Welton Street Café is an east Denver community institution.
Occupying a corner spot in Five Points Plaza — about a block from the neighborhood’s namesake intersection, just off a light-rail stop — the diner has been serving wings and Southern-style and Caribbean fare since 1999.
Owner/founder Flynn Dickerson, who runs the place with his children, said the recent wave of growth and development that has swept over Five Points has boosted traffic at his restaurant, but also created uncertainty, particularly since a new owner and property management group took over the plaza three years ago.
“I want to say, in a good way, it has helped. It’s helped somewhat,” Dickerson said of the boom in a neighborhood the Denver City Council declared blighted five years ago. “As far as rent, we face a scary situation. They just arbitrarily give us rent based on how they feel. They say we have a lease. We’ve asked for a lease, but they don’t give us one. These guys are like super predators. They don’t care. They don’t care one bit.”
There is word for the force Dickerson and many others are contending with in Five Points: gentrification.
That process, whereby an influx of new, more affluent residents in an area sparks new development and investment, often costing out the poorer residents who were there before, is occurring in cities across the country as a generation of young professionals flock to now-thriving urban areas their parents abandoned in the last century.
It’s nothing new in Five Points. The 80205 ZIP code, which includes eastern Five Points and Denver’s City Park, City Park West, Whittier, Cole, Skyland and Clayton neighborhoods, was deemed one of the fastest-gentrifying areas in the country between 2000 and 2010 in a study shared by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute that highlighted a 27 percent jump in the white population.
In recent years, the fraught topic has taken on added urgency in Denver. And it was thrust to the forefront of Denver’s civic consciousness the week of Thanksgiving when an Ink Coffee shop in Five Pointsput a sign out front reading “Happily gentrifying the neighborhood since 2014,” sparking protests, calls for boycotts and vandalism.
With home values soaring, community advocates, elected leaders and developers alike are digging for ways to preserve some affordable housing and business space in neighborhoods like Five Points and keep people who have lived and worked there for years from being involuntarily displaced.
“Gentrification moves fast. It’s faster than government is responding right now,” City Council President Albus Brooks, who represents the Five Points area, said recently. “That’s why you see the anger.”
Politicians face criticism
Brooks, Mayor Michael Hancock and other city leaders have been accused of catering to developers while throwing money at high-profile projects such as the National Western Center complex overhaul rather than addressing displacement and other negative side effects of growth. Hancock has said developers don’t receive special treatment in Denver and points to market forces driving the city’s building boom.
Brooks points to initiatives in the works now leaders hope will help address gentrification such as creating a legal services office for people facing eviction and possibly refinancing the city’s debt with aims to put the savings — as much as $100 million to $150 million — toward affordable housing. He said he hopes to schedule symposiums in Five Points and other neighborhoods on the topic soon.
“We want to bring in national experts on gentrification to begin to stimulate conversation and ask for policy recommendations for residents that we can start working on,” Brooks said. “We need to be working with the private sector and nonprofit community to come together to begin developing a solution.”
Back at Welton Street Cafe, Dickerson is concerned Denver is already overdeveloped. His sales may be up now, but with many new restaurants nearby, he fears the growth will cannibalize itself. And he worries that once some big projects in Five Points are completed, his landlord will come to him with new rental terms he can’t afford.
Jacob Vanderslice, principal of VanWest Partners, emphasized the Welton Street Cafe does have a lease, which has been in holdover since 2009. Its rent is $2,800 per month, and has not changed since VanWest bought Five Points Plaza for $1.95 million in June 2014. The cafe is expected to pay a portion of monthly utilities and maintenance, but reimbursement terms are also built into the lease.
“It is important to us as a company to respect the history and community of the neighborhoods that we invest in,” Vanderslice wrote in an email. “We are proud to have the Welton Street Cafe, a staple of the Five Points community, as part of our Five Points Plaza project and look forward to continue leasing to them for years to come.”
Tony Pigford is among the activists who has spoken out against gentrification. He feels the Ink Coffee sign controversy exposed a larger problem: Denver valuing growth over people. He pointed to two recent City Council actions as examples. The first was the creation in 2016 of a 10-year, $150 million affordable housing fund in the city. (Brooks said he pushed for the fund to be twice that large.) The second was the council’s approval in August of a $1.8 billion contract with private partners to renovate and manage the main terminal building at Denver International Airport over 34 years. (The airport will pay the costs from operational revenues and won’t use taxpayer funds, officials say.) Pigford said the disparity in investment speaks to the lack of political will to confront affordable housing needs.
Pigford’s family history in Five Points dates to 1901 when his great-grandfather, Alexander Waller, opened a loan and real estate company at 2636 Welton St. The neighborhood was then emerging as the epicenter of African-American life and culture in Denver, a title it retained for decades as jazz legends were performing at the Rossonian Hotel and discriminatory housing practices continued to largely confine black people to the area.
Pigford lives in a house his grandfather bought in City Park West in 1937. Ownership has insulated his family from rising rent, but statistics show his neighborhood and many others in east Denver have changed since the Great Recession.
