An Evolving Home And Family

It is easy to fall into the mindset that your home and your family are constants. But they evolve with everything else.

My grandparents, and many of many aunts and uncles have died. My brother and I got married (acquiring in-laws in the process) and had children, as did my wife's sister and many of my cousins (some of whom married or found a lifetime companion without having children). I moved west and learned of a whole new branch of the family no one had ever mentioned out here. My mother passed. My dad remarried, and in the process, I gained a stepmother and several step-siblings and step-nieces and nephews. My children have become adults and found significant others who may or may not end up becoming long term additions to the family. My family tree will continue to evolve.

We bought our home in the year 2000 when it was 75 years old. Previous owners had already done a lot to it after its construction in 1925. It originally had a coal fired steam heat boiler, tiny fireplaces or stoves on two floors, a milk door, and may or may not have been wired for electricity (much of the old lighting was do it yourself work not up to code and the thermostat was added later). Do it yourselfers and renovation contractors replaced some but not all of the galvanized steel water pipes with copper. The steam heat boiler and fireplaces were converted to natural gas. A later owner drywalled over one of the natural gas fireplaces and sealed the other one. The milk door was sealed. Someone carpeted the main room in the basement even though it flooded sometimes. Tiny amount of painted woodwork on the mostly brick exterior was repainted. Our immediate prior owner turned the Model T sized garage into a pottery studio, put a shop sink in the basement, and outfitted much of the house with original tile.

We've probably been more ambitious than any of the prior owner over the last twenty-one years. When we bought it, we helped draft the party wall agreement that divided it and had it subdivided. We built a backyard fence to separate the two units. We added an attic access previously only possible to reach from the other half of the duplex. When the next door neighbor's house was scraped and a new duplex was built there, the fence was rebuilt and a resolution of a boundary irregularity was resolved. We put in a swamp cooler. We replaced the curtain rods and put in new curtains. We got the doors to shut and replaced the garage door and the rear wall of the garage. We rearranged the main floor, taking down a cement wall and chimney from the downstairs utility room, sealing off two doors out of the kitchen, extending a hallway to provide access to a room previously entered through the kitchen. We completely renovated the kitchen and dining room (except for the dining room floor and one historic dining room light) from floor to crown molding with new cabinets, a new sink, countertops, new lighting, and new appliances (and have since replaced the refrigerator and the dishwasher again). We replaced a sink, toilet, lighting, and fan and added a cabinet, in a bathroom and replaced the fixtures in the tub. We refinished the floors. We replaced single pane, steel frame windows with triple pane vinyl windows. We replaced the front door and an adjacent light fixture. We refinished the wood floors. We replaced a ceiling fan. We replaced the shop sink in the basement and another toilet. We replaced the converted coal fired boiler and removed related asbestos. We restored one of the fireplaces. We put in a water line to the freezer (a feature of the freezer which needs to be fixed). We put in new utility room appliances. We put an egress window and new flooring and lighting into a downstairs storage room to make it more of a bedroom. We took the original kitchen cabinets and relocated them to a basement storage room with a new countertop. We replaced a garage door opener. We put in a rear patio and gazebo and planting box. We replaced an outdoor faucet that froze and put in a shutoff valve so it doesn't happen again. We planted a tree that has grown to adulthood. We replaced all of the light switch hardware. We repaired our mail slot and a gap in our brickwork. We put in and then abandoned a satellite TV dish and digital TV antenna (that latter of which never really worked). We extended our gutter to prevent foundation inundation. We replaced our roof. We re-poured the concrete sidewalk in front of our house and replaced the grass between the sidewalk and the road with rocks. We removed obstructions from a main drain. We've repainted all of the interior walls (in some cases, more than once).

An old house is never done and will continue to evolve. We plan to put a closet in the downstairs room we remodeled so that it can officially be a third bedroom. Several old light fixtures should be replaced. The thermostat could be replaced with a more modern one. A crawl space could use better insulation and a few basement windows could be upgraded from the original steel framed single pane glass that ones that don't completely shut well and have ragged old screens. The dryer vent could be upgraded. A basement bathroom/utility room could use further remodeling. We have a side door that could be replaced but doesn't have to be, and our fence may need some mending. An outdoor power outlet that we never use needs to be replaced. There is landscaping to be done in our dying, steeply sloped, 400 square foot front lawn (the last bit of grass remaining on our 1/15th of an acre lot). The garage door need to be replaced. We should get a shed so we can make room for a car again in the garage which currently holds mostly home and lawn maintenance materials and equipment, particularly if we decide to buy a plug-in electric car some day. 

Perhaps by 2025, when the house is a century old, some of those finishing touches could be completed.

Some of the renovations are driven by the high value of housing in Denver. It is easier to polish your existing small home into a gem, than to buy a new one. We also did well by the Denver Public Schools. We paid $245,000 for our home, which was a fixer upper, the cheapest house on the block just a couple hundred years from Washington Park, the premier jewel in the crown of Denver's park system and a desirable urban residential neighborhood. The mortgage has been refinanced twice to a much lower rate (3.25% fixed) than what we started with, and the balance we've owed on it has declined over the years. Now, one of the realtors that courts us tells us it is worth $610,000 and that probably doesn't even reflect its much improved trim level and amenities. 

Even the neighborhood has evolved. Some houses on our block have been scrapped and replaced or pop topped. The nearby main intersection has new stop lights and crossing lights. The sidewalks at the intersections of wheelchair ramps. The asphalt has been redone on the street, and the alleyway concrete has been redone. The dumpster we replaced with trash and recycling bins. There are 5G towers throughout the neighborhood. Some trees have died and been replaced in the neighborhood. The water mains will be replaced in the near future.

I do a lot of estate planning and probate work as an attorney, so I often visit the homes of the elderly and the recently deceased. So many of those homes are frozen in time to a state almost the same as it was when they bought it several decades earlier when they were just starting a family. Even many of the decorations, spice drawer contents, and liquor cabinets are often undisturbed for decades. We have thankfully avoided that trap, so far, and have a home that is fresh and modern with only period touches. It doesn't yet have the smell of death and decay that is so common in the homes of the very old, although that may come with time. I'd like to think that we can escape that.

Denver's Globeville Is The Most Polluted Neighborhood In The County

Everyone knows that Globeville has industrial areas and some environmental problems, but I would never have guessed that it was the most polluted neighborhood in America and worse than Love Canal (the very first case I worked on after passing the bar exam related to Love Canal where litigation continued decades after the fact). 

Not coincidentally, this is a historically African-American neighborhood, although that his shifted somewhat with gentrification.

No other populated area in the country carries as high an environmental risk as a few square miles just northeast of downtown Denver, according to a study from ATTOM Data Solution. 

That hasn’t dampened enthusiasm for development, however. Normally, high levels of past contamination and heavy industry nearby would weaken or kill off the surrounding housing market. But northeast Denver’s 80216 ZIP code, home to the Globeville and Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods and the River North Art District and National Western complex, is experiencing some of the strongest developer interest and home price gains along the Front Range.

