Denver's future growth Eastward (Aurora, Ken Caryl: house, employment, landscaping)

[Katiana]

Portland, Oregon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As the population has grown, and undeveloped land inside the urban growth boundary has dwindled, there has been pressure to change or relax the rules.

The original state rules included a provision for expanding urban growth boundaries, but critics felt this wasn't being accomplished. In 1995, the State passed a law requiring cities to expand UGBs to provide enough undeveloped land for a 20 year supply of future housing at projected growth levels.[54]

So they just keep expanding the UGB as the population grows. It's not clear to me just what is being accomplished.

BTW, I have lived on the "fronteir" of Denver's metro area for 25 years. I like it, that's all.

[zenkonami]

Originally Posted by Katiana

Portland, Oregon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



So they just keep expanding the UGB as the population grows. It's not clear to me just what is being accomplished.

BTW, I have lived on the "fronteir" of Denver's metro area for 25 years. I like it, that's all.

Part of the key with Urban Growth Boundaries is that the UGBs are not the actual borders of the city or metropolitan area...that way they can allow for open space or agricultural zoning outside the UGB but inside city or metro borders. Over time, this allow growth to continue in a managed fashion, while also relaxing some issues on housing and land affordability from time to time. I don't actually know what happens if the expanding the UGBs reach the metro limits.

UGBs may not be a perfect solution, but they are a step toward solving the problem. I'd rather we debated solutions and tried them out than do nothing at all. I've seen Houston. I've lived in Phoenix. I live in L.A. (well within the city proper, I might add.) I've wanted to make Denver my home again for a long time, and that opportunity is coming soon. I really don't want it to become another Houston / Phoenix / L.A. People who enjoy that lifestyle are welcome to those cities.

Also, I'm not blaming you for enjoying the fringe of the city. In fact, my point is that I think we'd all like to enjoy the edge of the city. I just think we need to consider how moving there affects more than just our own personal satisfaction. Obviously someone is going to live at a city's edge, but I would think such people would be among the most vocal about protecting that boundary from unchecked / unplanned expansion...particularly when done by developers who have no interest in what the people already living there want.

[Katiana]

Well, some people seem to enjoy living IN the city, and claim to hate the suburbs and rural-suburban areas. Me, I just put up a second batch of tomatoes today, to enjoy come winter. I froze some green beans yesterday. Not everyone likes to do this. But we do. DH loves to grow the stuff, and I do the canning/freezing. BUT, we also like some of the city offerings: the arts, the sports, the shopping you get in a bigger city (including at the suburban malls). So we live where we live.

Boulder has some sort of planning areas, too. They don't have legal status, and in one case, their "urban planning area" which is not a part of the city comes to the Louisville city limits.

I hate pitting one group of people against another. That happened in Louisville for years, and it was not a pretty sight. The old timers (which seemed to include anyone who had lived there 2+ years) didn't want any more development, etc. I hated the "us vs them" mentality it brought about. There's got to be a better way.

[steveindenver]

So you can't live in the City and have a garden now? I had better get accustomed to the hallucinations I'm having of half a dozen tomato plants, spinach, basil, etc. There are quite a few city lots that are larger than what you find out in the sticks.

There's got to be a better way.

There is, it's called planning and reducing suburban sprawl.

[vegaspilgrim]

Originally Posted by steveindenver

So you can't live in the City and have a garden now? I had better get accustomed to the hallucinations I'm having of half a dozen tomato plants, spinach, basil, etc. There are quite a few city lots that are larger than what you find out in the sticks.


There is, it's called planning and reducing suburban sprawl.

Use whatever terminology you want, but a neighborhood with single family homes on big lots just isn't a "city" or "urban" neighborhood regardless of what you call it or what municipality it's located in; it's an old, mature, probably very attractive old-money suburban area with a central location. Denver Country Club is a good example. What makes an area fundamentally urban is DENSITY. There is no substitute for population density. Ironically, I've seen plenty of suburban apartment complexes and even high rise apartment buildings in the suburbs that are more dense, and therefore more urban in the true sense of the word than official "new urbanist" developments in "the city."

[Katiana]

I agree, vegas. In any event, we couldn't have a garden in our apt. in Denver, b/c it was a shared yard. We had a few plants on the patio. Some apt. dwellers don't even have a patio to grow a plant on, or to sit outdoors on. That is, of course, true of apts in the city OR the suburbs.

