Seth Klamann is a statehouse reporter at the Denver Post, covering policy, state government and the legislature. He previously worked for the Gazette, the Casper Star-Tribune and the Omaha World-Herald. He's a graduate of the University of Missouri and a proud Kansas City native.
Dr. Jodi Lovejoy, director of Behavioral Health, stands for a photo in the doorway of her apartment in Westminster, Colorado on Thursday, March 7, 2024. She has lived in the apartment for 8 years. Jodi Lovejoy can look out the window of her Westminster apartment and see the mountains of the Front Range. She can track the rolling clouds and watch the weather change over the peaks, something she used to do with her children. The neighborhood is quiet, dotted by mature trees.
“I wanted to retire here. But I’m constantly worrying about where should I go? Because I don’t know that I can stay here,” the 56-year-old said. Her daughter is considering moving out of the state with her boyfriend in search of cheaper pastures. “If they stay, I would like to stay, but I don’t think that my life is going to be secure. It just makes me feel like my homeland has been taken over somehow, and I’m not going to be able to stay.
The city faces the same debates over zoning and density as other cities and the state generally, he said. “It’s the story of entrenched, long-standing community members who are not comfortable with the growth trajectory of their city and the state, and how that correlates into housing stock and the decisions that need to be made to be able to deliver housing stock in today’s market environment.
Like other cities across Colorado and the United States, Westminster lacks the type of middle housing — duplexes and townhomes — that act as stepping stones for people like Lovejoy: middle-income earners looking for a home and the equity it brings. The study’s authors found that 82% of residents surveyed wanted more diverse housing options.
The city’s approach to housing, several officials said, has swung like a pendulum over the past 10 years. Starting around 2015, the city began to build up its apartment and multi-family offerings after years of stagnant development. More building permits were issued in 2019 than had been doled out in any given year since the early 1990s, and most of them were for multi-family developments, according to data pulled together by one developer.
Jeff Handlin, president of Oread Capital & Development, speaks at a groundbreaking ceremony to introduce a new master-planned community in Westminster that will provide 2,350 homes on 234 acres near the corner of West 88th Avenue and Irving Street in Westminster, Colorado on Wednesday, September 27, 2023.
Supporters of reform, meanwhile, have called water and infrastructure concerns a red herring, and several Westminster developers and advocates said the water issue wasn’t as damning as density opponents and some council members have made it out to be.
As Westminster’s leaders watch the pendulum swing to-and-fro, the legislature is extending its hand to halt the paradigm. Together with allies in the General Assembly, the governor has pushed legislation to change local density rules for cities across the Front Range in a bid to build faster and more densely in key areas.
Zucker, the developer, said it came down to a question of what Westminster has been and what it needs to be, for current and future residents.
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