Continuing evolution
The area has continued to evolve since 2010, with the 80205 ZIP code seeing its population shift from 28.1 percent black then to 22.1 percent in 2015, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Meanwhile, the median home value shot up to $275,200 in 2015 from $234,100 in 2011. Median contract rent climbed to $831 from $694.
A report issued this spring by ApartmenList showed Five Points had the highest median two-bedroom rent in the city: $2,130 per month.
The result, Pigford fears, is an accelerating slide toward economic segregation in Denver’s urban core. And because the wealth gap in America has long been drawn on racial lines, that means fewer and fewer people who look like him in his neighborhood.
“What stings with a lot of the conversation and the discourse is the way our neighborhoods are talked about,” he said. “There is no conversation about how ghettos were formed in the first place. People are saying, ‘That was a crappy neighborhood and it’s better now,’ and not thinking about the toiling and suffering that went on in these neighborhoods under, simply, very racist policy.”
Many blocks of Five Points, particularly in the industrial area on the west side of the neighborhood where Ink Coffee is located, are unrecognizable today compared to a decade ago. Bars and restaurants have replaced warehouses and factories.
Some of the transformation can be attributed to the creation of the River North Arts District. The roughly 1-square-mile district was launched in 2005 as a means to connect local arts organizations and attract visitors to galleries, studios and other creative businesses concentrated in the industrial corridor along the South Platte River. RiNo, as the area the district encompasses is now commonly known, includes pieces of four neighborhoods including Five Points.
Artist and RiNo Art District co-founder Tracy Weil said affordability is what drew him and many others to the area two decades ago. Now, affordability has become a challenge. The district launched a business improvement district in 2015 that collects money from commercial properties within its boundaries. It was expected to raise $550,000 in 2016. One of its priorities: support affordability.
“We had to do something and be advocates for our neighbors who have been here for generations,” Weil said.
Developer, property owner and RiNo Art District co-chair Andy Feinstein has been called out by some anti-gentrification activists as being a force driving displacement in Five Points. He is the is managing partner of EXDO Property Group, which bought a defunct film reel plant at 35th and Walnut streets in 2000 and has since turned it into the EXDO Event Center, LGBTQ night club Tracks Denver and space for gyms and a yoga studio. Feinstein said 150 people now work on a block that was once all but deserted.
Feinstein, a fifth generation Denverite, feels the best way to keep Five Points economically inclusive is by adding density and built-in affordability in select places such as near the 38th and Blake Station train stop, an area where EXDO owns land. The city already is offering developers the opportunity to build higher — up to 16 stories — near the station if they include an affordability element to their projects, and is considering broader changes that would allow more of these kinds of developments in the area.
“The question is how do we tackle this challenge?” Feinstein said. “And I think this is how we do it. By inviting developers to provide affordable space.”
“Economy drives change”
Daniel Rogers is a salesman for RiNo-based Colorado Straight Up Pure Spring Water. He has lived in the neighborhood since 2012 and run his business there for more than three years. He said he doesn’t see anything wrong with the changes the neighborhood is experiencing.
“Capitalism is in full swing in Denver, and the economy drives change. Otherwise there would be no new businesses on Welton,” Rogers wrote in an email.
From his perspective, many new residents and businesses would not be there in the neighborhood if others had not chosen to move out first.
Matthew Yarber is an example of black business owner who chose to move his business into Five Points. He owns My Wine & Spirit Shoppe at 2741 Welton. After 25 years of operating his liquor store in City Park West, he moved to Welton Street in 2015, in part to be part of the area’s resurgence. The 71-year-old grew up in the neighborhood and remembers its glory days.
“I think it’s positive,” he said of recent changes to Five Points. “You used to see all this sitting idle. There was nothing going on. I remember when you couldn’t get white people to drive down Welton without locking the doors and rolling up the windows. Now, 1, 2 in the morning you see a little old white lady out here walking her dog.”
City leaders are embracing a multifaceted approach to fighting involuntary displacement due to gentrification.
In recent years, the city has supported construction of new affordable rental or for-sale housing at nine projects that have either been completed or soon will be in Five Points, economic development officials say, either through providing financing or by approving an affordable housing plan to produce for-sale units. The goal is to create mixed-income neighborhoods that invite private investment as well as preserve affordable space, city officials say.
“The opposite of mixed-income is economic segregation,” said Erik Solivan, executive director of Denver’s Office of Housing and Opportunities for People Everywhere. “Concentrated property never works. It doesn’t create a path to prosperity and opportunity and better education.”
The city also is working to connect people with jobs in key neighborhoods, including a Community College of Denver program to create an online jobs platform to highlight openings at local businesses, allow applicants to submit resumes and connect them with other assistance.
On Nov. 1, the city launched a temporary rental assistance program meant to keep people in their homes for up six months in the face of unforeseen financial hardships or other crises. It helped 53 households in its first month.
“It’s got to be a complete package,” chief city economist Jeff Romine said of fighting displacement. “It’s got to be around making sure we have safe secure housing, job opportunities and support.”
