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Two people can stand in the exact same spot and have two entirely different experiences.
Having grown up here in a family that couldn't afford to travel and had no reason to move around (i.e. not military), Colorado Springs was the center of my universe for the first 18 or so years of my life. As I started to assert myself politically, I sort of got a rude wake up call when it comes to this towns position in the world, and how much of the outside world views us. Still... I think I walk around with rose colored glasses when it comes to the springs. The problem is, like-minded people look at Colorado Springs and see a sprawling conservative dump. I see potential,potential, potential. I question whether that potential will ever be realized because the place is run by old grouches who hate change, but when I look at the area around The Pioneers Museum, I see the potential for a bustling civic plaza with museums and a library... when I look at Tejon Street, I envision a thriving, pedestrian friendly commercial strip with a healthy mix of retail and restaurants, Cache Le Pouder and Cascade screams arts district. I don't believe Colorado Springs ever can or should try to become a major city. First, it's not happening in our life time, and second, I don't believe thats its role.
My "Perfect Colorado Springs" would look a lot like the present day city with a few changes. Downtown would thrive economically. Parking lots would fill with 3 to 5 story buildings housing stores, restaurants, offices, and apartments. There would be a handful of office and residential towers, but there is no need to fill the skyline with skyscrapers. Downtown would connect to Colorado College and Manitou Springs by trolly. Heavy rail would connect the front range from Cheyenne to Pueblo, maybe even Albuquerque, and light rail would zoom east to west along Woodmen Road, helping alleviate the east west congestion problem. I'd like to see the ski slopes at The Broadmoor open back up, also. Parks, trails, hiking, biking, would continue to be a central part of the culture, I'd like to see the focus on those things increase, actually. That's about it. I'd like to see the sprawl come to an end, but I'm not going to harp on that too much because who am I to tell people what to do with their land?
I like Colorado Springs, I just wish Colorado Springs liked itself enough to be the best city it can be. The place has a real problem with self deprecation. "Aim low" seems to be the motto here.
Typically, this is the part where someone offers suggestions of other city's to move to. The thing is, this is my vision for Colorado Springs, for my hometown, the town that I love and that I want to see thrive... not some other town somewhere.
Anyone else care enough about this place to think about its future?
The whole idea of this thriving downtown with jobs, restaurants, retail, etc seems to go against the spread out centers of employment: new industrial parks on the north side, schriever, afa, peterson, carson, two big new hospitals and doctors offices on the north side.
Another indicator: Where are the new hotels being built? Yep, Interquest, Briargate, etc.
If any city has the cards stacked against it for centralization, COS would be it.
I am also a born and raised native. I also think that "good" public transportation is something desparately needed here. I also believe that food, culture, the arts, etc., could improve as well. However, with those kinds of improvements, comes more people and more people means this beautiful backward thinking city becomes a metropolis rat race like the places everyone left to come here. I don't think the people here aim low, they want to keep it low key and I'm all for that. This place has already grown far more than I would ever like to have seen. If one wants big fast city, take a trip to Denver, but leave Colorado Springs a nice home town, you want to come home to when you're away. Just an old native's perspective.
I like the vision in CSNative's O.P., i.e., "when I look at the area around The Pioneers Museum, I see the potential for a bustling civic plaza with museums and a library... when I look at Tejon Street, I envision a thriving, pedestrian friendly commercial strip with a healthy mix of retail and restaurants, Cache Le Pouder and Cascade screams arts district. I don't believe Colorado Springs ever can or should try to become a major city. First, it's not happening in our life time, and second, I don't believe thats its role."
What I see now in the downtown is a walkable, livable, human-scale, low-rise and AFFORDABLE city. This is something that most "major" cities are not, especially the affordable part. I'd like it to stay that way. I'd like to see some increased density in the form of mid-rise, owner-occupied condo's; not high rise, not townhouses, and for damned sure not SFH's. IMO, the beauty of our downtown are the tree-lined residential streets, small homes with charm and all that walkable stuff I mentioned at the start. I do not want high rise office buildings in the downtown, that will wreck commuting for all.
IMO, to go with high density anything downtown is a huge mistake. We seem to have about the ONLY non-dense city (of this size) in the nation, owing mostly to Denver being the early railroad center which enabled Denver to become a standard industrial / dense city, with all the ills that go with it.
The other year there was talk of building a large convention center in the downtown. IMO, that is the LAST thing they want to do. It will trash the walkable, livable gem of a downtown that we now have and replace it with a multi-square block monolithic blockhouse of a structure, with huge traffic issues, and support only hotels, bars and eateries. If the city needs a convention center, there is all that land now being developed at I-25 and Interquest, which Charles spoke to. That would be a great location, there's nothing to tear down, no city streets to ruin, is right off I-25 and ramps would be a snap to install compared to rebuilding downtown streets and sub-ground infrastructure to accommodate a big convention center.
