Part 2: Revanchism in the Neoliberal City:How the #NewDenver was Won, and Why Gentrification is the Wrong Battle
Part 2: Ignorance of Man, Time and Space
Denver previously had a Latino as Mayor in Federico Pena from 1983–91, who later served as Secretary of Transportation and Secretary of Energy under Bill Clinton. The Colorado Convention Center was being finished as he was leaving office. Pena had stood on the banks of the Platte River and asked Denverites to “imagine a great city” in 1983. Businessmen had and they knew who they wanted for their next Mayor, Pena’s handpicked successor Norm Early. In 1991, Denver elected its first African-American mayor. This would be a time of great municipal projects, such as building the Denver International Airport, adding mass transits, stadiums for Denver Broncos and the Nuggets and finally a stadium for new baseball team of the Colorado Rockies, to name a few of the projects.
Building required tax revenue, bonds and a population growth. The was city and prospectors were in constant stages condemning, selling and buying proper for Denver’s next big move. With a Democrat in the White House, the Governor’s mansion, the Mayor mansion, the former mayor now being the Secretary of Transportation and Colorado being a swing state, Denver was in prime position to grow and catch a rainfall of government subsidies. Empowerment and enterprise zones sprung up in different areas of the city as community members wrestle over who had more of a right to parts of the city and the monies these zones brought in. More importantly people had to be moved. Some were resettled to different parts of the city or the metropolitan area. While those new to Colorado were simply redirected to other parts of the metro. Denver needed to make itself into a major city, no more was it trying to be Houston or Chicago, it was trying to find its identity, it could be more than the Washington D.C. of the West. This was the West, people had come to the West to become something new, something different. Denver it could be something new, it could be something different. It could be a great American city — with a few changes.
Democracy, Capital and Valhalla
No man better represented the Omni-American and what America and Denver could offer than Wellington Webb. At 6'5, 250 lbs, he was a man who had climbed the social and poverty ladder from the projects of Denver to the Mayor’s residence of Cableland. A job that many argued including the business community was not supposed to be his but former Washingtonian turned District Attorney, Norm Early’s. Webb as the product of an enforced segregated school system and grandson of a Chicagoan ward trained grandmother, knew the art of the deal and so he became Denver’s first Black Mayor in 1991. He had seen a 4.3% population loss of the 70’s and then the 5% loss in the 80’s, he understood that it was not people leaving the city, it was capital that was fleeing the city.
In him White capital did not see what they had seen in Pena, Early and later Hancock (both from Pena’s administration), a man who would do its bidding. He was a tall and serious man who had been a bureaucrat, with deep ties to the community not professional organizations that screened Blacks and Latinos and approved them to the faces of capital and society. He knew how things and people worked on the ground level. Yet and despite all of his stature and greatness Webb was typical of Black leaders since the Jim Crow era, they had been a batch of charismatic men with a strong belief in self, and many had the fortitude to achieve their dreams but their visions of greatness extended no further than their selves, a few family members and close friends. He now needed a vision outside of himself. He needed to imagine what a great city could be.
In this capacity, Webb hired an ambitious, trained architect by the name of Jennifer Moulton, the Executive Director of Historic Denver as his Planning Director. Moulton, had moved to Colorado in 1967, as a freshman at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. In Colorado she found she could make a name for herself not live or die by the currency of her family name, the proper schooling or right connection. Much like her fellow preservationists Dana Crawford she had a vision for the potential of what the city of Denver could be but more so than Webb she also had the established relationships with the downtown businesses to develop her vision.
When Denverites look upon the New Denver they see the vision of Jennifer Moulton and her partnerships with developers and business owners, this is what she will be long remembered. The woman who saw a cowtown turned collapsed oiltown become a boomtown metropolis. Moulton will also be remembered within developer and activist circles for saying in, “The Denver Plan” during the 90’s, “Denver is a great city…but it’s like a donut”. The hole in the donut that Moulton was talking about was more than the cavity of a downtown after 5 p.m. She was talking about the Black and Latino populations that lived close to Central Business District. Moulton knew the people who Denver wanted to attract.
They were the prosperous young to middle-aged Whites from what geographer Joel Kotkin would describe, suffering from the Valhalla Syndrome, that was engulfing the Rocky Mountain states such as Colorado, Montana, and Idaho. They were coming from California heading East, looking for a freedom road in the West. These modern Westerners wanted to live in and be near major cities, not in small distant towns and ranches. They simply did not want to be with the populations they had left behind. The political conservative and cultural commentator, David Brooks, would describe a slightly different version of them later in his book, “Bobos in Paradise”, by essentially there the same person.
The new Denverites, that the city wanted to recruit were moving away from what they consider their welfare states, obvious urban social and cultural inequities and it’s challenges. They wanted to create a new world and culture, mixed with bohemian ways with bourgeois values. Denver could be an open canvas to these people of a modern West, but there was just one problem.
Resettling the High Plains
Many of the people who surrounded downtown Denver were subsidized renters who lived in places such as the East Village Apartments. The Ville as it was colloquially known, was built for the 1976 Winter Olympics that Colorado and it’s citizens rejected for sake of the environment and economy. After the state rejected the Olympics the local government decided to use the built structures for many of it’s disenfranchised and poorer populations and the people who lived in the East Village Apartments were another version of what these new Denverites were moving away from.
