Housing in general, even in areas of new construction where Aurora can expand to the east, has only gotten pricier. It wasn’t until 2017, when myself and couple other folks were elected, that we made it a priority.”Īurora city councilwoman Crystal Murillo, who represents Ward I, which is seeing impacts of gentrification. “We’re Colorado’s third-largest city, but we don’t even have an affordable housing plan,” says Murillo, who embraced public service after the 2016 election. (Ed Kosmicki, Special to The Colorado Sun) In Aurora, officials play catch-upĪs rising housing prices swept through Denver, it seemed only a matter of time before demand spilled across the city limits into Aurora and began pricing out low-income tenants.Īnd yet, to city councilwoman and lifelong resident Crystal Murillo, the surge has somehow caught the city flat-footed and playing catch-up. The neighborhoods - Buckingham, Andersonville and Alta Vista - are increasingly being encroached upon by new development moving from the south. The Cottages, a relatively new residential complex near three historically Latino neighborhoods in Fort Collins, Colorado, known as Tres Colonias. “Property values are going up, and that’s concerning to longer-term residents.” “We’re seeing changes from primarily Hispanic neighborhoods to new urbanism, young white couples coming in and revamping homes,” Sowder says. She says the city is “keeping an eye on it” and has principles about affordable housing that seek to retain equity and affordability across income levels. Low-income areas with lots of long-term residents see new residents with new ideas about the architectural character of the neighborhood. I don’t know that it’s the same as in Denver, but it’s on people’s minds based on the comments we’ve received.”īeth Sowder, Fort Collins’ social sustainability department director, observes that while the city isn’t seeing whole neighborhoods scraped for huge, luxury apartments, it is seeing gentrification on a smaller scale. There’s also a city program that helps lower-income residents control utility costs, but beyond that he doesn’t see specific programs or groups addressing this issue “in any functional way.”īut he notes that as the city has been going through the process of community engagement before adopting a new long-range plan for the next 20 years, “that issue has been raised much more than in the past. “We have policy that supports diversity, but no regulations in place specifically,” he says.įor example, the city tries to protect mobile home parks, often the only option for low-income residents, from redevelopment as much as possible. The 2013 study, done by a CSU professor who interviewed two dozen Latino residents in the area, revealed that fault lines in relations with the city already had appeared and recommended reaching out to those communities.įort Collins has instituted no anti-displacement regulations, per se, according to Gloss, who adds that “the market’s going to dictate if an area ends up changing.” She found, by exploring census data dating back to 2000 and plugging it into a widely-used statistical model, that the area appears to be in the early stages of gentrification. In 2015, the city commissioned a Colorado State University student to look for quantifiable variables in the wake of another study two years earlier that first raised concerns about gentrification in those neighborhoods. (Ed Kosmicki, Special to The Colorado Sun) New development is increasingly encroaching on these older areas of the growing city. Museo de las Tres Colonias curates the history of three Latino neighborhoods on the north side of Fort Collins: Buckingham, Andersonville and Alta Vista. In Fort Collins, it’s seeping into an area called Tres Colonias, where three separate neighborhoods - Alta Vista, Andersonville, and Buckingham, traditionally Latino for many years - have appeared on planners’ radar screen as the elements of cost and convenient-to-downtown location attract new buyers. I’ve been on panels with other planning directors, and this story seems to be coming up in many communities, where we see displacement going on. “Price increases are happening throughout the community, throughout the Front Range,” says Cameron Gloss, Fort Collins’ long-range planning manager.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |