One of the West’s most sprawling, traffic-choked cities becomes a champion of mass transit — and a cleaner, greener future

Standing amid yucca and scrub oak on the foothills south of Denver, Keith Simon can see most of the metropolitan area that 2.6 million people now call home. To the northeast, the white spires of Denver International Airport rise from the Plains like pup tents at a Boy Scout outing. To the northwest juts 14,255-foot Longs Peak, with the cities of Boulder and Longmont at its feet. In the middle, poking out of the brown cloud on this autumn day like whiskery chin stubble, stand the skyscrapers of downtown Denver.

Snaking from downtown toward the bluffs where Simon stands is Interstate 25, broadband at up to 12 lanes with no room to expand. The anomalous piece of undeveloped pasture that lies below Simon’s feet, surrounded by cookie-cutter suburban homes, sits within Lone Tree, one of Denver’s new southern suburbs. But it remains little changed since it was homesteaded 130 years ago. Even now, a herd of Angus cattle is grazing its way to market.

Like the cattle, however, this pastoral landscape won’t survive much longer. And Simon is the one who will administer the coup de grâce, although he plans to do so as humanely as possible. Dressed in a bright pink shirt and tan loafers, the soft-spoken vice president of the Coventry Development Corp. describes the city his company is building here on 3,500 acres. RidgeGate, Simon says, will look and function far differently than the surrounding suburbia. It will be compact, even dense, in an inner-city sort of way, with three, five, even 10 times as many homes per acre as a traditional suburb, punctuated by clusters of taller buildings with apartments above and shops below.

Automobiles will not be banished, but neither will they dominate. The 60,000 people who will eventually live here will be able to walk to offices, stores and schools. Hopping on a light-rail train, they will glide rapidly to Broncos games near downtown Denver, to jobs in the nearby Tech Center, and to other commercial and social hubs in the region.

"We aren’t quite Manhattan, and never will be," says Simon. "Everyone will need at least one car in a family if they live at RidgeGate, but they won’t have to be joined at the hip with their cars."

Simon is not some dreamy futurist. He was a landscape architect in San Diego, Albuquerque and Santa Fe before landing in Denver in the late 1990s. And, talking about his new project, he sounds as stolid and unsentimental as an economics textbook.

"The cost to develop at lower densities is really immense, both to home-buyers and to the public, because you have miles of roads and more miles of pipes and more of everything," Simon says. "To create a more sustainable metro area, one that isn’t wall-to-wall low-density homes, we need to find ways to create communities that use less land."

Simon and his company are not alone in rethinking traditional development in the Mile High City. During the past decade, a small but growing army of progressive developers, planners and politicians — particularly Denver’s mayor, John Hickenlooper — have put their money where their mouths are. They’ve turned one defunct airport into a vibrant community, and are doing the same with a second. They’ve demolished 1960s-era shopping malls, such as Villa Italia and Cinderella City, and replaced them with apartments and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. They’ve transformed aging warehouses into a trendy residential and commercial hotspot. And they’ve constructed a modest light-rail network.

Call it SimCity, the New Urbanism edition.

And the fun has only begun. Last November, voters in metro Denver passed a sales tax increase to fund a program called FasTracks. In the next year, FasTracks will build 35 miles of new electric-powered light rail. During the next decade, the $4.7 billion program will yield another 119 new miles of new light rail, diesel-fueled commuter rail, and bus rapid transit. The potential for this new transportation infrastructure to transform Denver — and to enrich the transformers — has most of the 32 mayors in the metro area, as well as business and environmental leaders, almost giddy with excitement. Already, conference rooms and computers are humming with plans to redevelop abandoned factories, stagnant or decaying first-ring suburbs, and even a few undeveloped sites on the periphery, such as the future city of RidgeGate, into compact pods of mixed uses.

Denver’s vaulting light-rail ambitions have put it in the national spotlight. "There are no other regions of the country taking on anything like this," says Shelley Poticha, director of the Oakland, Calif., Center for Transit-Oriented Development.

Denver’s plans have also sparked some hope that the cities and towns in the West are not doomed to spill chaotically and endlessly over the region’s open spaces. If Denver — one of the West’s largest, most sprawling, smog-filled, traffic-choked cities — can be remade into something more compact and livable, the rest of the region might just be inspired to get on board, too.

Hitting the wall

To those who have watched it grow during the past several decades, Denver is an unlikely poster child for mass transit. A place with sports teams named the Rockies, the Nuggets, and the Avalanche, it has long seemed the prototypical undisciplined Western city, populated by people enamored of low-density suburbs sprawling across mountain and prairie, and so attached to their cars that nothing could pry their fingers from the steering wheels (HCN, 6/13/05: How dense can we be?).

Even as early as the 1980s, however, Denver highway engineers such as Guillermo "Bill" Vidal were beginning to realize that low-density living came with serious drawbacks. In those days, Vidal was working with neighborhood groups, so he heard plenty about the problems of traffic, noise and air pollution. But although new technology kept the air pollution from getting worse, traffic congestion continued to intensify. In the 1990s, as chief executive of the Colorado Department of Transportation, Vidal realized that highway expansion would always lag behind growth in traffic. And the price tag was daunting: Expanding highways to meet rush-hour demands often required buying adjacent homes and businesses, which sent costs soaring to stratospheric levels.

"It’s not a matter of whether we accommodate the car," Vidal says. "It’s a matter of that we have no room."

Population growth is the inexorable force driving all these changes. Since 1980, metro Denver has gained 1 million residents, bringing the total population to 2.6 million. Demographers predict an even larger human tide in the next quarter of a century, with the city projected to hit 3.9 million people by 2030.

Plotting this larger city of the future, Vidal and other regional leaders began looking to a transportation mode of the past: the rail. Like most cities and even the smaller towns of the West, Denver once had an array of streetcars. Begun in 1872, drawn first by horses, the streetcars were soon electrified and extended into the countryside, creating their own suburbs. Those streetcar suburbs today constitute Denver’s oldest and densest neighborhoods. Similar "interurban" lines radiated to nearby farming towns, and to Boulder, 25 miles away. Even smallish farming towns, like Fort Collins, Colo., had trolleys and streetcars soon after the 20th century dawned.

A century later, as traffic overwhelmed metro highways, Denver was ready to get back on the tracks. In 1994, the seven-county Regional Transportation District unveiled a 5.3-mile light rail line in the central business district, financing it without state or federal aid. It was received well enough, encouraging faithful rail supporters to push for more. In 1997, they put a $6 billion expansion proposal on the ballot. But the high price tag, combined with vague routes and political infighting, sent the "Guide the Ride" measure down to defeat.

Nonetheless, in July 2000, the Regional Transportation District bounced back with an 8.7-mile extension of light rail from downtown to the southwest suburbs. Delivered on time and within budget, the rail line immediately attracted throngs of riders, serving 18,000 daily within two years — more than even the most optimistic projections. Light rail had hit a home run in Denver.

Work had already begun on a 19.1-mile extension of light rail, paralleling the clogged I-25 toward Lone Tree, where Keith Simon and his cohorts envision their New Urbanist city of RidgeGate. And now that the public had eagerly embraced light rail, proponents began plotting something more ambitious yet.

On the fast track

The 2004 FasTracks campaign not only united environmentalists with businesspeople, it also revealed a strengthening alliance between city and suburbs. All 31 mayors in the metro area at that time pledged their support, but Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper was at the campaign’s forefront.

Tall and lanky, Hickenlooper caught the fancy of Denverites two years earlier when, as a political novice, he campaigned for mayor with television advertisements depicting himself as a geeky do-gooder plugging coins into the city’s unpopular parking meters. In television ads this fall, Hickenlooper stifled his innate fear of heights to sky-dive while explaining to voters why they should modify Colorado’s throat-choking budget limitations. For the well-funded FasTracks television campaign last year, he presented a completely different face: an urbane, relaxed, thoughtful Hickenlooper boarding the train, reading a newspaper. Light rail, the TV spot seemed to say, was convenient and sophisticated.

The various personalities are not facades. Hickenlooper has his head, and his heart, in many places. Behind his desk in City Hall hangs a famous painting of Colorado’s Mount of the Holy Cross by 19th century landscape artist Thomas Moran. As a geology student, Hickenlooper spent two summers in the Absaroka Mountains north of Yellowstone National Park, doing research for his master’s thesis. When Denver’s energy boom of the early 1980s tanked, the oil geologist re-created himself as a restaurateur. In 1988, Hickenlooper opened Colorado’s first brewpub, the Wynkoop Brewery, located across from Union Station, Denver’s old railway headquarters. In doing so, he led the charge of gentrification into what had been a shabby warehouse district. In 1992, he moved to the neighborhood himself, buying a loft above his brewery.

For the next decade, Hickenlooper got around chiefly by walking, even as he got ever more involved in community nonprofit causes and expanded his restaurant holdings. "I would go 10 days without getting in a car," he recalls. "It really was a transforming time. I felt not as tense; I felt more in control of my life."