On February 8, Denver City Council will vote on a major update to the group-living portions of the Denver Zoning Code. Among other things, the proposal would allow up to five unrelated adults to live in a household right now, that number is capped at two and open more areas of the city to residential facilities, including halfway houses and sober-living homes.
The plan has been in the works for three years, and as Conor McCormack-Cavanagh reported this week, the fight will go down to the wire, with Safe and Sound Denver fighting the proposal while a slim majority of councilmembers appear to favor it.
There are numerous things to dislike about the Group Living Amendment now before the Denver City Council and scheduled for a vote on Feb. 8. One of the most glaring is the statement made by the cityâs Department of Community Planning and Development (CPD) in its presentation material when the Group Living Proposal was first submitted for public review. It read: âWe have exclusionary regulations with roots in classism and racism.â
That seemed to me to be a rather harsh and unreasonable statement being that, when I first took up residency in the neighborhood where Iâve lived for 45 years, I was not informed about the racist/classist nature of the neighborhood nor did I become aware of that state of affairs until the truth of the matter was revealed, thanks to CPD.
Editor s note: The $1.2 million sale was finalized at the end of January.
The final act in a bitter dispute over the sale of two-thirds of El Oasis, a 43-plot garden at 3533 Quivas Street operated by Denver Urban Gardens, included a flurry of animated interjections over Zoom on January 19. The issue was no longer whether a portion of the garden in Highland would be sold the deal is set to close by the end of January but whether the city would issue a zoning permit allowing the property to be divided, ensuring that one-third of the land would remain a garden.
Denver has rising housing prices. This is an obvious statistical fact, backed by plenty of data. What people fail to realize is that this is caused by two issues: an increase in demand, and a lack of supply.
Everyone agrees that demand is going up. Whether the demand is caused by people who were happy to have roommates suddenly needing more space because of the COVID-related trend toward working from home, or because we re an inexpensive city compared to many cities that line both coasts, or because we have too many good restaurants and venues and now we re desirable in a way we weren t ten or twenty years ago, is up for debate and that is not my concern. The demand is here to stay, though, far as I can tell.