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 DENVER-Can a single real estate development show Americans how to shed pounds, live healthy, generate community, create a sustainable environment, house millionaires and working class families in a single block, open urban schools that the middle class likes, sprout big box retail stores and small neighborhood centers-and make money?
Maybe not. But Forest City Enterprises, a publicly traded, family-run Cleveland-based firm that focuses on urban projects nationwide, is making a big play to pull off what would seem the near impossible on the site of Denver's Stapleton Airport, which was decommissioned in 1995 with the opening Denver International Airport, 20 miles to the east.
At 7.5 square miles, notes Forest City CEO Charles Ratner, Stapleton is America's biggest urban infill development. It's just 10 minutes from downtown, right across the street from established Denver neighborhoods. Starting with the 1989 decision to build a new airport, philanthropist Sam Gary and other Denver civic leaders pressed for a sensitively designed new Stapleton, woven as closely as possible into Denver's urban fabric.
Mixed-income housing anchored by high-quality schools and open space, Gary argued, could change the pattern of sprawl that has scarred so many of the nation's cities. A citizen-driven Green Book enunciated similar environmental, New Urbanist city-building principles, setting the stage for Forest City to be chosen master developer.
Visit Stapleton today and you find a vast amount of development underway. As the old structures, runways and taxiways are demolished - some of the pavements are more than four feet thick - a succession of land parcels has been turned over to Forest City. Driving along a number of neatly groomed, sidewalk-equipped streets, one sees over 1,000 front-porched homes and some apartments, set in a compact New Urbanist pattern proposed by noted planner Peter Calthorpe. They're the leading edge of a projected 12,000 units to be built by the 2020s.
In jarring contrast, Forest City has turned one corner of the Stapleton property over to Home Depot, Wal-Mart and other retailers, an obvious bid to tap the regional market and stimulate the project's cash flow. The big box area does make one concession to pedestrian values: the stores are set on a standard street grid, with sidewalks, street trees and the like.
But Stapleton also has begun to open some more intimate, neighborhood-oriented shopping areas. The critical question is whether there will be enough of them, close enough to homes, to draw the area's new residents out on foot.
And walkability, quite suddenly, has become a critical nationwide development issue. A healthier America depends on combating the nation's rising tide of obesity by promoting a much more active lifestyle. And that means alternatives to the typical sprawl of strip malls, cul-de-sacs and subdivisions without sidewalks that oblige people to drive everywhere.
Recognizing Stapleton as a lead experiment in the new healthy lifestyle thrust, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has made a $200,000 Active Living by Design grant to encourage land use, street designs, transportation, recreation, even school policies that encourage walking, biking and sports at the site and in nearby Denver neighborhoods.
Health is a natural fit for Stapleton, says Tom Gleason, the project's vice president for public relations. Moving from airfields to playfields in short order, over 1,100 acres have been set aside for parks and open space, including an 80-acre Central Park just east of the old control tower. Westerly Creek, for decades buried under a runway in a concrete culvert, has been restored with additional wildlife habitat and hiking and biking trails. Plus, the site is linked directly to the new, 27-square-mile Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Refuge.
A new summertime farmer's market is now available to Stapleton's new residents-many of whom already arrive, it's claimed, seeking a healthy, outdoor lifestyle. This fall Denver metro residents will vote on Fastracks, 119 miles of new rail transit including a line running directly from downtown Denver to Stapleton to the new Denver International Airport.
Stapleton's list of draws for a new urban lifestyle is extensive. The project even has a sustainability director, pushing energy-conserving materials and techniques along with water saving in new construction.
Stapleton also is making a big effort to work with the Denver public school system to create new schools with strong middle class appeal, including America's first school building with both a regular and a charter elementary school under the same roof-one focused on a core knowledge curriculum, the other on an Outward Bound-like expeditionary theme.
Stapleton's communities, says Gleason, are designed to be diverse-in architecture, age, race, income levels, and to sweep the streetscape of the surrounding neighborhoods right into our property. In an America plagued by exclusionary zoning and gated communities, Stapleton apparently is aiming not just for physical, but social health. You have to conclude that if it works, we all win.
Copyright © 2004 Washington Post Writers Group
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