Digressing a bit, I like the way large office buildings are strung out along Hwy-83 and Voyager Pkwy. On the west of these buildings is I-25 and on the east is Hwy-83 and Voyager, bisected by Interquest Pkwy (exit 153 off I-25). The beauty of this is that there's housing further up the ridgeline to the east of each one, putting very affordable homes practically within walking distance from the work sites, which is something that FEW cities can claim, as most of our cities are built on the usual dense downtown model with horrendous hub/spoke commuting patterns. A dense downtown is the LAST thing we want in COLO SPGS.
I like the spread out, mid-rise approach. We'll NEVER have the money for a subway or transit system like DC or NYC, thus we need to equally spread the job sites and subdivisions around town, creating a series of small "company town" locations all around town, rather than cramming every office tower downtown and then try to build our way out of a commuting nightmare, at a nightmare cost.
I agree with your first paragraph Mike, but you start to lose me after that.
Blame for high traffic in metro areas should be placed on suburbia, not downtown. If people lived in the city instead of sprawling suburbs 20 miles away, we wouldn't have the traffic issues.
I fully support more density downtown, but only if great care and thought is put into the planning process. For starters, the idea should be for people to live and work downtown, minimizing the transportation issue and increasing the demand for services. Lets face it, the only things that thrive downtown right now are bars, restaurants, and hotels... its a constant struggle for retail. If you bring a convention center, a sports stadium, and other cultural attractions downtown, that makes downtown a destination. It gives people a reason to want to live and work there. Its the old idea of businesses following roof tops. If you get a certain population density, the stores will come back to downtown, and you could theoretically live, work, shop, eat, and play downtown and never have to drive if you didn't want to. Walkability is an extremely important piece of the puzzle here, downtown would have to remain pedestrian friendly for this to work. Affordability is also key, downtown needs to be a place where people at all income levels can make a home. The town is already enough of a sprawling mess that we should have been investing in mass transit a long time ago. I'm okay with height restrictions... tall buildings aren't really my goal here. I think we have an opportunity to take the old concept of what an urban core is and re-define it.
This probably all sounds a little pie in the sky, but I do believe it could work and provide a little slice of the city for those of us who love Colorado Springs and love a more urban life style to make a home in. The suburban market is well served here. What about the rest of us?
I agree and wish our downtown was a more desirable place to be. This city is so beautiful and great, but honestly you could drive past downtown on I-25 and not even realize you passed it. The America the Beautiful Park is the best addition to downtown in years, but a park alone does not bring enough people to help it grow.
It always depends on who you ask. Obviously Mike from Back East likes it the way it is. I personally would have preferred to see some downtown redevelopment to give it a bigger city feeling and to replace the ugly eye-sores between I-25 and Cascade.
The largest developer in town, Classic Companies, tried for years to get a redevelopment of downtown approved through the City Council. That must have been in the paper for the past 5 years. Plan after plan (according to what I read and heard) the council denied the development plans.
A thriving downtown needs an anchor to grow off of, all of which failed. First, the developer proposed bringing the Colorado Skysox downtown into a new downtown baseball stadium. Then they tried to bring a Convention Center into downtown (like Mike mentioned), which was backed by a Hotel tycoon who promised a new hotel alongside. And then they proposed an entire Olympic Center, which was also backed by the hotel. Once you get established with something major like that, then a downtown starts to get busy and businesses thrive and it creates more opportunity for the things you envision, CSNative.
The new development mentioned above by Charles (including hotel) off Interquest is the same hotel that was offered to be built downtown. Smart people like the hotel tycoon seem to know a good opportunity (Colorado Springs) when they see it, but I don’t blame them for moving on from downtown to a different location. And same with new residential opportunities – everything keeps getting pushed east and north.
I imaging people who own businesses in and around downtown would prefer to see the development, as would people like me who like to be in a downtown atmosphere and would bring my business there. I go to Denver when I’m looking for that, but I would prefer to stay here if we had it. I’m guessing Mike from back east does not own a business in or around downtown (just a guess). Maybe he owns a business off Briargate, which would make sense to promote the growth there. For people it’s all about where your interests lie.
And for the folks who are anti-growth, I understand your points. Wouldn’t we all love to be the first ones here and the last ones allowed in? I’m also a Colorado native, and there is just no way we can park ourselves along these beautiful mountains and expect nobody to follow.
Your version of things seems skewed as compared to my understanding of how events have unfolded over the past few years.
