Not all neighborhood change is created equal

Denver’s latest stab at guiding development and land use for the next decade or two in the growth-fatigued city has added even more complexity to an evolving plan.

City officials are proposing four classifications to promote varying degrees of change or stability, neighborhood by neighborhood, as part of the updated “Blueprint Denver” plan. Their aim is for a new level of sophistication that might stave off some of the intense development and rezoning fights seen in recent years.

Planners are taking that and other proposed changes on the road in coming weeks to community workshop meetings across the city. The first is Tuesday night at 5:30 p.m. at Thomas Jefferson High School in southeast Denver.

The 2002 Blueprint Denver land use and transportation plan is one of four plans undergoing updates or being written for the first time as part of a two-year citywide planning effort called “Denveright.”

The original Blueprint plan’s simplicity — pegging every inch of the city as an area of change or stability — was hailed as innovative 16 years ago, but during the recent population boom its classifications have fed into disputes during heated rezoning fights.

In an overview of the latest changes since the last round of meetings in September, principal city planner David Gaspers and Denver planning chief Brad Buchanan said the four proposed categories for types of change would allow for the highlighting of prevailing needs in different parts of the city.

“It weights different kinds of change over another,” Buchanan said.

Only in some areas, such as the parking lots around the Pepsi Center and Elitch Gardens, is there such a demand for development that a transformation of their character is warranted in coming decades, Gaspers said.

A map showing where the categories would be applied wasn’t yet available. But the concept joins other stillevolving proposals for a more concrete mapping of the entire city that labels places with neighborhood contexts, ranging from suburban to different levels of urban to downtown. That map also differentiates between travel corridors and community nodes and cen- ters of different types, and it classifies residential areas by the density of buildings desired, from low to high.

The Department of Community Planning and Development is aiming to produce a draft Blueprint plan in coming months, with adoption of a final plan by the City Council this summer.

In formulating a new Blueprint roadmap, city planners are navigating conflicting pressures. Urban advocates have stood up at Blueprint meetings to argue for a plan that prepares a wider swath of the city to absorb the future population growth projected by demographers, resulting in wider-scale densification. But some fiercely protective neighborhood advocates want assurances that their smaller-scale areas will survive intact.

“Blueprint Denver is so hard to understand for the public,” said Councilman Wayne New, who represents central Denver, during a recent council committee briefing. He urged Gaspers to make it easy for attendees of the upcoming meetings to understand how the Blueprint plan will affect their neighborhoods — and to dispel any misconceptions about changes that might be in store.

“I don’t want people to be scared about what’s going to happen,” New said.