OP/ED: Say ‘No’ To Pretty Pictures And Big Talk

The Bill Always Comes Due

By Tom Morris, Special to the GPHN

This opinion is in response to Andrew Sense’s advocacy for YIMBYs, which appeared in the February issue of the Greater Park Hill News.

YIMBYs are people who are pre-programmed to say “YES!” Not, “yes” or even “Yes.” Their enthusiasm for any old program is a demonstration of their Trumpian attraction to pretty pictures and big talk.

Their enthusiasm does not extend to what might happen if it doesn’t work. Several years ago they earnestly supported a regional playground for City Park with no discussion of what it might do to the park. The Denver Department of Parks and Recreation had decided that “regional” attractions should be focused in a Regional Park. It did not notify the neighbors of the park that this decision had been made until it had a contest to pick the winning design for the playground.

The YIMBYs attended many, many neighborhood meetings during which they were asked how much they liked what was being proposed. No one asked how many people might be attracted to the park. Nobody asked what would happen if it attracted so many people that parking might be a problem and the park would lose maybe 20 acres more to asphalt. No one asked about its maintenance in a park where four out of five public fountains were not actually functioning because of a lack of maintenance.

If it hadn’t been for NIMBYs, City Park would now have:

• A fire station (in defiance of federal fire prevention standards)

• The city’s aquarium and accompanying parking lots (it would have certainly failed right in the middle of City Park)

• Offices for Department of Parks and Recreation in the expanded Pavilion with more parking for its visitors and no public access without a security check

• A summer-long outdoor movie theater between the museum and Ferril Lake

• Half the park closed each summer for six weeks for a concert venue, with no parking open to those who could not afford its $90 cost

• Advertising stations dispensing dog poop bags

• A regional playground with no parking

• And the greensward between the museum and Colorado Boulevard would be paved for parking.

The YIMBYs believe that we will all be surging around town on our bicycles and even the people from Arvada or Centennial will be showing up on bicycles. Denver is in an uncontrolled, unplanned, hasty series of growth burst decisions. This was the foundation of the 2010 brand new zoning ordinance that the city was going to the next phase of city-building. There was a decision made to make the changes without any pre-planning or infrastructure. Any neighborhood that wasn’t paying attention or was populated with YIMBY’S got a large dose of the five-story pre-tenements, which are now under construction in every neighborhood that thought participating in government was for fools.

The infrastructure of this city is in decay. The roads, bridges, water and gas piping, storm and sanitary drainage was not planned for reconstruction until the population had popped up to maybe 800,000 residents.

We can say “YES!” as loudly as we want today. We can move before the check arrives. But someday, the city is going to have to redo much of the infrastructure. It won’t be potholes. It will be the entire road or bicycle path including the piping under it and the curbings that edge it. It is simply penny-wise and dollar-stupid to ignore routine maintenance as long as Denver has been doing it. And the bill always comes.

All the YIMBYs and newcomers who stay until the bill arrives will have the choice of paying for it or let Denver return to fly-over America.

It is not going to get any cheaper.

Tom Morris is a fourth generation Denverite. He has been an advocate of citizen participation since 1966. He is retired from architecture.