As far my quote, "there has to be a better way", it was taken out of context. I meant, there has to be a better way than "us vs them".

[Triste_en_Tampa]

I know there are many people in every metropolitan area who share the sentiments of Katiana and others who've responded to this tread. It is nice to have all the conveniences of a major city while being close to "open space" and livestock, etc. That's what you get when living at the fringe. However if everyone (or, let's say, a large constituency of home buyers) wanted to live at the fringe to be near open space, then it wouldn't be long before that open space behind your backyard becomes filled with cookie-cutter homes, gas stations, parking lots, strip malls, industrial parks, six lane highways and sprawling schools: the unsightly landscape you moved to the fringe to get away from. A few more years go by, you've got equity built into your home, your income has risen, and you move to the "new" fringe, five miles further out. You and a hundred thousand other people in search of a charmed life in the country. And the suburban municipalities consume ever more land. In my opinion, though, you can't have it both ways. You can't have the country and the city; at least, not without heavy government subsidization at the expense of city and rural dwellers.

As gas prices have risen and as governments like Denver's begin to take the initiative of encouraging smarter growth, I believe we will see less and less of the cylce mentioned above. I think in the future, one will have to make a choice between city (with its hardcore urban areas, and its less dense, more tranquil areas) and country. This has been the reality for all of human civilization until the twentieth century. The suburban landscape as we know it from the last century and the beginning of the current one is, in my opinion, an anomaly.

[Katiana]

I"ll try to be civil here, but it's getting harder by the minute. Triste_en_Tampa, you have been a member of CD for exactly three days. This is the first I've seen you on this forum. Unless you've been reading all my old posts, you don't know much about me, and your post indicates that. I have not "move(d) to the "new" fringe, five miles further out." In fact, I haven't moved anywhere for 19 years, and before I lived in this house, I lived in one 1/2 mile away, just across the road. I suspect I am old enough to be your mother, and I don't need a little lecture about choices people have to make. I could give that lecture, and have given it to my grown children from time to time. I doubt you even know which suburban city I live in. I live a grand total of 4 1/2 miles from my work, perhaps closer than you do to yours. My spouse's job is 6 miles away. We are not raping the landscape. We are trying to earn a lving and we have raised a family. Yes, the suburbs have grown. The population of metro Denver has grown from 1.4 million people in 1980, when we came here, to 2.4 million today. Where would you put an extra million people?

[vegaspilgrim]

Originally Posted by Triste_en_Tampa

As gas prices have risen and as governments like Denver's begin to take the initiative of encouraging smarter growth, I believe we will see less and less of the cylce mentioned above. I think in the future, one will have to make a choice between city (with its hardcore urban areas, and its less dense, more tranquil areas) and country. This has been the reality for all of human civilization until the twentieth century. The suburban landscape as we know it from the last century and the beginning of the current one is, in my opinion, an anomaly.

The perfectly rectangular city block grid with a linear "Main Street" running down the middle, often originally connected to a rail station, is an anomaly of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

[vegaspilgrim]

Originally Posted by Katiana

I"ll try to be civil here, but it's getting harder by the minute. Triste_en_Tampa, you have been a member of CD for exactly three days. This is the first I've seen you on this forum. Unless you've been reading all my old posts, you don't know much about me, and your post indicates that. I have not "move(d) to the "new" fringe, five miles further out." In fact, I haven't moved anywhere for 19 years, and before I lived in this house, I lived in one 1/2 mile away, just across the road. I suspect I am old enough to be your mother, and I don't need a little lecture about choices people have to make. I could give that lecture, and have given it to my grown children from time to time. I doubt you even know which suburban city I live in. I live a grand total of 4 1/2 miles from my work, perhaps closer than you do to yours. My spouse's job is 6 miles away. We are not raping the landscape. We are trying to earn a lving and we have raised a family. Yes, the suburbs have grown. The population of metro Denver has grown from 1.4 million people in 1980, when we came here, to 2.4 million today. Where would you put an extra million people?

Instead of building new development outward, we could have bulldozed Capitol Hill, Highland, Washington Park, Cheeseman Park, and City Park to the ground, got rid of all those historic single family homes and replaced them with hundreds and thousands blocks of 15-20 story concrete high rise buildings. That way we'd have a million new people living right in the core of the city. That's what they do in third world developing countries around the world. Sounds like Smart Growth to me!