To figure out where the highest environmental risks exist for property owners, ATTOM Data Solutions looked at 8,642 ZIP codes with more than 1,000 homes. It then looked at the number of Superfund sites, brownfield sites, active polluters and overall air quality to create an environmental hazard index. “It is a hot mess. A lot of people developing are cashing in on the market,” said Candi Cdebaca, a fourth-generation Swansea resident whose family has fought for years to ensure that part of Denver gets the remediation needed. 

The four measures combined gave the 80216 ZIP code a score of 455 on the environmental hazard index, putting it ahead of the 92408 area of San Bernardino, Calif., Baltimore’s 21226 ZIP, and the 90670 area of Los Angeles. 

Denver’s most at-risk neighborhoods scored even worse than the 14303 ZIP code-area near the old Love Canal site in New York, considered one of the nation’s worst environmental disasters. 

Many of the area’s environmental wounds came in the late 1800s, when smelters belched lead, arsenic and heavy metals and produced slag that contaminated the soil. Two Superfund sites and six brownfield sites are legacies of that industrial heritage.

A history of past contamination is common among areas across the country that currently rank high for environmental risk, and in many of those places, the generators of contamination are long gone. But that part of northeast Denver still has two dozen active polluters, as defined by the 2015 Toxics Release Inventory. That pushed the risk score over the top, even with a decent air quality score. 

From here.

Earth Day in Denver Is A Big Day For RTD This Year

Today is Earth Day, a celebration near and dear to my heart because my father was involved in the original Earth Day, not so long before I was born.

One of the notable experiences of my own adult life has been to bear witness to Denver's transit system come into being from almost nothing when I arrived in Denver.

RTD's Big Year

In honor of the day, Denver's Regional Transportation District is opening its 22.8 mile commuter rail A line from Union Station to the Denver International Airport today. (This also connects Denver's Gateway and Stapleton neighborhoods by rail to downtown.)  Tomorrow, all rail lines in the RTD system will be free and there will be parties at each of the new A line stops.

This is the one of several major transit expansions for the year for RTD, which has also brought a revamped fare structure. Overall, RTD is adding 50.7 miles to its electric rail lines this year, in addition to 18 miles of bus rapid transit infrastructure along U.S. 36.

This dramatic expansion of transit in Denver will make the city one of the best served by transit in the country, and regional municipalities are working hard to leverage that by authorizing high density transit friendly zoning near rail stops - evidence of which is visible across the metropolitan area.

A Brief Historical Detour.

From 1886-1950, Denver had intracity rail service provided by the Denver Tramway Company, but this was discontinued in 1950.

The tramway made use of a variety of types of streetcars, including conduit cars (until 1888), cable cars (until 1900), and trolley cars (until 1950). At the height of its trolley operations, the tramway owned more than 160 miles (260 km) of track and operated over 250 streetcars. By the end of trolley service, only 64 streetcars were still in use.

The Denver Tramway Company continued to exist an provide bus service in greater Denver until 1971 when its assets were sold to the City of Denver.  Denver in turn, transferred the assets to the Regional Transportation District (RTD) which it created in cooperation with neighboring jurisdictions and the state legislature in 1974.

Denver's current light rail system opened with only the 10.5 mile "Central Corridor" light rail line in October of 1994, after 44 years without rail.  The 8.7 mile Southwest Corridor light rail line opened in 2000 (shortly after I moved to Denver).  The 1.8 mile Central Platte Valley spur of RTD's light rail service opened in 2002.

On the map above, the portions in dark blue/purple represent the 40 miles of transit were in place or under construction before FasTracks was approved.  Of this, 19 miles of which, basically the entire Southwest leg of the project, was part of the T-REX project which started land acquisition in 2002 and was completed in 2006.

The 12.1 mile W line from Union Station to Golden added in 2013 (shown in aqua on the map above) was added as part of FasTracks (which was approved by voters in 2004 ballot initiative). Denver's Union Station itself was overhauled in 2014.

Thus, in the year 1999, when I moved to Denver, there were only a 10.5 miles of the Central Corridor light rail line that was just five years old (and was less than two years old when I move to Colorado) and there was no bus rapid transit. At the end of 2019, there will be 96.6 miles of rail and 18 additional miles of bus rapid transit in the region. Denver also has many bus lines that offer frequent bus service along many of the metro area's major arterial streets, that provide service that rivals intracity rail in convenience without the infrastructure costs associated with rail lines.

The FasTracks project has more than doubled the size of metro Denver's transit system, even excluding portions shown in green, which may never be completed, unless new funding is found. If FasTracks is ever completed as planned it will rival the peak size of the Denver Tramway Company's transit network of 1886-1950.

This Year's Other RTD Expansions

Earlier this year, it launched bus rapid transit (BRT) service along U.S. 36 to Boulder and a second free downtown shuttle service.

This summer, a 6.2 mile stub of a commuter rail B line from Union Station to Westminster (a first installment of the planned 41 mile commuter rail to Boulder and Longmont) will open.

This fall, an 11.2 mile commuter rail G line from Union Station to Arvada and Wheat Ridge will open.

And, this winter before the end of the year, the R line extending the existing light rail service to 9 Mile station in Aurora by 10.5 miles, all of the way along the I-225 corridor to the A line will be completed.  All of the track has been laid for the R line now, but it still takes months to get it ready to enter service.

Many new rail stations are opening in connection with the new lines and the downtown Denver's Civic Center bus station will also be rebuilt into a larger RTD bus depot now that the Market Street station hub in LoDo has been replaced by services offered at Union Station which a developer has purchased for a mixed use office, commercial and micro-apartment project.

The expanded bus rapid transit, shuttle, and rail services will also entail a major overhaul RTD's bus services, particularly its longer trip regional and express bus services.

Coming Attractions

There are still some loose ends to the FasTracks project, approved by metropolitan Denver voters in 2004, to complete after 2016.

The portions to be completed through 2019 are shown in orange on the map above.

Public-private partnerships put two of the remaining portions ahead of the schedule dictated by available funding. A commuter rail line will go north from Union Station along I-25 (only 13 miles of the planned 18.5 miles of the line is set for expedited completion in 2018 with the last 5.5 miles coming later, perhaps much, much later) and a 2.3 mile extension of the light rail line along I-25 to the Denver Tech Center to the Skyridge Hospital (set to open in 2019).

The remaining parts of the project are shown in green on the map above.

Lagging at the very end of the FasTracks project will be a 0.8 mile continuation of the 30th and Downing light rail line will be continued to the A line (the Central Rail Extension L line), a 2.5 mile extension of the Southwest rail line to Highlands Ranch. The scheduled dates for these projects hasn't been set, but appears to be after 2035, unless new sources of funding can be identified.

The Highland's Ranch extension probably will receive corporate sponsorship and assistance.

It would be a great shame to make the final 0.8 mile extension needed to complete the central part of the plan wait another two decades, but no private or public co-sponsors of that relatively tiny part of the overall plan have come forward and RTD is basically out of money for the near future. The W light rail line is the most recent light rail comparable in Denver, and it cost $707 million to build, greatly over budget due to various management mistakes, with completion in 2013 and was 12.1 miles long for an average of $58.4 million per mile.  At that rate, it ought to cost about $47 million to build the Central Rail Extension L line, some of which has already been expended for environmental impact statements and planning.  This would serve not just people in Northeast Denver neighborhoods, but also people en route to DIA from all points to the South who would like to bypass Union Station. (Also, with a slight additional modification requiring no new stations and less than a mile of additional rail, the Central Rail Extension L line could be extended to connect with the N line to the North as well as the A line to the East, allowing commuters from northern suburbans to bypass Union Station en route to the Denver Tech Center.)

