While Denver was hosting urban planners from 18 nations recently for a conference on green space, residents were launching a campaign to preserve 155 acres of open space at the Park Hill Golf Course, which was sold to a developer last month.
These Save Open Space Denver advocates say they’re fighting to ensure breathing room amid a citywide thickening of traffic, jam-packed apartments and rising heat. They’re focusing on the Park Hill land as a last relatively inexpensive chance to move toward a balance between nature and development that city leaders traditionally aspired to in the goal of making Denver “a city within a park.”
Nature in cities has emerged as a global challenge, with more than half of humanity now living in urban areas and a projected 2.5 billion more people expected to live in cities by 2050. Denver officials face rising concerns that the city is failing to ensure sufficient green space.
“We have to fight for every bit of green space we can, or pretty soon our city is going to become unlivable,” said SOS Denver steering committee member Woody Garnsey.
This fight began in 1997, when Denver paid $2 million to place a conservation easement on the Park Hill land — a legal restriction perpetually banning development. That easement remains even after Westside Investment Partners bought the land for $24 million last month. It says the 155 acres must be preserved for golf and “such unrelated recreational uses such as ball fields, tennis courts, etc.”
But Westside managing principal and founder Andy Klein aims to persuade City Council members to change the easement and rezone the property, which they have the power to do, to allow residential and commercial construction.
“It is a risk. We are hopeful,” Klein said last week in an interview. “We’re going to start meeting with the neighbors in the upcoming weeks and months. That will determine how long the process takes.”
Parks are “vitally important” and green space adds long-term value to housing in a city, Klein said. “But people want to move to Denver. It is a battle everyone has to wrestle with. How do you balance new people wanting to move here with maintaining the way of life when there was more open space?
“I understand both sides of it. I’m a native,” he said. At Park Hill, “we want to see it be a great park, too. It would certainly be a big public park.”
The number of acres developers would preserve as natural green space hasn’t been decided, Klein said. “I would guarantee it would be at least a third.” The upcoming process of surveying residents “is about finding the right mix of uses.”
SOS Denver and the registered Inter-Neighborhood Cooperation grassroots umbrella group are insisting that all 155 acres must be preserved, consistent with the easement. They have sent letters urging City Council members not to give in.
Mayor Michael Hancock’s parks department said last week there are no current plans for the land, other than finishing stormwater drainage work — part of a $1.4 billion citywide burden of dealing with increased runoff caused by an expanding “impervious” or paved-over urban landscape. The northeast Denver area around the golf course has been designated as not having enough green space.
“The city’s intent, as stipulated by the conservation easement, is to restore the land to golf course-related purposes,” Denver Parks and Recreation Manager Happy Haynes said in an emailed response to Denver Post queries. “This administration fully appreciates the public appetite for preserving the Park Hill golf course as open space.”
No efforts have been made to remove the easement, and Westside received no assurances about possible future development, said Denver city attorney’s office spokesman Ryan Luby.
Still, open space advocates circulated a flyer last week suggesting that Westside contributions to Hancock’s re-election left city officials beholden. City officials declined to discuss the allegation.
Wellington Webb, who was mayor when the easement was purchased, also raised concerns.
“I do believe there was a gentlemen’s agreement … before the election, that after the election people would proceed with buying Park Hill and then set it out for a development plan — and go out and do a sham community input process to say they ‘talked to people in the neighborhood,’ ” Webb told The Denver Post in an interview. “It is my hope that members of City Council will not fall for this deal.”
For years, developers in Denver have used a pretense of supplying needed affordable housing and promising small portions of open space to get their projects approved, he said, and yet when projects are completed the housing is not affordable and the city has lost green space.
“I’m not anti-growth. You just have to manage growth. That 155 acres is a large vestige of open space,” Webb said. “We have to draw a line in the sand somewhere, to start standing up to developers and to elected officials who want to create deals.”
Across Denver’s 155-square-mile area, city officials have failed to add enough green space to keep pace with population growth, falling behind other major cities — a problem that Hancock acknowledged last year.
Denver slipped to 29th this year in the Trust For Public Land rankings of U.S. cities in parks quality and access, down from 14th in 2004. Formal designations of parks since 2003 added 700 acres of open space, a city document shows, but population has increased by 121,000 over the same period.
City officials have talked up “pocket parks” — 73 of them, covering 13.5 acres total citywide — but haven’t established large parks, such as the 161-acre Washington Park and 330-acre City Park that Denver leaders last century established to ensure adequate nature in the city.
Hancock administration officials last week pointed to a massive document, called Game Plan for a Healthy City, in response to questions about addressing green space challenges. That document says Denver would need to add 4,700 acres over the next 10 years to reach the national norm of 13 park acres per 1,000 residents. Denver’s current ratio has slipped to 8.9 acres, down from 9.4 acres in 2006, and is projected to decrease to 7.3 acres by 2040 as population tops 857,000.
Denver’s existing parks cover 8.3% of the city’s 155 square-mile area. This compares with 22% parkland in New York City, 21% in Washington, D.C., and 20% in San Francisco. It was unclear from Denver’s parks plan whether adding 4,700 acres is a goal.
During his re-election campaign, Hancock declined to commit to a specific number of new acres, while challenger Jamie Giellis committed to ensure 10% of Denver would be parkland.
Voters have approved a parks initiative that raises $37.5 million a year for parks. Denver officials plan to use $16 million a year for land acquisition, with the rest devoted to maintaining and developing existing parks.
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Parks manager Haynes defended city efforts and said hosting the recent conference Greater and Greener: Exploring Natural Connections reflects Denver’s position as a leader in open space efforts.
“We wouldn’t be part of the City Parks Alliance and hosting the Greater and Greener Conference if we weren’t committed to becoming greater and greener, nor would we have been selected to host the conference if the organization representing the experts in the field did not believe that we were leaders in this effort across the country,” she said.
At the conference, more than 1,000 urban parks planners gathered to explore efforts to ensure green space inside cities. Organizers said they staged the conference in Denver in part to draw attention to challenges amid rapid growth and development.
“We wanted to see what is happening in the city that is negatively impacting parks and the environment and the open spaces. Bring it attention,” said Jayne Miller, board chair of World Urban Parks.
Those at the conference widely expressed admiration of Denver’s economic vitality and the central Civic Center and opera house area where hosts held forums. But they also deemed Denver lacking in pedestrian-friendly green space, which increasingly is seen as essential for economic competitiveness and quality of life.
Urban parks advocate Gil Penalosa of Bogota, president of “8-80 Cities,” said nature in cities is critical.
“The way to do it is to make it a priority. It is not a priority in Denver. Or it is way down in the priorities. Cars are your priority here. So you do big highways. You do big roads. Big intersections,” Penalosa said, lamenting the difficulty crossing Denver streets.
“We need to realize that green space and parks is not about green space and parks,” he said. “It is about the benefits. We want to be healthier. We want mental health. We know that, when people have nature close to them, they have less depression.”
