Denver:
Denver: Politics and Policy Systems
Denver presents yet another variation of a postwar economic development policy system, one which the local, “native”, although displaced from power in 1947, resisted until the mid-fifties the “growth” policies of the new business reformers. The native business elite (the “Seventeenth Street tycoons”) near the end of World War II, like Oklahoma City’s, was especially narrow—the widespread local perception was that a handful of key business leaders controlled the long-time (1923) mayor, Ben Stapleton and had done so since the 1920’s. Their knee-jerk reaction to the inevitable wartime growth and its associated problems was best summarized by Stapleton’s famous comment to a question concerning Denver’s wartime housing crisis: “If all these people would only go back where they came from, we wouldn’t have a housing shortage”.
The traditional business elite prospered greatly from Denver’s pre-war economic base which rested on white collar government employees working in the numerous regional headquarters of the state and federal governments, tourism, and extraction and export of raw materials. The almost feared an increase in manufacturing because its pollution threatened their environment, its workers brought unionism, and branch plant corporate leadership was unlikely to integrate with the native business elite. Aside from tourism, Denver’s traditional business leadership was sufficiently motivated to acquire the Lowry Air Force Base in 1938 and the Buckley Air Force base in 1943. In 1948 there had been 10,000 federal civilian employees in Denver. By 1961 the number was 23,000 and by 1975, 32,000[1].
Click to access DenverSuburbsMPS.pdf
Their fear of corporate new comers was based on folk such as our friend, Henry Kaiser who during the war established the federally-owned Denver Ordinance Plant, employing more than a thousand workers. Abbott concurs: “It was modern carpetbaggers attracted to Denver by wartime who provided the initial impulses for change”. Outsiders captured leadership in banks (Elwood Brooks), and aggressively pushed downtown redevelopment (William Zeckendorf) and these outsiders were supported by the sympathetic Denver Post controlled by Palmer Hoyt formerly employed by the Portland Oregonian[2].
By 1947, a tired and very vulnerable Ben Stapleton lost the election to James Quigg Newton, a thirty-five year old, Yale Law School, and former Supreme Court clerk to William O. Douglas—and a Navy veteran. Calling for change of all sorts, but especially attacking the city’s obviously declining appearance, economic vibrancy, and all too obvious cronyism. Newton held sway for two terms, and while unable to achieve charter reform (which was typical reform of western business reformers), his “Michigan Mafia” of imported professional municipal officials modernized and upgraded the City Hall bureaucracy and its operations. The two mayors who followed Newton carried on the same traditions well into the 1960’s.
By the mid-1950 the traditional business elite lost control over the Denver Chamber. “Newton presided over a postwar generation of bankers, real estate brokers, merchants and small industrialists who (in the mid-1950’s), in concert with the chamber of commerce, sought growth at any price.”[3] Under the new reform business leadership, the Chamber “began to produce booster literature of a sort unimaginable during the 1940’s”. “The Chamber and the Colorado Bureau of Tourism (established in 1937) began to place advertisements in national magazines extolling Colorado’s virtues as a vacation spot”. During these years, Colorado’s ski industry came into being; by 1975 there were thirty major ski areas in operation and dozens of ski equipment manufacturers and wholesalers selling their wares.[4]
In partnership with the business reform mayors the Chamber during the middle and late fifties embarked on several important growth initiatives such as diverting water to the Blue Mountain Reservoir and Dillon Lake into the city’s water system. But their critical action was to ensure effective access to Eisenhower’s 1956 new Interstate Highway Program. As proposed, the Interstate Highway Act stopped dead at Denver, limited western access as well as access into Colorado’s interior. Denver’s Mayor and Governor, working with Eisenhower, were able to obtain funding to build out I-70 to Salt Lake City—a victory for Denver reminiscent of the earlier railroad era. A final economic development-related initiative commenced in the early 1960’s; after several years of effort, Denver was chosen by the USOC in 1970 as America’s sole 1976 Olympics applicant (1970 Denver won the IOC endorsement.
Denver’s Urban Renewal
Colorado enacted its urban renewal enabling legislation in 1958, but Denver began its efforts in 1955 when seventy-five local businessmen established Downtown Denver Incorporated (DDI). Almost immediately DDI contracted with Urban Land Institute to survey/analyze the downtown and prepare a report. In the next year, 176 firms formed the Downtown Denver Improvement Association whose core purpose was to lobby the state legislature for legislation to create an urban renewal authority.
When the state responded with the 1958 state enabling law, the City quickly established in that year the Denver Urban Renewal Authority[5]. This was followed in 1961 by the formation of a public/private Downtown Denver Master Plan Committee—charged with writing the urban renewal master plan. Its report, Development Guide for Downtown Denver called for coordinated transportation infrastructure and redevelopment of the downtown core (the Skyline Project). In 1964, another private sector EDO, Forward Metro Denver was established to guide the Skyline Project through the approval and bond referendum process. But this steady, thoughtful approach to urban renewal did little to impress the voters. In 1964, they turned down a $8 million bond issue to finance Denver’s first CBD urban renewal project: the Skyline Renewal Project.