Finally, an extension of the commuter rail B line the rest of the way to Boulder and Longmont from Westminster (the existence of a BRT substitute already in place to Boulder makes this a lower priority).  The FasTracks proposal called for a commuter rail line from Denver to Boulder to Longmont.  But, the last leg from Boulder to Longmont would provide almost no benefit relative to bus rapid transit according to recent studies, so it will probably never be built.  As the Denver Post editorial board explains:

Total daily ridership on bus and rail would increase by only 300 riders by 2035 if the $1.15 billion line were built to Longmont, according to a recent analysis by the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project of RTD's Northwest Area Mobility Study. Not only that, travel time actually would be longer on the train than in rapid transit bus — 71 minutes on the rail from Longmont station to Union Station compared to 53 minutes by rapid bus.

Work on these last two parts of the B line for a total of 35 miles of rail line is not scheduled to begin for another 24 years, i.e. not until 2040.

Colorado's Intercity Transit Service

The transit picture for greater Denver also includes "Bustang", an affordable intercity luxury commuter bus service, provided by the state, on I-25 from Denver to Fort Collins and to Colorado Springs, and along I-70 from Denver to Glenwood Springs.

This service, as much as anything, demonstrates by example that the limited market for this service doesn't require high speed rail (at least in the I-25 corridor where high speed rail would be least expensive with $9.8 billion in construction costs for 135 miles or so of track from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, where population densities are greatest), because most of I-25 on this route is fast (75 miles per hour, only slightly reduced for select stops by bus), because luxury buses can provided the amenities that high speed rail users would seek, and because the amount of demand for the service is fairly weak even at very modest prices.

I-25 tends to be gridlocked every rush hour in the Denver metropolitan area (and savvy Bustang users can transition to RTD transit to avoid that rather than going all of the way to the downtown stop), but absent snowstorms and major construction projects, I-25 is rarely congested enough to significantly slow traffic in the rest of the Front Range.

Put another way, high speed rail on the Front Range is only attractive enough to secure economically viable demand if it is materially faster than driving or flying, at a not much greater price.  "High speed" rail service along the I-25 corridor that goes 95 mph, for example, would provide almost no benefit relative to driving your own car on that route.  But, perhaps at 180 mph, high speed rail along the I-25 corridor might begin to make sense if it wasn't too expensive and Front Range urban areas other than greater Denver started to experience a great deal of population growth.

Intense traffic congestion on I-70 from Denver to Glenwood Springs during ski season (and the vulnerability of those roads to closure due to accidents, snow and landslides) make the potential benefits per trip for high speed rail in that corridor relative to bus service much greater.  But, the population density served is much lower in the I-70 corridor than in the I-25 corridor, traffic is low outside of ski season (overall an estimated two-thirds less traffic per year), and the cost of building high speed rail in the mountains is much greater per mile ($16.5 billion from Golden to Eagle, about 120 miles) than on the flat open plains (much of which is open land and farm country) of the I-25 corridor.  On the other hand, since I-70 is near capacity in ski season already, adding rail service could produce substantial interstate highway road construction savings, reaching into the billions of dollars.

(In addition, Colorado has an Amtrak line that runs through Denver, an Amtrak line that grazes the far Southeast corner of the state, irregular season Ski Train service to Winter Park when funding is available, Greyhound bus service, and some smaller intercity bus or van shuttle operators.)

Why Transit?

What does Denver get out of its immense investment in transit that has provided it with a comprehensive system of electric rail service that puts most of the metro area within a modest distance from their nearest rail station?

First, this is a hedge against rising oil prices.  Prior to FasTracks, Denver would basically collapse if oil prices rose too much to make a city connected entirely by gasoline and diesel fueled vehicles economically viable.  Now, if oil prices rise, most metro area residents can replace most of their commutes with a transit system that isn't sensitive to oil prices.

In particular, the new comprehensive transit system makes it viable for someone wanting to go to most of the metro area's commercial center to park and ride with a short range electric vehicle (or bicycle) to a rail station, and then to make the rest of the trip by train.  So, even if we completely ran out of oil, the city could live on, while other cities that were not so far sighted would have to play catch up spending a decade or more when they had no alternatives and construction was much more expensive trying to put a transit system in place.

This said, Denver's transit system is not really a potentially complete replacement of motor vehicles. It is essentially a system for getting commuters and out of town travelers to downtown, the Denver Tech Center and the Denver International Airport that closely mirrors the interstate highway system in the metropolitan area.  It isn't designed to provide neighborhood to neighborhood transportation (which RTD does via buses).

Second, it is a hedge against future interstate highway system congestion.  The A line opening today will already often be faster than trying to get from downtown to the airport on the highway. Denver is creeping into permanent gridlock during rush hours, and rail provides a faster alternative at those times that can be expanded much less expensively than expanding interstate highways with more lanes in the metro area.  The more rush hour congestion grows, the more ridership the transit system will see.

(Incidentally, rail systems are also much less likely to be obstructed in bad weather or due to accidents, making the overall transportation system more robust in bad weather.)

Metropolitan Denver, and the City and County of Denver proper in particular, has been growing like wildfire, pretty much continuously since the early 1980s oil bust, and especially in the last decade and a half.  Denver has gone from being a medium sized middle of the United States city to a world class city of the first or second rank.

Despite seemingly having no natural boundaries (in fact, limited water supplies impose nearly invisible boundaries as Douglas County's ever falling ground water table reminds us), recent construction in the Denver metropolitan area has been at urban densities comparable to major cities with much more restricted natural limits on their available land.  Denver has made excellent use of infill opportunities and land use regulation changes to squeeze more people onto the same land.  And, higher population density is the key to making transit more attractive economically.

Third, it allows for higher density construction in commercial centers without the need to provide parking for new commercial development, while simultaneously increasing the value of housing across the metro area by bringing such much of it closer in terms of travel time to commercial centers than the pre-transit systems.  In a nutshell, transit allows downtown to outsource parking to distant park and ride stations which helps both commuters and people attending sporting, entertainment and civic events in the urban core.

It turns out that it is almost a global, universal empirical economic fact that higher population density is strongly correlated with greater economic productivity per worker.  So, facilitating higher density strengthens our economy.

Without good transit, metropolitan Denver would have to develop more dispersed and lower density suburban office parks that would be less economically productive, and the capacity of central Denver to be a first class sports and entertainment hub for the entire region would be impaired.  Yet, it has consistently been shown that healthier central cities yield economic benefits for entire metropolitian areas.

Fourth, it helps the environment in a city where ozone levels have impaired air quality.

Electric trains are not inherently more environmentally friendly than gasoline and diesel driven motor vehicles.  The coal that fuels much of the power grid in Colorado is very dirty energy.  And, emissions from new vehicles are much lower than their predecessors.

But, the large number of passengers on average per rail car-mile, and the efficiency of electric motors relative to internal combustion engines, tilts the balance back in favor of transit.  Equally important, as Colorado's electric grid (which is already about 25% sourced from renewable energy) becomes greener, everything that relies on electricity automatically and effortlessly becomes greener without any change in consumer behavior.  And, utility companies are in a much better position to be at the cutting edge of green energy innovation than every day consumers.

Fifth, the more extensive transit system also makes it easier for the disabled and other non-drivers (older children, people with suspended driver's licenses, people who can't afford vehicles) to access destinations across the metro area.  From a practical perspective, this is more of a side effect and serves a population that was already willing, because it had no other choice, to use existing RTD bus service to the same destinations which has been in place for decades.  But, it is still a benefit of transit.

Ranking Denver's Transit System

By the end of 2016, only six North American cities have more combined miles of commuter rail and light rail than Denver:

1. New York City 260.8
2. Mexico City 148.75
3. San Francisco 144.2
4. Philadelphia 118.4
5. Washington D.C. 117.0
6. Chicago 102.8
7. Los Angeles 98.5
8. Toronto 93.4
9. Dallas 91.6
10. Denver 90.7 
11. Portland 67.35
12. Boston 64.0
13. San Diego 53.5
14. Atlanta 50.3
15. Baltimore 48.5
16. Salt Lake City 46.8
17. Saint Louis 46.0
18. Montreal 43.0
19. Sacramento 42.9
20. Vancouver 42.6
21. San Jose 42.2
22. Calgary 37.2
23. Trenton-Camden 34.0
24. Cleveland 32.3
25. Pittsburg 26.2
26. Phoenix 26.0
27. Miami 24.2
28. Seattle 24.2
29. Houston 22.7
30. New Orleans 22.3
31. Oceanside 22.0
32. Monterrey (Mexico) 20.0
33. Minneapolis 21.8
34. Jersey City 17.0
35. Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) 17.0
36. Edmonton 15.1
37. Guadalajara 14.9
38. San Juan 10.7
39. Charlotte 9.6
40. Panama City 8.5
41. Norfolk 7.4
42. Buffalo 6.4
43. Memphis 6.3
44. Newark 6.2
45. Ottowa 5.0
46. Tuscon 3.9
47. Tampa 2.7

No city in Latin America other than Mexico City has any urban rail or light rail service with as many miles as Denver's city (the runner up in Latin America, Santiago (Chile) has 64.0 miles of rail, third is Sao Paulo (Brazil) with 46.1 miles).  There are 24 cities with urban rail or light rail service in Latin America other than Mexico City, Santiago and Sao Paulo.

By the end of 2019, Denver will have 108 miles, surpassing Dallas, Toronto, Los Angeles and Chicago, and making Denver first for a non-coastal U.S. city, fifth in the United States, and sixth in the Americas. If the entire FasTracks project is completed, Denver will have 151.6 miles of rail lines and be second only to New York City in combined miles of commuter rail and light rail in all of North and South America.

Melbourne, Australia has 155.3 miles of light rail, Adelaide has 9.3 miles, Sydney will open a new system in 2019 with 45 miles of rail.  Gold Coast, Australia will open a new system in 2018 with 4.5 miles of rail.

Antarctica, unsurprisingly, has no urban rail.

In Africa: there are four suburban rail systems in South Africa (some with hundreds of miles of track), there is a tram system in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (with 19.6 miles of track), there is a tram and a metro system in Cairo, Egypt (48.4 miles of heavy rail and something less than 36 miles of tram line), there is a tram system in Alexandra, Egypt (20 miles), and there are also urban rail systems in Morocco (one 19 mile line and one 11.8 mile line), Algeria (one 19.2 miles in two systems in Algiers, one 5.6 mile line in Constantine, and one 11.6 mile line in Oran) and Tunisia (one 19.9 mile line). There are also two transit systems under construction in Nigeria (the larger of which will have 22 miles of track).

There are many transit systems in Asia (including Japan) and Europe, many of which are more extensive than most of those in the Americas. See lists of global metro systems, tram systems, and suburban rail systems.

Needless to say, all of these other cities have much larger metropolitan area populations than Denver, and measured by ridership, Denver has a much more challenging task to compete with other major U.S. urban rail systems.

Small Armed Drones Ready For Prime Time

An article at Defense Tech reviews a variety of new light military drone designs in connection with a U.S. military RFP called LMAMS (for Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System).

For example, "the Switchblade weighs less than five pounds and its electric propulsion is near-silent. It is tube-launched, with flick-out wings, and can fly for more than ten minutes, sending back color video and infra-red imagery so the operator can locate and identify a target. Once spotted, it can lock on and dive in at over 90mph with a warhead powerful enough to take out a pickup truck or a group of individuals with pinpoint precision from six miles away. Being able to find and hit targets miles away from behind cover with high accuracy could alter ground combat. A squad with this capability could decimate opponents at long range without ever being seen. Switchblade can also be launched from an aircraft or even a submarine for covert strike."

What does that mean in terms someone can relate to?

This means that a soldier on foot with only a backpack on the University of Denver campus is capable of destroying a single particular vehicle or killing group of people as far away as downtown Denver or the Denver Tech Center.

Half a dozen other models from companies across the world vary the parameters moderately, but are basically comparable in a capabilities.  Poland makes a drone called "Warmate" that is a bit larger and more capable.

The Warmate is larger than the size specified for LMAMS at nine pounds, but it has a 30-minute endurance and a maximum speed of 90 miles per hour. There are two different warheads, an anti-personnel fragmentation charge and a shaped-charge warhead. The first version is claimed to have a lethal radius of ten meters, while the second can penetrate 100mm of steel armor. Unlike other infantry weapons, a drone can easily attack the top, rear or sides of a vehicle.

The Warmate system would be capable of killing everyone waiting in line outside the Denver Pavilions movie theater on the 16th Street mall or cracking open a bank safe in downtown Denver from a launch site on the campus of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The downside of this powerful new armed drone technology is that this is very affordable off the shelf technology that pretty much any country or insurgent group's military force can acquire. For example, ISIS has adapted hobby model airplanes for recon and armed drone purposes. Drone countermeasures are still in their infancy, however.

For example, even if an incoming armed drone with of range of many miles can be destroyed before it does harm, locating the people who launched it, or even knowing it was coming before it was almost on top of you, would be almost impossible using current technology.  And, this is before anyone attempts to use stealth technology which can give a jet fighter the radar profile of a large bird.

When the radar target is the size of a large bird to start with and moving only moderate faster than a large bird in a good wind (hawks can dive faster than may of these drones reaching speeds of 120 miles per hour and have a peak cruising speed of about 50 miles per hour) distinguishing noise from signal is a daunting challenge.  But, if you apply stealth technology, you get a radar profile the size of a large bug which really is to all intents and purposes invisible, in addition to having a target that isn't terribly hot compared to a bird in the infrared with an electric motor, isn't much louder than a bird, and isn't easy to see visually, especially if it is camouflaged to match a nighttime or daytime sky as the case may be.

Service Interruption

I am pretty much out of commission for a few days when it comes to blogging, as I was robbed at gunpoint by two men last night on the way home from a late night at the office, outside my Washington Park home and they took my wallet, phone, laptop, some earbuds, and a calculator.  I cooperated and was not harmed, and I was honestly not really even all that shaken up emotionally. I promptly called the police and they've done what they can, trying to get a fingerprint from my car and taking statements, but, realistically, the prospects of finding the culprits (who face 16-48 years prison terms each if convicted) is dim.