The Ville was a low-income housing development which set a 7-minute walk from downtown, prime real estate property. To reduce the population developers recruited a local Black councilwoman who later established a political alliance with a future mayor and two Denver Public School (DPS) board representatives against the Mayor and they would need federal funding. For her work she would get a municipal building named after her. Webb saw the possibilities displacing thousands Black and Brown citizens, many who had voted for him. With carrot and whip he managed to negotiate a plan that would allow the City and County of Denver to buy the development for 12.3 million dollars in 2001 but in the end it would not be enough to save the people of the East Village Apartment. It was only prolonging the inevitable.
Just one year later, in 2002, Denver would receive the federal funding it needed to raise the East Village Apartments. The project to rid the downtown of the poor was known as Hope VI, a block grant proposing private developers invest with public money to improve public housing. Denver was awarded 20 million dollars to redevelop the low-income housing. Hope VI propose the idea that the problem in cities and housing was not racism, education or economic factors but a saturation of the impoverished in central locations. It was a project that believed in the dissipation of the poor. Years later it would be found out that not only had Hope VI pushed poorer people out of cities for more affluent populations, it had not been regulated from 1992–1999 and had been allowed to disavow federal guidelines of a 1–1 public housing demolition-build ratio, to achieve a 5–1 ratio. Many of the properties funded whether dilapidated or livable conditions were condemned because of location such as on waterfronts and close to urban centers. Worse regulators and overseers had used a system of reward and return against Federal guidelines.
In many cases the millions of residents in places like the East Village Apartments were told across the nation, the government will remodel the properties, you will be given a voucher, and can return afterwards. Activist Charmaine “Shark” Barros, who was given a voucher in 2000, called it a voucher to nowhere, is still waiting. She signaled it would leave a generation homeless and removed. Ms. Barros appears to have been right, few of the East Village’s inhabitants and Denver’s poorer populations would be able to continue to live in Denver. They would be pushed from reservation to range until there was nowhere else to go. The East Village Apartments and other low-income properties would change their status from low income properties to a mixture affordable housing and a few low income homes.
As far as, Ms. Barros in 2018, she finds herself being pushed out of the city of Denver again as real estate owners and investors no longer want or need to HUD vouchers when the market will pay whatever price requested. A recent studies show that a person living in Denver would need to make $22.11 ($46,000 a year) to afford an average 1 bedroom apartment. By the city’s own affordable housing calculation a person making $76,000 qualifies for affordable housing in Denver. In the new Denver a very frugal teacher could afford to live in small 1 bedroom apartment but a microbiologist could have taxpayer subsidized loft.
The poorer populations from the places like the East Village were pushed to Aurora and Lakewood, where many celebrated the cheaper rent, at the time. The resettlement would make Aurora a city of Generation Xers and Millennials,and one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. In 2008, it would be named an “All America City” (Lakewood receive this distinction in 2016). As the years passed the residents of places like the East Village Apartments would find their chances of returning to their former homes and Denver little more than dreams.
There are many things that can be said about the former Mayor, Wellington Webb, what you cannot say is that he directed harsh policies against the poor and the underprivileged. What we find is when the machine of development starts not even the most powerful and respected mayor in the country can stop it once the checks have been signed, hands shaken and consciences allayed, it’s not personal, it’s just business.
Neo-Exodusters and Promise Lands of Other Men
Why did you move there, is something I like to always ask people. I came across a Black man in 2010, who runs his own company and prides himself in not working for another man. Mr. T as he shall be named in this article is married and his wife is a doctor. They are a Black couple, with a family. After years of living in the Midwest and the East they knew they wanted to live in Denver. So they packed up and moved in, with some family, they had living in Colorado. Eager for their own space, they hired a real estate agent and told her how much they wanted to live in Denver. She seemed as excited as them as she drove them to Saddle Rock, Utah Park, Eaglecrest and Smoky Hill and told them how great the schools were and how safe the neighborhoods were. After a week of never seeing Denver proper, they fired her.
They hired another real estate agent and told her “We want to be near the Five Points, that we have heard about”. They were told, “it’s dangerous down there but I will show you that area and places close to it.” She drove them to Green Valley Ranch, his wife was not happy. He begged his wife to give the realtor a chance to do her job. His wife acquiesced but after another week’s time they had seen Green Valley Ranch, Highlands Ranch, Centennial and Aurora again. He could fight it no more. They fired her.
They hired a black realtor at the insistence of his wife, they told her, “We don’t want to see anything that’s post office address says anything other than Denver”. The realtor laughed and said, “I get it”. They found a house within a week, close to one of Denver’s better public schools. Mr. T is one of the lucky ones he and his wife knew what they wanted for their children. They were persistent, they had family that was already living in Colorado, they would not be led they were not starting over they were continuing their lives. Others would not be as lucky, they would be led by the promise of hope, dreams, possibilities, opportunity and “good schools” to lands further East, further South, a slow journey closer and closer back to where the ancestors started but at what cost.
The irony in all of this is, as many Blacks were being showed the outer regions Denver and Aurora, many developers, young professional couples, and new Denverites were being homesteaded for loans from the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, during this time. In this manner the Metropolitan Lofts on 9th and Acoma Street in Denver which sell for $650,000 were created and so were the Stadium Lofts on 22nd and Blake that sell for $400,000. This Act was created for the poor and underprivileged in neighborhoods that had been traditionally redlined but many did not know of it or were turned down. While the persons who were receiving the majority of the loans were the very populations that had always received the loans even during redlining, after all the Act did not require race or gender, just geographic location. It was the West things were always changing, like the buffalo that had once roamed the plains.
