Area plan that sparked testy public hearing last year to have open house next week

Residents of five Denver neighborhoods that make up the "near southeast area" are invited to participate in an open house on April 23 about a plan affecting their area. The city says the open house is part of its efforts to ensure that area plans, which are essentially guides on how an area should develop over 20 years, include community feedback and wishes.

City officials say plans like the near southeast area plan seek to address residents concerns and make the city a better place to live. But at times residents feel left out and this plan, like many others, has drawn flak.

At a high level, an area plan offers guidance on future changes to a specific area in the city. It is a process in which the city engages the community to "understand what their issues are" and how they'd like to see them addressed long term, Scott Robinson, a senior city planner at the Department of Community Planning and Development (CPD), said.

"These neighborhood plans are intended to take a citywide policy guidance from our citywide plans and say 'how should these plans work together and be implemented and applied within these specific neighborhoods?'" he said.

In the case of the near southeast plan, the neighborhoods included are Washington Virginia Vale, Virginia Vale, Indian Creek, Goldsmith and University Hills North. The plan itself doesn't make any changes, serving as guidance, but the city council can enact legislative zoning changes so the area falls in line with the plan.

During the creation of the plan, the city received more than 7,200 survey responses and 5,400 comments to the near southeast area plan, according to the plan document online.

Though specific responses from the outreach process were unavailable, residents let the city council know their displeasure towards what they felt was "upzoning" during a public hearing last year.

"Upzoning: typically involves increasing density in a neighborhood by rezoning single residential lots to allow for multifamily units.

Some residents worried a series of legislative zoning changes — sponsored by the council, not residents and part of the area plan — were unfairly targeting the Evans Medical Center as they appeared to force it to downsize. The owners of the center feared it would spell their financial doom.

"We will go into negative equity the next day,” Ramin Vatan told The Denver Gazette at the time.

He said the proposal smacked of racist spot zoning and historic redlining practices that depleted the values of properties owned by people of color in order to force them from certain areas, an allegation council members said was unfounded.

Located at 4700 E. Iliff Ave., the center served about 6,000 patients last year and primarily focuses on serving immigrants and other at-risk populations according to previous reports by The Denver Gazette.

The medical center is still operating. The Denver Gazette called for comment but did not receive a response before print time.

And comments from public hearings like this are part of the challenge the city faces when developing and implementing these plans, Fran Peñafiel, another city planner at CPD, said. Zoning changes also only apply to new construction and an old building with a new zoning code is not "illegal" she said.

She said the fears of upzoning and increasing density are unwarranted. In many cases, the southeast area plan seeks to preserve the businesses, but adjusts setback rules so that main entrances, rather than parking lots or drive-throughs, are streetside, she said. The plan outlines "very clear guidance" on those changes and not everything will be "built out."

"In most places we're going to be keeping the entitlement, only creating better design outcomes," she said. "If something right now is allowed to go up to three stories, we're going to go to a different zoning that also allows three stories. We're not increasing the density."