I quickly cancelled credit cards and changed some passwords. Aside from the cash in my wallet, there was little of value that they took that could be of much value to them.  My phone is primitive, my laptop was hardly top of the line hardware even though the information on it was very valuable, and I lost nothing irreplaceable.  A few things that were stolen (but not the laptop or phone) were recovered in an alley, about a mile away, the next day.

So, I'm borrowing computers until I can replace that one that was stolen and then get it up and running. Fortunately, the laptop was password protected and almost all of the important files (except for even a couple of years of browser bookmarks that I use as research notes!) live in the cloud, so while it is a great pain in the butt to replace some of the things that were stolen, it is really just a bump in the road for me.  In a few days, I'll be a few hundred dollars poorer, some of which may be recoverable through insurance if I'm bothered to pursue a claim, and back to normal.

Those guys, in contrast, sooner or later, will either get shot or arrested.  Crime literally doesn't pay well. They need to make multiple robberies of this class every week just to make the equivalent of minimum wage. Even if the odds of being caught per robbery are just 0.5% in any given incident (in reality the clearance rate for robberies is much higher, at almost 30%, so the odds are that they'll eventually be caught, if they aren't shot first, is very high).  Or, they could OD on drugs.  One of my recovered items was in a dumpster with a hypodermic needle on top of it, which is probably not a coincidence.

Bottom line:

As much as it sucks to be a crime victim, this time around, I still almost surely have the better side the deal in the big picture of life.

Now, do these guys still belong in prison?

Absolutely.

Somebody needs to lock them up before someone who handles the situation less calmly is shot and killed, or raped, or whatever, and real harm is done.  And, I won't mourn them if their actions result in them getting shot and killed by somebody.

But, I won't lose any sleep craving revenge over my petty property loss and mild inconvenience in  this particular incident, even if it does interrupt my blogging a bit.

Aurora Public Schools Broken

The Denver Post highlights a new report from a local non-profit regarding the poor performance of the Aurora public schools. The numbers are bleak and make the often criticized Denver Public Schools look positively competent and effective by comparison.

Only 55% of Aurora's public school district graduate (the state average is about 78%).  Only about 40% of graduates go to college (the state average is about 57%). More than half of those who go to college need remedial work, and 67.3% of college attendees from Aurora Central High School need remedial work (the state average is about 38%).  Only about 10% of Aurora public school district students graduate ready for college and attend college.

By comparison, about 27% of students statewide graduate ready for college and attend college, and about 16% of Denver Public Schools graduates graduate ready for college and attend college. The odds of students who attend college but need to do remedial work graduating with a college degree are quite low.  Colorado, for what it is worth, is quite typical of the nation as a whole.

About 56% of students statewide are proficient or advanced in mathematics, compared to 36% of students in the Aurora public schools.  About 69% of students statewide are proficient or advanced in reading, compared to 46% of students in the Aurora public schools

The fact that the Aurora public schools performs worse in absolute terms than the state average, in and of itself isn't in and of itself a cause of concern about the quality of education that its students are receiving.

The students at the Aurora public school face challenges far more serious than those in the state as a whole.  About 40% of its students don't speak English as their native language and about two-thirds of students than the statewide average are poor enough to qualify for reduced or free lunch programs. It is an overwhelmingly majority minority district (about three-quarters of its students are Hispanic or black), which is correlated with poorer academic outcomes in almost every such school district in the United States for reasons that however problematic they are have little or nothing to do with what the teachers and administrators in this particular school district are doing right or wrong.

What is a cause for concern is that the Aurora public schools do a significantly worse job of graduating students with comparable challenges, and preparing comparable students who do graduate for college, than either Denver or the State of Colorado as a whole. 

Students are still significantly less likely to graduate from the Aurora public schools, than comparable students in either Denver or the State of Colorado as a whole, when they have disabilities, when they have limited English proficiency, when they are economically disadvantages, when they are migrants, when they received benefits under Title 1, when they are non-white, and when they are gifted and talents.  Homeless students in the Aurora public schools are less likely than the state average to graduate (although the graduation rate for homeless students in the Aurora public schools is a bit better than in the Denver Public Schools).

For example, about 95% of students in gifted and talented programs in the state graduate from high school, while only about 75% of students in gifted and talented programs in the Aurora public schools do.  When large percentages of gifted and talented students (usually defined as the 98th percentile or better on standardized IQ tests taken in elementary school), are failing, something is deeply wrong with the opportunities and quality of education that the school is offering.  About 30 high school senior aged kids from the Aurora public school each year who should be well prepared college students on a clear track to a good middle class life or better, are instead ending up as high school dropouts.  A mind is a terrible thing to waste.  The Denver Public Schools, in contrast, have programs that do an excellent job of serving low income gifted and talented students.

About 58% of students with limited English proficiency in Colorado graduate from high school, while only 41% of such students graduate in the Aurora public schools.

Likewise, those students who do graduate from the Aurora public schools are significantly less likely to attend college and significantly more likely to need remedial education than students graduating from other schools.

If the Aurora public schools were performing at levels in the vicinity of Denver or the State of Colorado with students facing comparable challenges, something like 15%-18% of Aurora public school students who graduate ready for college and attend college, rather than just 10%.

While the best team of teachers and administrators in the nation for a district this size with this mix of students would be hard pressed to match state averages in academic achievement, a merely par for the course and average team of teachers and administrators ought to be able to achieve outcomes more than 50% better on a host of indicators than the Aurora public schools is able to manage.

There is also no indication that the Aurora public schools is doing a particularly good job of preparing non-college bound students for the world of work, about 55% of students statewide and about 80% of students in the Aurora public schools. It is certainly failing the 45% of its students who fail to graduate.  There is no doubt whatsoever that the life prospects of high school dropouts in the United States are almost always bleak.  And, there are no signs that the 60% of its graduates who don't attend college leave with technical skills or have the academic competency of typical high school graduates who don't go to college in the state as a whole, or in neighboring Denver.  The Denver Public Schools, in contrast, has a wealth of alternative programs who non-college bound students.

Recognizing that there is a clear problem, of course, doesn't mean that the solution is obvious. Almost surely, there are myriad specific problems and not one overarching problem that explains the whole picture.  But, there is no doubt that dramatic change needs to be the order of the day in this troubled school district.

Glendale 180 Project Approval Was Secured Only With Sham Voters

I give props to fellow Colorado attorney Tim Flanagan, whom I have had dealings with in various cases, for fighting the good fight against the City of Glendale in court, in connection with its Glendale 180 project.

The City of Glendale is in Arapahoe County, has under 5,000, almost no single family housing, and is entirely surrounded by the City and County of Denver.

Glendale sold one square foot of vacant brown grass at a corner of a municipal park to five different people (two of whom were city employees), in order to stack the ballot in an August 4, 2015 election to establish a 14.3 acre downtown development authority, and a previous effort to establish a previous special district.

