City planning officials quietly released an unusual edict this fall that has loud implications for the future of several long-overlooked west Denver neighborhoods.
Denver’s Community Planning and Development announced that until further notice, its staff would not recommend approval for any rezoning applications in six neighborhoods if they sought to allow developers to build higher-density projects, like row homes, on single-family home properties.
City officials saw that Oct. 10 memo as the first step in pumping the brakes on denser new development in the west-central portion of Denver. Their goal: to stem the tide of gentrification trends in the historically Latino area.
The rezoning pause will be reevaluated, the memo says, when “more affordability tools to preserve and/or create affordable housing are available to be paired with rezonings to higher intensity districts.”
The planning department’s new policy has support from City Councilwoman Jamie Torres, who grew up in west Denver and now represents the area. It also has been applauded by some longtime residents of the affected neighborhoods — West Colfax, Villa Park, Sun Valley, Barnum, Barnum West and Valverde.
“We do need a chance to look at some different options and tools and incentives,” Villa Park resident Kathy Sandoval said, citing potential ways to spur the creation of new affordable housing in her part of town. “(We) also need to look at ways that we can keep residents in the neighborhoods they have been in for years and years and years.”
But the planning department’s move has also drawn criticism.
Making it harder for property owners to turn single-family homes into lots that could host multiple attached homes is rankling some housing advocates, who point out that Denver’s affordable housing crisis is being driven by limited supply.
“Development is a symptom caused by supply seeking to meet demand,” said Ryan Keeney, the president of the housing advocacy group YIMBY Denver; the acronym stands for “Yes In My Backyard,” a rejoinder to NIMBY-type opposition.
“Stopping rezonings in west Denver will do little to forestall demographic turnover so long as land and home prices continue to increase,” he said.
Community Planning and Development’s pause on recommending approval for single-family property zoning changes applies to the six neighborhoods covered by the West Area Plan. That plan sets long-term, resident-informed guidance for the future development and character of those neighborhoods. The City Council approved it in March 2023.
What’s behind new stance — and what it means
City planning officials say they want to make clear that they are not preventing any property owners from filing applications to upzone.
Zoning changes are handled through a quasi-judicial process, with the City Council having the final say. But city staff prepare reports and presentations that council members review when voting on those requests.
It is rare to see an application even make it to the council level without community planning staff finding that it meets the criteria for adoption. The October memo has already resulted in some applicants pulling back their requests.
Officials say that with the memo, they are doing their best to adhere to the guiding principles in the West Area Plan, which recommends addressing affordable housing and reducing involuntary displacement.
“Any property owner may still submit a rezoning application, and it will be reviewed against rezoning criteria and existing plan guidance,” department spokeswoman Alexandra Foster wrote in an email. “Given current conditions for development, CPD has alerted applicants that they will likely receive a recommendation of denial for rezoning from a single-unit district to a more intense district.”
Four rezoning applications in the affected neighborhoods had been withdrawn as of Dec. 18, and four remained in process, Foster said.
As for when CPD might change its stance, that will depend on how quickly officials can develop tools to protect existing income-qualified housing in coordination with the city’s Department of Housing Stability, Foster said.
For Torres, the supporting data that CPD shared in the memo were striking.
Home values in the West Area Plan neighborhoods increased 155%, on average, from 2010 to 2022, a period when home values skyrocketed citywide. But that spike has corresponded with a rapid decline in ethnic diversity in the area.
Those West Area neighborhoods were made up of 70% Hispanic and nonwhite residents in 2010. By 2022, that share had fallen to about 41%, according to data the city rounded up. Median household incomes climbed by 250% between 2017 and 2022.
“I think what’s at risk is we are actually sacrificing the people who already live here in order to make room for the density for the future,” Torres said.
When it comes to development activity, rezoning applications are only the tip of the iceberg, she noted. The CPD memo highlighted that the West Colfax neighborhood saw 97 residential demolition permits pulled between 2021 and 2023. The total number of permits pulled citywide over that period was 1,982 — or roughly 27 per neighborhood.
“This is happening right now all over the place, and it’s not just in rezonings,” Torres said of the transformation in west Denver neighborhoods.
West Colfax has become the latest epicenter of Denver’s evolution into a denser, bigger city. This spring, real estate agent Caitlin Clough told The Denver Post for a larger story on urban change along West Colfax Avenue that the prospect of being able to build new, denser projects along the once-hardscrabble corridor had investors “licking their chops.”
In the view of the YIMBY group, the best way to limit the gentrifying effects of new development in vulnerable, historically lower-income neighborhoods like Barnum and West Colfax is to make it easier to build more housing everywhere.
In other words: to do away with single-family zoning in Denver altogether. It’s a step that other cities like Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon, have already taken. In metro Denver, Littleton is considering that move.
“The most equitable approach to solving our housing supply shortage is a citywide upzone,” Keeney said. “This would maximize the creation of new homes for Denverites to live in while avoiding the wholesale transformation of any particular neighborhood, such as those in west Denver referred to by this memo.”
“There is a sense of urgency”
As city officials seek out ways to soften the impact of that development, Torres is thinking about potential policies that could make a difference.
“There is a huge gap in the code about which building forms are allowed in different zone districts. We don’t see a lot of triplexes and quads in single-family lots. We see accumulations of properties for row homes that end up being very expensive,” she said.
In 2025, CPD is undertaking a “missing middle housing” project aimed at fostering a more gentle increase in density in appropriate places. In the broader housing conversation, missing middle housing falls in between large apartment buildings and the single-family homes that may be unattainable for working-class residents.
Such middle-density housing can take varying shapes, including duplexes and more moderately priced townhomes.
The project also includes seeking ways to incentivizing adaptive reuse of more buildings for housing and creating new on-site affordable housing requirements for smaller-scale development, department officials told councilmembers during a committee hearing Dec. 17.
Denver’s affordable housing mandate — to include income-qualified, reduced-rent units in a building or pay steep fees in lieu of that construction — currently applies only to new projects of 10 units or more.
Torres said she wanted discussions to focus not just on regulations and restrictions, but also on incentives and supports that might be available — including financial assistance for residents trying to maintain or improve their homes.
For her, what’s happening in west Denver is not a simple numbers game. Seven attached houses in a new rowhome project are not always better for the community than one older house that was more affordable and helped a family build generational wealth.
Her district is already contributing to the densification of the city because it is home to Ball Arena, which is now cleared to be the epicenter of a new urban neighborhood.
“I came into this space wanting to keep residents in west Denver. Those families have names, they have stories here and those are things that are important to me,” she said. “There is a sense of urgency around this (conversation) not taking years.”
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