Allie Wellner and her husband love their spacious house on the plains by “a humungous park with the most beautiful sunset views” — the opposite of the compact urban transit-oriented development that Colorado leaders are promoting.
They lived in central Denver a decade ago before they had sons and pit bulls in a $2,200-a-month duplex. The construction of high-rise apartments across the street led to traffic jams. They moved in 2016 to a $230,000 house in suburban Westminster by open space near Standley Lake. But developers put 50 new homes around them.
It’s been nearly three years since they moved again to suburban Aurora, where they bought this $515,000 house, bigger than Denver houses that cost more than $700,000.
“This feels so much more open. You can see a lot of sky. You can see all the way to downtown,” said Wellner, 38, who grew up in an Ohio town at a house with a large backyard.
“You can see geese. The kids get super excited. We’ve got some bald eagles that live near the community. We all get excited when we see them. Nature is just a big part of our family life. We’re outdoor people. We try to keep our kids off screens. There are beautiful little trails around here. One is actually called ‘the nature trail.’ It makes you happy to go walking here.”
While Colorado lawmakers require upzoning and offer incentives in their push for denser housing concentrated at Regional Transportation District bus and train hubs, thousands of metro Denver residents like the Wellners are migrating to suburbs. They give multiple reasons for their moves: affordability, elbow room, quietness, safety, and parks — things that transit-oriented development (TOD) often lacks.
They represent a challenge to government plans for shrinking metro Denver’s footprint. Nearly three times as much of the new housing since 2000 was built away from public transit as close to it, and at least two-thirds of recent housing construction has been done in suburbs outside Denver, according to census and building permit data and analyses reviewed by the Denver Post.
Lawmakers have tried to encourage denser development through laws like one last year that required local governments to find ways to increase housing density near transit and one that prohibited parking space quotas. This year, lawmakers have proposed transit reform legislation to align the RTD more closely with state goals to increase the housing supply and cut traffic congestion.
“We can really deliver on the promise of walkable areas, located close to a variety of transit options, with cultural, social, recreational, and consumer amenities in a variety of price points,” said Rep. Meg Froelich, who chairs Colorado’s House Transportation, Housing and Local Government Committee. “Lots of Coloradans will want what TODs offer.”
Expanding suburbs
Since the year 2000, metro Denver’s population has grown from about 2.4 million to 3.3 million, according to the state demographer’s office, spurring construction of nearly a quarter million new housing units. State demographers project about 3.7 million people by 2035.
Builders installed about 66,000 housing units within a half-mile of RTD transit hubs between 2000 and 2019, according to an Urban Institute analysis of census data. But they installed more than 180,000 housing units away from transit, mostly single-family homes in suburbs, said Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained urban planner Yonah Freemark, who conducted the analysis. That fits a national pattern where far more housing was built away from transit stations (17.6 million units) than near them (2 million units) over the past two decades, Freemark said, despite persistent government promotion of compactness.
“Getting more housing in places around transit is essential for reducing people’s overall costs of living,” he said, noting Denver saw some of the fastest growth in apartments by transit among U.S. cities.
“But a large share of Americans prefer single-family homes. This doesn’t mean that everyone does, however, and if given the chance to live in a walkable community near transit and local options many Americans will choose to do so even if it means a smaller house,” Freemark said. “Sprawl destroys local ecosystems, making it more difficult for flora and fauna to survive. It increases greenhouse gas emissions, worsening climate change. And it increases the amount of time people need to spend driving.”
To compete with the suburbs, TOD developers must improve designs, emphasizing landscaping, he said. “Too many TOD projects today are built as boxes surrounding parking garages.”
Since 2020, 71% of the new housing construction in metro Denver was done in the six counties surrounding Denver (Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Douglas, Jefferson), according to building permit data analyzed by Denver-based THK Associates, a landscape architecture, planning, market research, and urban design consulting firm. Most of the new housing units in Denver were apartments, THK president Dan Conway and his team found, due to high land costs that make single-family housing unprofitable.
Watching for what people want
“Not everybody wants to live in an apartment in a transit-oriented development,” said Chris Fellows, the developer of Painted Prairie in Aurora, who favors a government hands-off approach to regional planning.
“There are some people who’d like to live near mass transit where they don’t have to rely on their car. There are others who’d like to have a little more elbow room to raise kids or a looser development where they can walk their dog and hang out with their kids. Some people don’t want to give up their car,” he said, citing resident surveys.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, “more people were leaning to the suburbs than leaning to the city center and the central core,” Fellows said. “It’s pretty hard to legislate supply and demand.”
TOD advocates have cast suburban expansion as “sprawl” that perpetuates “car-centric” lifestyles and clogs roads.
“This form of development is economically unsustainable,” Matt Frommer, senior transportation associate for the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, said.
Meanwhile, TOD critics accuse lawmakers of acting as social engineers.