These sham property owner votes allowed it to outvote the three other land owners in a proposed new taxing district (only one of whom, Staybridge Hotels represented by Flanagan, pays property taxes) on a vote to establish a the new taxing district, which passed by a vote of 7-3, two of which were cast by Staybridge which owns 23% of the land in the proposed DDA (71% is owned by the Glendale, which it feels makes its actions morally justified).

The only three actual residents of the proposed DDA (who were registered to vote at Staybridge Hotels addresses) didn't vote, although their failure to vote may simply be because those individuals no longer live at the addresses where they were registered to vote (which is not uncommon for people who list an extended stay hotel as a residential address).

Yet, under election laws that have generally held to be constitutional, property owners may be given a vote in certain kinds of local government elections (in this case, apparently on a one parcel, one vote basis), notwithstanding the usual one man, one vote rule of constitutional law.

Apparently, this little known practice is common in Colorado:

The creation of small landholders is a common mechanism by which to form metro districts in Colorado and meet the ownership requirements laid out in state law, according to Ann Terry, executive director of the Special District Association of Colorado.

Another private taxpayer, the owners of a rug shop, were stripped from the district after making a stink over the City's plan to use the power of eminent domain to take their 6 acre property (they were offered $11 million and turned down the offer), to prevent it from voting against the proposal.  The rug shop owners were pleased to avoid the eminent domain seizure risk, but their removal from the district did gerrymander the group of remaining voters.

Flanagan is arguing on behalf of his client that this cheap trick improperly circumvents TABOR's requirement that new taxes be approved by voters.  The methods used by Glendale are obviously a dirty trick, even if they are common.  While Glendale is free to do what it wants with the 71% of the land it owns, imposing a tax on a single land owner approved with fake voters doesn't sound like a legitimate way to go about doing it.

The larger merits of whether Glendale should be able to use the power of eminent domain to assemble property to make it suitable for business development (one of the main purposes of the DDA is to allow Glendale to use the power of eminent domain to force Staybridge to sell property to it) are also controversial.

Eminent domain is permitted for public works (e.g. pipelines and roads), and to abate urban blight, but it is a long shot to call that part of Glendale blighted, even if it could arguably have a higher and better use in connection with the Glendale 180 plan. But, it is not generally permitted to permit private profit for future land developers.  Usually, property assembly is left to private developers who lack the power of eminent domain.  Those private developers then seek to have the property rezoned for a project once it is assembled, not by a governmental entity.

On the other hand, eminent domain power exists in order to curb "rent seeking" by holdout property owners that get more than their fair share of the total investment in a project by insisting on prices far in excess of the value of their land in its current use that are only possible to realize if they cooperate.

On the law, Staybridge probably faces an uphill battle.  But, it is a fight worth fighting, the legal theory advanced is not frivolous, and even if this battle it lost, it may convince the Colorado General Assembly to change the law of eminent domain going forward in the State of Colorado.

This case could also easily influence the national debate over the use of the eminent domain power to facilitate urban planning in a manner similar to the landmark Kelo v. City of New London case (545 U.S. 469 (2005)), in which the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision "held that the general benefits a community enjoyed from economic growth qualified private redevelopment plans as a permissible "public use" under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment."  The City won the Kelo case, but energized opponents of this kind of used of the eminent domain power in the process, resulting in tighter restricts on this kind of taking under federal law, and under state and local law in many places.

The Economics of Micro-Housing

Between Sports Authority Stadium at Mile High and the booming Highlands neighborhood in Denver, just across I-25 from the Elitch Gardens amusement park, is a building that used to be the somewhat worse for wear Hotel VQ, a cylinder which once had a rotating restaurant on its top floor in "mod" style built in 1969.

A pair of real estate development companies converted the hotel to 179 apartments, mostly spartan 335 square foot studio apartments, together with a few penthouses where the restaurant used to be on the 13th floor.  Units have hot plates instead of gas or electric ranges, because the building's utilities can't handle any more demand.  The amenities are at the low end, but with the range of what modestly prices apartment buildings near downtown offer.  The signature piece of this development is a bicycle repair work space available to all tenants.

Realistically, this is about as small as a studio apartment can get without dropping down into the currently almost non-existent in Denver realm of youth hostels, dormitories, and flophouses aka "single occupancy hotels".

The developers paid $9 million for the Hotel, as is, and put $11-12 million into thrifty renovations, for a total price of about $20,000,000.  This is about $90,000 per unit and about $270 per square foot. It helps that mortgage interest rates for commercial and residential borrowers with good credit and adequate down payments are at record lows.  The rent for one of the studio units about $990 a month - 1.1% of the cost of the unit per month, about 45% of the rent for a two bedroom apartment in the neighborhood - which may include some utilities.  The city also requires 350 square feet of parking space per unit, which is workable for this project because the hotel already had plenty of parking.

Tenants start moving in this week and about half the units are currently leased.  I'm sure that the rest will fill up soon.  Vacancies in apartments in Denver are at record lows, rents are surging, and more affordable units are particularly scarce.

There is a pent up demand for studio apartments in downtown Denver which this project seeks to fill. For whatever reason, the tens of thousands of new apartments that are being built in Denver each year for the next several years, are overwhelmingly one and two bedroom units at the luxury end of the rental market.  Studios and apartments with three bedroom are scarce in general, and even more scarce in new apartment construction.  Existing units that used to be considerable desirable are being forced to renovate or move down the rental housing hierarchy.

Some of the unprecedented surge in apartment building is due to pent up demand from the years after the Financial Crisis when nobody was building and nobody was investing in housing or lending the money to make it happen.  Part of the demand comes from the ranks of people who lost homes or gave them up during the Financial Crisis and are now looking for apartments to live in, instead.  Part of the demand comes from a strong Denver economy (5th fastest growing in the nation in 2014) that is expected to attract about 50,000 new residents to the Denver metropolitan area over the next few years, although it is hard to know if that surge will be muted if low oil prices take some of the steam out of the Mountain West's economy that is managed mostly from Denver. New zoning regulations across the metro area to encourage high density development near light rail lines, and other strategic zoning changes in Denver to encourage new development have also played a part.

Of course, $990 a month for a studio apartment that struggles to house an intimate couple and mostly houses young single people who want to live near downtown is hardly a steal.  Just a couple of years ago, you could get a decent sized one bedroom place for that.

Of course, for genuinely affordable housing, the city really needs more studio apartments with rents in the $450-$600 a month range to be affordable for working class and lower middle class renters who don't need prime locations and glitz, or even single parents with one or two children (often on a part-time basis).

This means that for these studio apartments to be built on a for profit basis, the units need to cost developers something on the order of $45,000-$60,000 to buy or build, which works out to about $135-$180 per square foot.  A number of developers (profit and non-profit) are trying to convert motels build on arterial streets in the metro areas that lost their clients when the interstate highway system was developed, into this kind of housing which is close to possible price point for the old motel units with modest renovations to make them suitable for housing.

Some of that budget needs to go towards land acquisition, which can be reduced by zoning more land for higher densities and reducing parking requirements at locations where transit is good enough to allow a significant share of residents to go carless or rely on car sharing programs (really short term, low paperwork car rentals).  Some of that budget needs to go towards construction - which is expensive when the metro area is in a building boom and is also somewhat a function of distinguishing between what is necessary for health and safety, and what is merely aesthetic or designed to discourage low income housing, in building codes.