My understanding is that different versions of Classic's "Palmer Village" have been approved by council, we just have never reached a point where it was economically viable.
The convention center was killed by voters who told city council not only do we not want a convention center right now, we never want to see the proposal on the ballot again. When the convention center was killed, the concept of an olympic themed neighborhood died with it.
The sky sox didn't move downtown because the owner of the team didn't want to move the stadium.
John Q. Hammons is the hotelier responsible for the 11-story Renaissance hotel going up on the north end of town. Hammons has also agreed to build an Embassy Suites hotel as part of a re-development next to America the Beautiful Park. Technically that project could still happen, but this was really a matter of timing... the project started to come together as the economy tanked. I wouldn't be surprised if Hammons takes another look at downtown once the economy improves.
There are a few other pojects in limbo right now, Cooper Tower (mixed use tower at Nevada & Kiowa) is all but dead, but technically could still happen, Pikes Peak Place (mixed use tower at Nevada & Pikes Peak) has been in limbo for years, the developer says he's waiting for the right time. The citygate project... the area by the power plant where they bulldozed all of those warehouses, is also on hold right now.
I also think that the Springs has a lot of potential. Frankly, the Denver crowd is always going to be bigoted against Colorado Springs for its own reasons. Colorado Springs needs to ignore naysayers from Denver and look at building their future themselves. On the plus side, Colorado Springs also has things that Denver will never have (proximity to the mountains, peak views, etc), that can work in its favor. Plus, Colorado Springs is much more affordable than Denver, particularly when you compare the two cities' city-center neighborhoods.
I agree with MFBE that high-rise construction isn't all that it's cracked up to be, and convention centers are a way overused tactic. 3-4 story mid-rise is certainly more than able to create a pedestrian friendly, mixed-use city center. There are many cities worldwide that have little in the way of high-rise construction (London, Paris) that are infinitely more pedestrian-friendly than any U.S. city is, so that can be a model. Historic Buildings should be preserved at all costs.
There's only so much that from the public sector point of view can be done. Cities will develop the way that the private sector will develop them. However, the city can provide incentives for certain development, and create greater connectivity. The good news is that the private sector is well aware of the fact that people WANT to live/work/play in walkable, transit-centric, and compact city center areas. This is one of the few aspects of the development industry that is still moving ahead even in our economic collapse.
The first thing the city needs to do is to do everything in its power to discourage the owners of surface parking lots. Surface parking lots are the plague of any downtown -- as much as people complain about parking downtown, the last place anyone wants to visit (or live in) is a parking-lot wasteland. The easiest way to do this is to require parking lot owners to adhere to strict design standards for landscaping, streetscaping, and quality design aesthetic. Surface parking lot owners generally don't want to spend even one dime on maintenance -- this alone will encourage a lot of them to sell to those who will convert the land to higher and better uses. Parking can be accomodated with structured parking covered with ground floor retail. If these tactics fail to work, the other thing is to set up a special property tax rate for surface parking lots -- this is more heavy-handed, but may become necessary.
Another thing would be to create connectivity between downtown and Old Colorado City. These are the two areas that people are going to want to go, comparable to Downtown Denver and Capitol Hill. In Denver, however, Capitol Hill transitions pretty seamlessly into downtown, whereas in Colorado Springs there's quite a barrier with I-25 in the way. Some type of rail trolley might be the best way to connect the two in an attractive manner, although a shuttle circulator like the MallRide in Denver might be another option.
I really like the way you think tfox. I don't disagree with anything you've said. I do worry that the uh... problem... that the Denver crowd has with us, and the fact that in some ways they are right, is costing us jobs and other opportunities, though.
I really like the way you think tfox. I don't disagree with anything you've said. I do worry that the uh... problem... that the Denver crowd has with us, and the fact that in some ways they are right, is costing us jobs and other opportunities, though.
Sure it is, but you have to think long-term. I think much of the perception of Colorado Springs by the nation as a whole is really more of a trailing indicator. I just today saw a great syndicated commentary piece by Cal Thomas (a conservative commentator) encouraging conservatives to deemphasize political activism and channel energies instead into acting locally to bring social justice and community transformation. It was a great article, and I think it's a trend in that community. The Falwell-Dobson-Robertson triumvirate of the 1980s I think has passed its prime If you talk to younger evangelicals, many of them actually voted for Obama due to a broadening of concerns of issues (to now include problems like poverty, the environment, etc). Most of them are less concerned about the inflammatory culture-war issues than they are about making the world a better place.
It will be a while, for sure, before Colorado Springs' bad reputation is forgotten, but slowly but surely, it will be rediscovered, and eventually people (at least those from outside Denver) will wonder why it ever had such a bad reputation in the first place.
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