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‘Blissful’ rezoning process has city planners in a snit

Sunday, February 25 at 12:01 AM

By Tom Morris

The Denver city planners are having a snit fit over the untidy rezoning plans being submitted by small groups of homeowners in Congress Park. As the instigator of this guerrilla zoning back in 1982, I couldn’t be prouder. Nothing inflates the ego like confounding the bureaucrats. Back in 1982 a bunch of us in South City Park decided that we would do something about the threat of high-rise apartment buildings springing up next door rather than waiting for the mighty wheels of City Hall to come to our rescue.

Turns out that the brilliant planners of 1956 decided that half my neighborhood should be high-rise apartment buildings even though it was mostly single-family houses. We fought back by applying to reduce the zoning on 24 properties from high-rise apartments to duplexes and single-family housing. If any neighbor chose not to rezone, we simply left them out of the application. This results in the checkerboard pattern on the zoning map of South City Park.

An earlier Capitol Hill downzoning application had been approved only after the applicants were able to manhandle all the owners on a square block to agree to the zoning change.

They wrangled over the issue for a couple of years as I recall.

They wrangled because the planners told them they had to get the entire block. The planners needed nice straight lines and large areas of uniformity. The tensions in the neighborhood were probably seen as good protection for the planners’ earlier, if mistaken, vision.

When my neighborhood downzoned we noted that there was no requirement in the zoning code that an entire block be downzoned and so we filed the checkerboard application even though the planners had steam coming out of their ears. Council approved the application. The Rocky Mountain News hailed our application as a sensible solution to a difficult problem.

Over the years we’ve downzoned more than 150 properties in our neighborhood. The people who chose not to join in downzoning have not been rezoned. In the 25 years since we downzoned to a checkerboard, there has not been a single complaint from any of the property owners who chose not to downzone. There has not been a single instance of opposition testimony at four separate zoning hearings over 25 years.

Each of the subsequent rezonings has been approved without a negative vote by any member of four separate City Councils. Each zoning effort solidified not only the physical character of our neighborhood but also created a sense of community about where we live.

Only a planner could see in this long-term, blissful and effective rezoning process the kind of threat that would require its replacement by nice neat lines on the zoning maps with no messy checkerboards.

The anger and tension which will be created by these artificial requirements is of no concern to Denver’s city planners who apparently revel in sticking it to neighborhoods whenever they can.

Tom Morris is a resident of Denver.

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