Denver’s Do-It-Yourself Developers

Denver is growing fast. The local government estimates that by 2025 the greater metropolitan area will have increased almost 1 million people from the current population of about 2.5 million. As the number of people moving to Denver outpaces the housing stock, Denver finds itself struggling, like many other Western cities established in the 19th century to maintain its historic neighborhoods.

This housing crunch has led to growth in the outer suburbs, which spread as far as the mountains thirty minutes away. Last year, voters passed a $4.7 billion transit initiative to help ease the commute between the city and the suburbs. Developers, in another approach, are also attempting to fill in existing gaps of the residential areas closer to the urban center. New development projects, however, are often not congruent with the scale and character of their neighborhoods. In Curtis Park, a neighborhood just a five-minute walk from Denver’s central business district, one such proposed development inspired a grassroots project in response. Residents formed a corporation to build housing themselves that would ensure consistency with the historic character of existing stock.

According to local preservationist Bill West, who has lived there for more than thirty years, Curtis Park is Denver’s oldest neighborhood. Its tree-lined streets are flanked by Victorian mansions, Italianate row homes, and Queen Anne bungalows that have survived various fashions of urban revitalization. “[Curtis Park] dates back to the great population boom of the late-19th century. The trains got to Denver in 1870, and Curtis Park was built out by about 1885. There was a huge population boom followed by a huge building boom. Curtis Park survived because the grid or axis of the city changed once the capital building was built. Instead of coming out our way, development went the other way and Curtis Park just survived, right on the edge of downtown Denver.”

Curtis Park is a place of mixed incomes and ethnic backgrounds. Residents are equally likely to be African American, Hispanic, or white, and the sense of community leads to people to want to remain. One resident told me, “I’ve never lived in a place where I have ten people that I can call if I ever needed anything and I know they will drop anything at a moment’s notice to help me.” In 2002, a resident of Curtis Park, architect Cathy Bellem, learned of a plan to construct sixteen apartments on an empty lot beside her property that had been collecting trash and weeds for almost thirty years. The originally proposed project would have inserted a four-story building into a block of intact, two-story, single-family homes. Parking for so many tenants would have taken up nearly the entire site. Bellem hired my firm, in situ DESIGN, to be the architects for an alternative development (her husband is my business partner). As she wrote in a client statement, “We understand the need for more housing stock and we embrace density, but infill housing should enhance the existing fabric, not detract from it.”

Bellem and a neighbor went door to door with a letter asking residents to help beat the potential buyers to the closing table. The next morning she found $40,000 in checks stuffed under her door. In a few short weeks, more than $150,000 was raised to close on the land. Bellem then helped form an LLC, Curtis Park Investment Group, which sold shares in the project. “We tried to keep the shares low to allow as many neighbors as possible to be involved,” she explained. A share could be purchased for $5,000, and each share equaled a vote. Middle-class residents bought most shares, with some purchasing multiple shares. Non-investors were also welcome to contribute to site planning at neighborhood design meetings.

Members of the neighborhood group included an attorney, accountant, architect, city planner, historian, real estate broker, and several members of the building trades. The group acquired the land, secured financing and political backing, selected professional engineers and contractors, and ultimately constructed the project. “Longtime neighbors, some more than thirty years, put their own homes up for collateral to guarantee the construction loan,” explained Bellem. The personal investments and difficult decisions involved in the project not only helped preserve the neighborhood physically, but also provided community-building opportunities that newer neighborhoods often lack.

From the beginning, the group set out to develop a project whose value would not be tied to a particular property but would increase the value of the overall neighborhood. After working through several designs, the group settled on a contemporary four-unit town house project that blends into a block of turn-of-the-century Victorian and Italianate homes. Design features intended to enhance the neighborhood’s residential character include street-facing front doors, front porches, and double-hung windows to match the proportions of the neighborhood’s historic windows. The group not only eliminated the empty lot that was dragging down neighborhood property values, but also added housing stock within city limits that retained the neighborhood character.

All the units of the new building went under contract in just over a month following the completion of construction. Now many in the investment group are rolling over profits from this first project to invest in a second Curtis Park development. To manage this second effort, Bellem started a development company called Grassroots Neighborhood Development. It purchased a second property with an investor group made up of 30 neighbors. The $2.5 million project, called Merchants Row, broke ground in March of this year. This six-unit townhome complex, like the first project, employs a contemporary design language compatible with the historic district.

But community-based development is not an antidote to gentrification. It was important to the neighborhood group that the new project be configured in such a way that could resist the homogenizing mechanisms of speculative development. Walk-out basements in Merchants Row are being marketed as “flex-space” for a home office or an affordable rental unit. This component has an opportunity to bring additional affordable and family-friendly units to the project. And it shows that low-cost rentals and multiple-unit homes can be planned for in other ways than cramming lofts or apartments into one or two buildings.

Urban homeowners often resist empty lots being filled in by the biggest buildings possible, even as they protest suburban growth. But people still need places to live. The new buildings among Curtis Park’s Victorians offer one model of co-existence for newcomers and old-timers, neither of whom thrives without the other.