchanan said, the current draft would prohibit residential builders from simply paying the fee for those units.
A non-residential development would pay five times the fee for the additional height privileges.
Such an incentive could help two-fold: increase density in a meaningful way to help meet demand, and result in real construction of affordable units. If it works in RiNo, Buchanan said such incentives could be added to places of dense development across the city.
Imagine if high-density developers in North Cherry Creek were required to include nearby affordable housing. That would be a real step toward creating economic diversity in our communities.
There are other solutions, too — allowing people to build accessory dwelling units on their property, adding penalties for projects that displace low-income residents, increasing the state’s affordable housing tax credits, or homeowners voluntarily adopting easements restricting their homes as affordable and forgoing profits now and in the future.
People were talking for decades about the revitalization of Five Points. It came slowly, dogged by very real gang violence and an over-concentration of service providers for Denver’s homeless population.
Among the first urban pioneers making the jump were Hugh and Lynne Brown, who purchased a beautiful historic home near Curtis Park 28 years ago and returned it from apartments to a singlefamily home. The Browns moved to Curtis Park because they believed in neighborhoods and community and diversity.
They helped create the Curtis Park historic district that today will preserve homes — like Josie Cosio’s cottage — from being razed and rebuilt. They fought for a community that had historically been undeserved. Today the couple say they are sick about the property values and the pressures that puts on their neighbors and friends, like Cosio.
“All of the statistics show you need a mixed-income community in order for them to be healthy,” says Lynne Brown, who once worked with Habitat for Humanity.
They agree that as chimneys come down just outside the district and are replaced by luxury condos and tri-level duplexes, it’d be nice if at least the character of those houses — like Cosio’s — could stay, too.