Mother Nature apparently was not happy about this. The 1965 ‘flood of the century’ took out much of the downtown and solidified the public consensus that action was needed. Not to take any chances, the City successfully lobbied the Johnson Administration to accept the construction of the Exhibition Hall as the local match for federal urban renewal dollars[6], allowing the city to delete a bond issuance from the 1967 referendum. The voters approved the Skyline Project (sans bond issuance) by over 70%. Thirty-seven obsolete and deteriorated slum and blighted blocks of Denver’s downtown went under the bulldozer[7]. Denver followed up with a second twenty-two block project, Cherry Creek. That project included facilities to house the Denver Community College, the Metropolitan State College, and the University of Colorado-Denver. The most controversial element of Cherry Creek, the Auraria neighborhood, required dislocation of its black and Chicano residents, and wholesale housing demolition. Voters in 1969, however, approved the bond issuance and residential opposition went for naught..
In its CBD redevelopment phase, DURA invested very little, certainly less than 2%, in residential neighborhoods and housing. The Agency received “strong support from city officials”. Even after the passage of the 1974 CDBG Act which ended urban renewal grants, DURA made the transition by contracting with the city’s recipient of CDBG funds, the Community Development Agency, to operate several CDA housing programs. “With two-thirds of its staff working on housing programs in the neighborhoods, [DURA’s] public focus was still concentrated on the downtown”. An important reason for DURA’s survival and downtown focus, was that the state of Colorado in 1968 had approved tax increment financing legislation specifically for Denver. By using TIF DURA was able to issue its own TIF bonds to finance its downtown redevelopment projects. DURA had made the transition from the Age of Urban Renewal to the 1980’s with its CBD mission pretty much intact, its political position quite solid and secure.
In 1981, DURA announced that it would redevelop nineteen blocks immediately adjacent to the CBD. Using its bonding authority, DURA wanted to entirely demolish eight blocks for condo development. The area did not precisely fit the legislative definition of blight, which guided DURA’s ability to act, and the business and middle class residents of these blocks exploded. They organized the Golden Triangle Association, fought back, lobbied city government. DURA readjusted some boundaries so to split off some corporate opposition, but it didn’t work. With over one hundred protestors at the meeting, the City Council overwhelmingly vetoed the project. In Denver, the Age of Urban Renewal was truly over only in November 1981. From that time on (early 1980’s) the Denver Urban Renewal Agency adjusted its mission, focusing more on TIF, affordable housing and neighborhoods—as well as downtown[8].
[1] Dennis R. Judd, “From Cowtown to Sunbelt City: Boosterism and Economic Growth in Denver”, in Susan S. Fainstein et al (Eds) Restructuring the City: the Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment (New York, Longman, 1983), p. 173.
[2] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., pp. 124-125.
[3] Lyle Dorsett, the Queen City: a History of Denver (Boulder, Pruett, 1977), p. 251.
[4] Dennis R. Judd, “From Cowtown to Sunbelt City: Boosterism and Economic Growth in Denver”, in Susan S. Fainstein et al (Eds) Restructuring the City: the Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment (New York, Longman, 1983), p. 172.
[5] DURA’s board was composed of a mixture of large corporate executives, downtown real estate interests and key banking leadership; Judd, From Cowtown to Sunbelt City, op. cit., p. 180.
[6] The same legislation allowed seven other cities to receive large urban renewal grants without local match. This legislation may have been urban renewal’s largest pork barrel financing. Harry Byrd ( Norfolk) put it together.
[7] A significant portion of the Skyline Project remained unfinished, most used for more than a decade for parking lots. Private sector investment in Denver’s skyline was slow in coming. Still taxes paid to the city from these blocks totaled $181,000 in 1967—a decade later (1977) nearly $2.5 million dollars were paid to the city. There was very little relocation (presumably SROs largely) involved in the Skyline Project. (Judd, From Cowtown to Sunbelt City, op. cit., p.180). In 1972 an $87 million bond was approved for police/fire, libraries, a sports stadium and the Center for Performing Arts. This massive public facility and improvement financing did generate an equivalent private sector investment—banks, headquarters, hotels and lots of office buildings. Much of the downtown street light and utilities were installed with this bond issuance. By 1982, the total post-Skyline private investment in the CBD exceed $2 billion (Judd, p. 181).
[8] http://www.renewdenver.org/assets/files/50thAnniversaryReport.pdf; Denver Urban Renewal Authority, Fifty Years of Revitalizing Denver (2008)
Ron W. Coan 