Alternately, one can build units with even fewer square feet per unit, amending zoning and building codes to allow it, by creating affordable housing in which, for example. residents share some or all bathroom facilities and/or have minimal or non-existent kitchens, perhaps trading out an affordable cafeteria serving mostly residents instead.  This takes you into the realm of youth hostels, dormitory and barracks style housing, and single occupancy hotels.  It's modest living, but beats being a vagrant sleeping on the streets, living in your car parked anywhere you can overnight, trying to cram several people into a small apartment as roommates in violation of the lease (a popular option with immigrant blue collar workers in Denver), or having to drive or take buses for hours from more affordable areas (or with relatives) for low wage workers.

Another affordable option if zoning codes would allow it, would be to allow single family houses in residential neighborhoods to be used as boarding houses with one or two renters per bedroom, or renovated into multiple unit apartments with similar densities but more separated living spaces. This kind of development is a staple of college towns and some high density, high cost cities, but is prohibited by zoning codes in most places.

Similarly, accessory dwelling units, such as "granny flats" or garages or basements converted to residences are prohibited by zoning codes in most residential areas in Denver, but could provide a huge inventory of affordable housing that doesn't overwhelm residential neighborhoods with high densities of low income tenants (because primary houses would still be occupied by middle class families that own homes).

Ultimately, the big problem has less to do with economics and building costs, and more to do with urban planning initiatives like restrictive zoning and building codes, that rule out a variety of workable solutions to the affordable housing problem without big investments of government funds or mandates imposed on developers of new housing.  But, to open up those possibilities, city leaders need to find a way to defeat NIMBY driven neighborhood activists who don't want more lower income people (or for that matter, more people, in general) in their neighborhoods.  Denver has a better track record on that score than many cities, but is missing out on low hanging fruit solutions like allowing accessory dwellings and multiple households in single family homes.

The Exception That Proves The Rule

There are situations where a private citizen does use a firearm in a justified shootings of someone in the act of committing a crime.  I explore one such recent incident at length from all available directions, because of the importance of these incidents to wider policy debates.

A recent incident in Aurora, Colorado, where a man moving into his newly purchased condominium with the help of a couple of friends at 11 pm. last Friday was being robbed at gunpoint by three juveniles appears to be such an incident. (Aurora Sentinel coverage here; Fox 31 KDVR television coverage here).  The men were interviewed and the case is being investigated, but they were not charged with any crimes.  According to the Denver Post, in the first link above:

Authorities in Arapahoe County have identified a 15-year-old boy slain when he allegedly tried to rob, along with two other juveniles, a group moving into an Aurora condominium late Friday. The county coroner's office on Tuesday identified the teen as Dewayne Lamonte Quenvell Brown, who died after being rushed to a hospital. 

Authorities say he died from two gunshot wounds and his manner of death has been classified as homicide. Brown's two alleged accomplices were also shot and wounded during the confrontation. One was listed in serious condition on Saturday while the other was treated after walking into a hospital and later arrested on unrelated charges. 

Aurora police say three men were moving boxes into a three-story condominium building on the 400 block of South Kalispell Way when the three juveniles allegedly approached them. One of the juveniles threatened the movers with a gun, officials say, and as two of the men began to take out their money the third man produced a handgun and shot at the trio.  

If the facts are as claimed, and the story seems plausible enough on its face, then this incident would involve a legally justified shooting by a civilian.  Incidentally, this happened very near one of the men's home on property belonging to his homeowner's association in which he had an interest, possibly triggering the expanded right of self-defense under the "make my day" self-defense law, although the fact that the shooter was not himself a property owner might complicate that analysis.

Notably, the shooting itself could not be prosecuted as a homicide even if the person using the gun didn't have a concealed weapons permit, a circumstance not clarified by any of the media reports.  But, if the person with the handgun was prohibited from owning one because he had a felony record, that would have been serious felony punishable by a minimum ten year federal prison term, even if the use of the firearm was justified.

Also importantly, we don't know precisely why the friend helping with the move had a loaded handgun on his person.  It might have been something he carried all of the time, or it could have been the case that he was carrying it because he felt a heightened risk in that location on that day.  One of the cultural facts that is a hidden subtext in many gun control debates is that the number of civilians outside the security professionals who carry handguns with them on a day to day basis is very small, even though a large minority of Americans own handguns, probably 25%-40% (there is great regional variation in this, however), but mostly they keep them in their homes rather than carrying them with them unless they anticipate heightened danger on a particular occasion.  Gun ownership has been falling steadily for almost 40 years (from about 50% to about 30% nationwide) but much of this trend reflects the decreasing popularity of hunting with long arms (in part, a side effect of an increasingly urban population), and doesn't necessarily reflect steep drops in the ownership of handguns for self-defense.  The U.S. at 88 guns per 100 people has the greatest number of privately owned guns per capita in the world (twice as high a rate as Switzerland with its large mandatory militia), but to a significant extent that is a product of affluence that reflects more gun owning households who own multiple guns, rather than more gun owning households.

I see I case like this in the Denver metropolitan area roughly once every year or two, reading the newspaper and scanning the 9News television news website most weekdays.

Of course, if none of the men had had a gun, and they had complied with the armed juveniles demands, the juveniles probably would have taken the money the men had on their persons (probably less than a couple of hundred dollars), and no one would be dead or injured at that point.  The men would have probably have been shaken and bitter, but would probably have gotten over it in a couple of weeks.  Anything taken other than cash, and maybe even the cash itself, probably would have been replaced if an insurance claim was made by the men.

The juveniles probably would have escaped and not been caught in that case.  (An incident like that is part of the origin story for the Spider Man comic book hero, and an armed robbery leading to deaths is also part of the origin story for the Batman comic book hero, a point worth mentioning because it goes to just how deeply criminal incidents just like these are woven into our popular culture.).  Indeed, they would likely have gone on to commit further armed robberies, particularly given the fact that one of the juveniles already had an outstanding arrest warrant from another incident, possibly eventually killing or seriously injuring someone in the process in a future crime.

But if they were caught after this incident if the men had cooperated, of course, none of the juveniles would have faced the death penalty or even a life prison sentence, for this incident.  On the other hand, if after cooperating in this incident, the men called the police and they responded rapidly to an armed robbery, one or more of the juveniles might very well have been shot by law enforcement attempting to arrest them because law enforcement would be likely to shoot suspects known to be armed.  There would also have been, if police sought out suspects, a greater risk that innocent juveniles with a similar description might have been shot or wrongfully arrested due to mistaken identity.

To be clear, I am not saying that an individual should have a legal duty to comply with the demands of someone carrying out an armed robbery.  But, if the men had been unarmed and that had happened, the event would have been far less tragic.

The report also doesn't say if the gun used by the juvenile was loaded, although that wouldn't be legally relevant because the juvenile acted in a manner consistent with it being loaded by threatening the men with it, and the men would have been reasonable in relying on the assumption that it was loaded.

The two juveniles who were shot but not killed will probably face juvenile felony charges for attempted robbery, although the District Attorney for the 18th District could attempt to try the accomplices as adults.

