Paint the town white
A reality check on downtown Denver’s renaissance — it would be served better by a more diverse residential palette
If you are one of those urban enthusiasts who extols every new high-rise and densely packed development as a step toward the future model city, you might want to take a look at the State of Downtown Denver 2018 report, released recently by the Downtown Denver Partnership.
Apparently the city of the future is white, single and childless. And well to do, of course. We wouldn’t want to overlook that.
Consider the six central neighborhoods — Ballpark, Lodo, Central Platte Valley, Auraria, Golden Triangle and Central Business District — whose population has tripled since 2000. As The Denver Post’s Joe Rubino succinctly put it, “The downtown population is overwhelmingly white, single and well paid. The report shows that the median age of a downtown Denver resident is 34 and 81 percent of them live alone. Just 4 percent live with kids.”
To be sure, the percentage of Americans single and without kids has been rising for decades, as has the percentage who live alone. Nationally, the Census Bureau reports more than a quarter of households include just one person. And the percentage of Americans who live without a spouse or partner is considerably higher — 42 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.
But by any calculation, down-
town Denver’s household statistics are a startling outlier — and a reminder that the glib urbanist cliches that have become so commonplace are an impediment to clear thinking about the nature of modern cities. So let’s talk a little sense.
Reality Check No. 1: The renaissance of Denver’s urban-core neighborhoods has been spectacular, bestowing far greater benefits than problems (remember the troubled 1970s and ‘80s, when Denver — although not its suburbs — lost population?) I’m a fan of much of the change. But that transformation shouldn’t be oversold as a general model. As a place to live, it appeals to and is affordable for only a segment of the population. Families and especially families with children look elsewhere.
Ultimately, Denver’s health depends on keeping its more diverse, lower-density neighborhoods happy, too.
Critics might counter that the appeal of dense urban living will broaden as those neighborhoods and others continue to mushroom. After all, upcoming large developments such as River Mile in the Elitch Gardens area as well as a project comprising 50 acres that includes Broncos parking lots will continue to reshape downtown in dramatic fashion.
Yet the experience of other highdensity core cities with skyrocketing prices isn’t helping their case. The New York Times reported last year, for example, that San Francisco “has the lowest percentage of children of any of the largest 100 cities in America.” In a growing number of neighborhoods, “the sidewalks display a narrow band of humanity, as if life started at 22 and ended somewhere around 40.”
Reality Check No. 2: Suburbs have not lost their appeal and are critical to keeping metro housing affordable. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard downtown and city representatives claim that millennials en masse have rejected older housing patterns and only want to live in hip, urban enclaves.
These proclamations reflect of course the undeniable fact that cities all over the U.S. — even Detroit, for heaven’s sake — have been on the upswing after dreary decades in the 20th century. But it so happens that the recent era in which cities outstripped suburbs in growth has stalled.
As the Wall Street Journal reported recently, the suburban population of large metro areas outpaced that of cities last year as more Americans “are being priced out of expensive urban cores” and “millennials and younger members of Generation X . . . are settling down to start families or have more children.”
By the way, more than 80 percent of homes purchased in America continue to be single-family dwellings, according to the National Association of Realtors, “followed by 7 percent of buyers choosing townhouses or rowhouses.”
That’s not to say the sometimes sterile suburban patterns of yesteryear are all the rage. Nowadays homebuyers often seek walkable commercial amenities and mixed development wherever they go. But the experience needn’t be urban.
For that matter, does anyone seriously think metro Denver can alleviate its housing crunch without suburbs playing a role?
Higher housing prices and rents reflect a shortage of supply, which has been outpaced for years by job and population growth in numerous metro areas. Many urban advocates sneer at what they call “sprawl,” but as Jim Griesemer, a professor and dean emeritus of the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver, tartly pointed out to me in the early 1990s when he was Aurora’s city manager, “Sprawl is where people live.” His point was that a burgeoning population can’t all move into existing neighborhoods. So the metro area expands.
To that end, Steve Hogan, Aurora’s mayor who died this month, was a notable hero, sloughing off the condescension of critics to focus on his vision of a growing, vibrant Aurora. His legacy, which includes Aurora Highlands south of DIA with potentially 60,000 future residents, will do far more to meet housing demand than Denver’s ramped-up campaign to subsidize affordable units such as the micro-apartments slated for the old First Avenue Hotel on Broadway.
I’ve got nothing against microapartments. To each his own. But the housing shortage, especially for families, isn’t going to be solved by cramming people into rabbit warrens.