Sorting through a stack of planning documents and books
on a shelf in her office, Denver city planner Ellen Ittelson pulls
out a faded booklet with yellowed pages. It's a Denver
planning-department primer from the 1940s, and the main topic is how
to remake the city's streets to accommodate cars. "The entire theory
of planning for street traffic has changed since the advent of the
automobile," it reads. "We can remedy these faults by making streets
sufficiently wide to carry traffic."
Since the end of World War II, Denver has guided its
development based on the notion that everyone would drive
everywhere. Now that traffic congestion has become the number-one
complaint of city residents, however, Ittelson believes Denver must
turn away from this model. "It took us a long time to get into the
mess we're in, and it will take a long time get out of it," she
says.
A good starting point is the intersection of University
Boulevard and Interstate 25 where, seven years from now, a major
light-rail station serving thousands of commuters will open as part
of the planned light-rail line down I-25. Ittelson hopes to see new
high-rise apartment buildings with stores on the ground floor grow
up around the station. She wants these apartment buildings to form
the center of an urban neighborhood where people will be able to go
to the grocery store, head for the movies and travel to the office
without ever getting into a car. "Right now in our society we don't
have the choice not to use a car," she says. "We want to give people
the opportunity to have a choice for each trip they make."
But dense development near light-rail stations may be
just the beginning. After decades of losing population to the
suburbs, Denver is growing again, and the city is increasingly
shouldering intense development pressure. In fact, the Denver
Regional Council of Governments predicts that Denver will add more
than 100,000 residents in the next twenty years -- and many in city
government believe the number could be twice that.
Adding to the pressure is the possibility that
Coloradans, angered by sprawl, will approve Amendment 24, the
"responsible growth" amendment on November 7. Under that proposal,
voters in cities and counties throughout the state would have to
approve local comprehensive plans designating where new development
could take place. The expectation is that suburban voters would
frown on bulldozing open space at the edge of their communities,
meaning more development would be funneled into areas that are
already urbanized.
Now officials who spent years trying to find ways to
keep the middle class in the city are faced with a startling new
problem: how to accommodate thousands of new residents without
destroying existing neighborhoods.
To answer that question, Denver has quietly begun work
on an overhaul of its land-use and transportation plan that will
eventually lead to a rezoning of much of the city. If Ittelson, who
is coordinating the effort, and others have their way, the plan will
encourage dense new residential construction along busy transit
routes such as Colfax and Broadway, as well as around the light-rail
stations like the planned one at University and I-25. If they're
packed in in this way, Ittelson is betting, a large number of these
new residents can be convinced to use bus and rail lines to get
around instead of cars.
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