Push for more green space unearths inequities
Final part of a three-part series
Denver planners have been gathering with residents to design the city’s first new big green space in more than a decade — 80 acres of park and natural land around Heron Pond near the South Platte River, including a pollinator garden, artwork and nods to working-class history.
But this is industrial wasteland. The 2-foot-deep pond holds toxic sludge laced with lead, arsenic and cadmium. Contaminated stormwater runoff from surrounding work yards worsens the brew.
And even though low-income north Denver residents say they are practically starved for nature in the city, a festering sense of injustice rankles the deal.
“We are left with the dregs,” longtime resident John Zapien said at a recent community meeting, urging city officials to prioritize health.
“We need to clean up Heron Pond. No ifs, ands or buts,” Zapien told officials in the room.
Denver’s willingness to embrace such a site for future parkland reflects the increasingly difficult challenge of establishing enough public green space to keep pace with population growth and development. Denver has fallen behind other U.S. cities in urban parks and open space. This is causing discomfort, hurting public health, exacerbating heat waves and risking costly problems with stormwater runoff.
City officials interviewed by The Denver Post said they see establishing new green space as essential but, perhaps, impossible given the rising price of land. Yet voters recently ordered a sales-tax hike that will raise $45 million a year for parks and open space. This has compelled planners to pore over thousands of acres that could be preserved as green space.
“We will lose ground if we don’t get busy,” Parks and Recreation Director Happy Haynes said as she contemplated Denver’s green-space crunch.
The problem, city officials said, is competing with private developers for land. Developers
since 1998 have installed buildings, paved over natural terrain and otherwise overhauled vast tracts of the city — profiting from shopping plazas and upmarket apartments that eventually sell as condominiums. They’ve built higher, lot-line-to-lot-line in some areas, leaving less space to even plant trees.
Turning to marginal industrial land, city officials said, may be Denver’s best hope for stabilizing a decline in green space per capita.
Chief parks planner Mark Tabor said that, after establishing the new green space around Heron Pond, Denver officials could try to purchase the land around the Arapaho power plant south of downtown and in the rail yards northwest of downtown for preservation as large green space where natural ecosystems could be restored.
This approach hinges on cleanup.
It can be done, not just by excavating and hauling away contaminated soil but by using modern cleanup methods that remove acidity and toxic metals, said Fonda Apostopoulos, a Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment engineer who managed decontamination of the Asarco smelters and 862 residential properties near Heron Pond.
“The low-lying fruit of clean property in Denver is few and far between. ‘Brownfields’ are pretty much the only property people are developing,” Apostopoulos said.
“It is all about exposure pathways” — the ways contamination can reach people, he said.
Around Heron Pond, cleanup included excavation and replacement of soil around homes. Nine new monitoring wells will be installed between the smelter site and the South Platte River to make sure toxic metals no longer contaminate groundwater, Apostopoulos said, pronouncing the area safe for at least passive recreational activity.
While cleaning up industrial wasteland costs hundreds of millions of dollars, “there are a lot of privatepublic partnerships that could do that,” he said. “Denver could get extra federal funding. They could get cleanup grants.”
Unfair competition
Earlier this year, Denver officials tried to buy a single acre in the highly sought Golden Triangle near downtown to establish green space needed for one of the city’s worst “park deserts” — only to find they were hamstrung by insufficient funds. They’d obtained $2 million in grants from groups such as Great Outdoors Colorado. But developers were able to bring more than three times that amount, and prevailed in the range of $7 million to $9 million.
“We are never in there strategically,” City Council President Jolon Clark said in an interview. “Now that land is going to be developed, wall-to-wall, 10 to 12 stories tall.”
Clark has championed a push for more green space and bristled. Denver “absolutely should not” turn away from its ideal of being a city within a park, he said. “But this is where we are barreling. We’re getting farther and farther away from it every single year. We need to turn it around. This is about turning things around and getting back to our vision.”
“I don’t think people in Denver realize how far away we’ve gotten,” Clark said. “This matters because the fabric of our city is the public open space, the parks. It is critical for us to preserve that. I am very worried.”
Yet city leaders’ commitments appear complicated. Mayor Michael Hancock, in office since 2011, recently acknowledged the problem. “We are falling behind … We are falling so far behind,” he said at a public gathering. Yet rather than build new 100-acre-plus green spaces — New York’s Central Park covers 840 acres, for comparison — Hancock has prioritized the creation of “pocket parks,” covering fewer than 2 acres, scattered around Denver so that every resident can reach one by walking less than 10 minutes.
“We are not talking about we have to have massive parks,” Hancock said.
Denver has 27 existing pocket parks, covering a total combined area of 13.5 acres. In contrast, parks established last century to ease industrialization covered more than 150 acres. Washington Park covers 161 acres and City Park encompasses 330 acres, including the Denver Zoo.
Nearly 86 percent of Denver residents already can reach a park within a 10minute walk, city documents show.
On the City Council, Clark said he sees a need for both large and small green space, as much as possible. “We have to look at these micro parks. But, yes, we need big parks. We need open space. We need preservation along the river for habitat,” he said. “If we could get a pocket park on every single block in the city, that, too, would be part of being a city within a park.”
No big swaths of land
Developers contend they should not be seen as villains in the lessening of nature in the city.
