“Denverization” is a thing in K.C. — and not a good thing
Ever heard of “Denverization”? In Kansas City, Mo., it’s a 13-letter word for gentrification, and it doesn’t come with Mile High City perks such as plentiful sunshine and nearby ski slopes.
The Kansas City Star published an editorial last week under the headline “Stop the Denverization of Kansas City. Troost doesn’t need to be hipsterfriendly.” The editorial decries city policy that has allowed for new money and development to pour into the city’s East Side without any giveback from builders or protection for low-income residents now being priced out of their once-overlooked, minority neighborhoods.
“The East Side badly needs economic
development, so what’s wrong with that?” the editorial asks. “Only that without any serious and legally binding housing policy, Kansas City is allowing its affordable housing crisis to deepen.” Sound familiar?
K.C. Star opinion writer Melinda Henneberger penned the editorial. It references Denver just once, in the final paragraph, where it talks about creating housing with “mountain-view prices, Rockies not included.”
It doesn’t define Denverization. It doesn’t need to because the word is already part of the Kansas City lexicon, Henneberger says.
“I used that term because it’s one people on the East Side here actually use; I first heard it maybe six months ago at a community meeting at a library there,” she said in an email. “They call it ‘Denverization’ because so many of those priced out in your town are moving to ours, where they are in turn pushing others out.”
In other words, it’s a domino effect of pricing pressure many a Coloradan might link back to the oft-decried Californification of their state. The median home price in Kansas City is $195,000, according to Zillow, less than half of Denver’s $468,495. In Los Angeles, it’s $799,000.
Henneberger’s column isn’t the first place “Denverization” has appeared. The Colorado Springs Business Journal used it in a 2006 opinion piece lashing out at plans for a downtown skyscraper. More recently, the Colorado Springs Independent has used it to describe an in-migration of Denver restaurants in the local food scene.
For some Kansas City residents, Denverization is less savory.
The epicenter of Denverization is Troost Avenue, a north-south thoroughfare that The Star has reported on a lot recently. Troost has been the dividing line between affluent white neighborhoods on the west and poor black neighborhoods on the east for generations. Only now, with young professionals (see: hipsters) being priced out of downtown Kansas City, new, more expensive housing is going up on the East Side.
Henneberger’s concern is that the city is asking nothing of developers when it comes to commitment to affordable housing. Nearly all of the hundreds of new apartments going up along Troost will command market-rate rents.
In Denver, high-percentage minority neighborhoods such as Highland and Five Points over the last decade have become redevelopment hotbeds. The result has been displacement of some lowincome residents, many of them black and Latino.
However, Denver has required developers to make affordability commitments. Its now-defunct inclusionary housing ordinance previously required large, new for-sale housing developments to set aside 10 percent of their units for low-income buyers. In place of that, the city has an affordable housing fund that draws from sources including development fees to support housing affordability.
But many have argued the city doesn’t do enough. Lisa Calderón, who is running for Denver mayor in May’s election, shared The Star’s Denverization column on her campaign Facebook page last week.
“Our city is becoming a model for what not to do,” Calderón wrote.