“Denver has been one of the areas where remote work is most popular, and people move to Denver in large part for economic opportunities and to access nature. They’re not moving to Denver to live like they were living in New York at Central Park West,” said Joel Kotkin, an urban futures fellow at Chapman University in California and researcher for the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas.
“Maybe you could make transit-oriented development cheaper. But who’s going to pay for that? The formula is ugly. You’re taking beautiful cities like Denver, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco and making them into East Germany. Progressives and the greens are fighting a losing battle against human aspiration. They’ve got to find a way to work with human aspiration, not against it.”
Parks, nature, and children
Painted Prairie residents, including several who moved from denser housing in Denver, said they’re largely happy with their choice, though some miss the close access to locally owned restaurants and stores.
“It’s about wanting space. Colorado’s always been that way. People don’t mind driving that much, as much as they whine about traffic,” said Jolynn Crownover, 38, who works remotely buying and selling homes and moved four years ago from an urban row house with her spouse, Sarah, and their two children.
“People are wanting bigger homes,” Crownover said, referring to her clients. “They’re saying they want a quieter home and they need more space. They don’t really want to be in a dense urban environment. And even if they’re single or don’t have kids, they want office space.”
She grew up in the San Luis Valley and loved views of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and starry skies at night. She persuaded Sarah to move after years living in central Denver along East Colfax Avenue, paying rent from $800 to $1,200, near City Park and St. Mark’s Coffee House. They bought the row house in northwest Denver for around $200,000 and sold it for nearly double that. The suburban house they moved to is valued at $740,000, Crownover said.
The backyards in Painted Prairie are smaller than in classic post-World War II suburbs, “but the way it is designed, it draws people outside to the parks and the shared spaces,” she said. “When we first moved out here in 2020, we ended up getting to know our neighbors so much quicker. It felt like the first year of college where everybody was new and everybody wanted to get to know each other.”
One of numerous new housing developments in Aurora, Painted Prairie received a National Association of Home Builders award. It’s half full, with 890 housing units sold and an average of 2.7 residents in each, Painted Prairie spokeswoman Michelle Tripp said. The location, 18 miles northeast of downtown Denver on 640 acres south of Denver International Airport, means residents typically drive more on the E-470 beltway and the increasingly congested Pena Boulevard, the only road to and from DIA.
Some said they order their groceries for delivery to save time. Reaching public transit, RTD stations for the A-Line commuter trains, requires driving. Wellner, 38, a photographer, said much of her work can be done from home where she focuses on their sons, ages 5 and 3. She enjoys driving her white Chevy truck to events, while Cody, 39, regularly commutes in his silver Buick to work sites around metro Denver.
Just over two years ago, Charlee Gatan, 29, and her husband, Nick, moved from west-central Denver, where they’d grown up. They rented an apartment during the pandemic near the RTD Olde Town Arvada Station for $1,800 a month and paid extra for a garage where they could park vehicles. “Great amenities, right off the light rail, which we used a lot to get us to downtown Denver,” Gatan said. She worked teaching nearby at a barre studio. Then, in 2020, they bought a house, a 1,300-square-foot bungalow near Regis University that cost $500,000. When their child was born, they “needed more room” but “in Denver, we quickly got priced out,” she said.
So they moved to the suburbs, buying a house for $760,000 that gives them 3,400 square feet.
“Nature is a big thing. We love to hike. My husband fishes and mountain bikes,” Gatan said. At their old house in Denver, friends would gather before heading west into the mountains on weekends. “We had the highway right there,” she said, missing those pre-trip social gatherings.
“It was one of the things we loved at that location. There’s less of that out here.”
But Painted Prairie was appealing — “the greenspace, shared space, big views, and farmer markets,” she said. “We go to the park every single day. There’s a swing set. We walk our dog. We have three parks within a one-block radius.”
More water needed for growth
Across the plains east of Denver, suburban construction in Aurora is ramping up this month, promising thousands of new housing units that may help address the state’s housing affordability challenge.
But water supplies eventually will be strained in Aurora (population 395,000), which relies on water from mountain snowpack as far as 200 miles to the west on the other side of the Continental Divide, diverted through pipelines and reservoirs in the South Platte River Basin.
When the city’s anticipated suburban “build-out” is completed, the population will increase by about 600,000 residents in 200,000 new housing units, Aurora Water spokeswoman Shonnie Cline said.
Aurora has embarked on a $600 million project to create a huge new water supply reservoir in South Park, Cline said. It will trap and store 90,000 acre-feet of water, enough for 180,000 to 360,000 new households. “The water storage provided by Wild Horse Reservoir is intended to help ensure sustainable water deliveries to meet future demands and to enhance resilience during droughts or emergencies,” she said.
The city has acquired land near Hartsel. Construction likely would not begin until after 2030. First, Aurora officials must navigate years of environmental and Park County reviews. Developers regard the reservoir as essential for future suburban expansion, Fellows said. “It’s very important that they get the approvals they need.”
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