Lack of city leadership has been the problem, said Mark Johnson, president of the Denver-based urban design firm Civitas, which has guided green-space projects here and around the world.
“The real issue is livability. Denver does not have enough parks and enough green spaces, and the parks are no longer connected,” he said. “Denver probably could use 50 percent more parks than it has — a significant increase in the types of parks and the distribution of parks.”
Some developers now advocate increased green space to buttress economic value.
“Land has gotten very expensive in Denver. We don’t have big swaths of open land left. We do have a pretty good supply of paved areas like parking lots. I have not heard anybody say, ‘Let’s turn parking lots into pocket parks.’ That could be interesting,” said Michael Leccese, director of the Urban Land Institute of Colorado, a developer-run global nonprofit organization that encourages smart growth.
“It’s not fair to put the blame entirely on developers,” Leccese said. “If you are developing a site, and everybody wants density to support urban living, you’re not going to solve the problem of open space. … But we should be thinking about creating the proper green spaces for a growing city.”
Funding new parks
One of the last parks Denver established became possible after the cleanup of contaminated land, a 1.2acre west-side parcel that city officials obtained in 2007.
Trailers and a bar at the site regularly drew police to deal with disorderly conduct and vandalism. The trailers were deemed derelict. But after city contractors razed the land in 2009, it sat empty for years. Residents led by Spanish-speaking mother Norma Brambila proposed the creation of a park.
Called Cuatro Vientos/ Four Winds Park, it officially opened in the Westwood neighborhood in 2014. While tiny, it improves one of the city’s worst park deserts and is heavily used.
City Councilman Paul Lopez, representing residents, celebrated that park and praised the women who demanded it to make their neighborhood livable.
“We practically had to have a bake sale to get this park built,” Lopez said.
“That’s the problem,” he said. “We as Denver residents, as taxpayers, should not have to have bake sales to raise funds to build our parks. This could be something that is a city government function.”
Denver’s success as a city increasingly may depend, in an era of global urban expansion and rising interest in resilience amid climate change, by how it connects with nature. But urban design experts said restoring significant green space would require major public and private investments and a vision, with help from the federal government.
“Private developers need to play a role. They’re trying to make a profit. It all comes down to detail. Is it going to be quality, meaningful green space? Or is it just a tree every 20 feet?” said Jeremy Stapleton, climate resilience director for the Sonoran Institute, an Arizona-based think tank considering expansion to Colorado’s high-growth Front Range.
“We’re hoping we are seeing a paradigm shift here where people are saying, ‘We will work with nature,’ ” Stapleton said. “We have got to embrace natural processes. Nature is going to provide way more benefits than a built environment — like air quality and water quality and access for people. It comes down to your land-use planning.”
Fighting for equity
For the industrial wasteland around Heron Pond, city and state health officials are finding that, when residents get involved, they demand full cleanup.
Denver has owned that land, next to the Asarco cleanup site, since 1951.
Fish tissue samples have confirmed elevated concentrations of heavy metals, including cadmium, lead and arsenic, according to a toxic inventory in city records. Waste from runoff continues to collect in this low-lying pond.
“No fishing” signs have been posted for years. Ball sports and other activity that could disturb surface soil also are limited. Yet birds live at the pond. City managers have designated the property as a “natural area.”
While health officials advise only passive use of the pond area for now, adjacent land, spanning nearly 15 acres, would be designated active use, such as ultimate Frisbee and soccer. Denver officials have created a master plan for an 80-acre “park” to be called Heron Pond/Heller/Carpio-Sanguinette.
At a November gathering in the adjacent Globeville neighborhood, city parks planner Cincere Eades led a process that lets residents vote on how the park will be designed. The process focuses on technical details, such as how fragments of sayings by school children could be embedded in cement pathways.
That’s when longtime resident John Zapien and a friend stood to raise the issues of natural integrity, justice and cleanup. A former meat plant worker who has lived in Globeville since 1958, Zapien insisted environmental health ought to be a priority for green space in Denver.
Eades told residents the city is committed to estab- lishing a park, but lacks funds for dealing with final cleanup matters such as the sludge at the bottom of Heron Pond. Dredging the pond to remove arsenic, cadmium, lead and other contaminants would cost more than $2 million, Eades estimated, emphasizing that this industrial land has been deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment as fully “remediated.”
Water in the pond, she said, serves as a natural “cap” containing toxic contaminants to keep them from spreading.
Yet residents keep raising the issue, Eades said. “Every single time.”
Concerns of residents appear related as much to justice and fairness citywide as to the actual safety of this land, she said. “And I don’t blame them.”
Zapien and a friend proposed a new idea for solving this problem and ending the delays in establishing new public green space. Why not seek private funds for dredging, in return for visibility? They pointed to the green plastic dinosaurs that the Sinclair Oil Co. deploys at gas stations around Denver. Children love these, Zapien said. What if cash-strapped city officials persuaded Sinclair to help establish this green space by funding a dredging of the pond?
In return, green dinosaurs could be installed in the park, Zapien said, including one big dinosaur that could be set in the pond, rising out of formerly toxic muck.
“Not clean this up? That would be doing the same thing we’ve been letting industry and government do to us in here Globeville for 100 years,” he said.
“We cannot go on like that.”