The story doesn't say so expressly, but it is a fair guess all three of the juveniles were probably black and male teenagers, given the location of the incident and the name of one of the juveniles who died.  It is harder to make an inference about the races of the men involved who have not been identified.  If the races of the victims and perpetrators were reversed, there is a good chance that the police would have handled the incident differently, but that doesn't mean that the way that it did play out was not in accordance with the law.

The two bedroom, two bath 984 square foot condominium unit in question disclosed in the TV news account (431 Kalispell Way, #104, about a mile from the Aurora Town Center Mall that was home to the Aurora movie theater shooting) was sold on May 20, 2013 for $70,000 according to Zillow.  The condo was the subject of three successive foreclosures in 2005 (the first of which was about four years after it was last purchased in a commercial sale in 1999 for $87,500) and another in 2013.  This would likely have been a fix and flip sale by someone who bought a few months after the foreclosure from the bank and waited two years to sell it in order to make the transaction tax free.

I mention this because it goes to the issues of social class involved.  The man moving into the condominium he just bought, was probably middle class, or securely working class, but probably not upper middle class, rich, or poor.  He (and his friends) were almost certainly not in the 1% or even the 5% or the 20% that "run things".  This isn't a ghetto, but it isn't a high rent district either.  The multiple foreclosures in this unit probably weren't unique to the complex, which may have been troubled by many foreclosures of working class and lower middle class owners just on the brink of the stability and respectability of home ownership, who frequently stumble in their effort to join the ranks of property owners.

The juveniles were almost surely either in or near poverty.  A shoe that hasn't yet dropped is the question of whether these these boys were their own tiny gang, or whether they were part of a larger street gang.  If they were "unconnected" to a larger gang, the matter is probably over and done with except for the criminal prosecutions of the accomplices in juvenile court, which most likely will be resolved by plea bargains.  If, however, they were part of a larger street gang, the men may be at serious risk of retaliation from the juvenile's gangs, possibly placing the men at great risk of future death or bodily injury and at a minimum requiring them to remain vigilant against a retaliatory gang attack for a long time afterwards.  It isn't clear (to me at least) the extent to which a gang is likely to retaliate for the justified shooting of their own members if the person doing it doesn't belong to a rival gang (which we have no obvious reason to suspect here).

The secrecy afforded to juvenile proceedings makes it almost impossible for members of the general public to evaluate that risk, or to know what justice ultimately will be meted out to the two boys who weren't killed.  Members of the general public will also have know way of knowing the threat that those two boys pose when they encounter them in the future, perhaps at school or as co-workers or potential romantic companions.

This also seems to have been a stranger crime incident and not one involving acquaintances of any kind.  The juveniles were out looking for someone to rob with a gun they brought for the purpose, and then found someone, only to be unpleasantly surprised.  They were looking for trouble, their marks were not.

Given that incidents like this do happen, the question is whether, as a matter of policy, this outcome is superior to the likely alternatives in a society where guns were far harder to get a hold of due to gun control laws with real bite (perhaps an impossibility, given the U.S. Supreme Court's recent Second Amendment jurisprudence).  The intended personal self-defense purpose of the Second Amendment does come into play sometimes, but the question is whether it happens enough and makes enough of a positive difference when it does come into play, to justify widespread, minimally regulated private firearm ownership.

Lightning Strikes

A tree that is a half a block from my house made the TV news when it was struck by lightning on Wednesday night in a very weird way.  The strike spiraled around the trunk, rather than going straight down.  These kinds of lightning strikes are not unheard of and sometimes spare the tree entirely.

When you have a prophet in the neighborhood, weird things happen.

Is Gentrification Fueling Gang Crime In North Denver?

Denver has seen a dramatic surge in gang killings and violence in North Denver this year, after a lull in the many years of the Great Recession and the slow recovery from it.

Yet, now, Denver's economy it hitting on all cylinders and North Denver.  These neighborhoods were historically black and except for Park Hill, which was a rare black middle class to mixed race middle class neighborhood (from North to South), poor to working class.  When I first moved to Denver from Grand Junction in 1999 and looked at census data from 1990 while I was investigating neighborhoods to move into in the city, about 50% of the African-American population of the State of Colorado lived within five miles of the intersection of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard and Colorado Boulevard.

This shifted in two ways in my first decade of living in Denver.  First, Hispanics, who had historically lived on Denver's West side, gradually migrated east into historically black neighborhoods like Five Points and North Capital Hill (now called "Uptown").  Second, young lower middle class white families and gay couples started snapping up inexpensive houses close to downtown and the hospital complexes in these neighborhoods despite historically racial divides in the city.  Since that decade, full fledged gentrification which has reached critical mass has taken hold.

Why should an area that is becoming more affluent also be seeing more crime?  A short but thoughtful 9News story explores this question.

Recent incidents of gang violence in northeast Denver may have many causes, but a noted anti-gang activist says urban renewal may be one of them. Rev. Leon Kelly says as more wealthy people are revitalizing neighborhoods, it is pushing gangs into smaller territories. "When you've got folks sitting on top of each other, gangs sitting on top of each other, it's causing tension," he said. . . .

The city has already seen more gang-related murders this year than it did all of last year. "We've had 17 murders this year. Twelve of them have been gang-related," Denver Police Chief Robert White said in a press conference Wednesday. "That number is relatively high." . . . White blames incidents at a rap concert in November for some of the violence seen so far this year. He says in most cases, shootings are retaliatory and other gang members are the intended target. . . . 

Rev. Leon Kelly says as more wealthy people are revitalizing neighborhoods, it is pushing gangs into smaller territories. . . . Kelly says gang members are more aggressive these days than they were 30 years ago. He says there is still more of a need for alternative programs to get them off the street. But he also says gentrification is playing a role in this. "When the gangs used to coexist over in the hood, over in the east side, Park Hill they had room to expand," he said.

Rev. Leon Kelly's thirty year ministry to North Denver's gangs is a Denver institution that has frequently played a critical role in quelling outbreaks of gang violence like this one, and in helping gang members turn their lives around. He has been a rare figure who is able to bridge the gap between the city's establishment leadership and gang member's in the city's poor minority communities.

Everyone is worried about what will happen this summer, when gang violence usually peaks.  Some fear we will see a summer rivaling the gang warfare fueled carnage of 1992's "Summer of Violence".

Of course, it is one thing to identify a cause, even if Kelly's analysis is correct, and quite another to devise a solution.

Overall, the Denver metropolitan area desegregated more than almost any other metropolitan area in the country between 1990 and 2010 as blacks and Hispanics moved into new, affordable mixed race suburbs fueled by eased underwriting of mortgage loans to people with less strong credit scores, lower incomes, and smaller down payments in places like the Green Valley Ranch neighborhood in Denver near DIA, in Westminster, and in Aurora.  The migration has also been aided by the cash windfalls that minority homeowners in those neighborhoods received when their homes were sold to would be gentrifiers for far more than the purchased their homes for years ago when the area was considered to be an irredeemable ghetto.

But, this invisible mass migration was largely limited to very stable working class and middle class black and Hispanic families.  Minority families that are truly poor, or are unstable working class families where unemployment is a regular occurrence or other family dramas disrupt family stability, who have always rented rather than owned their homes, have largely remained in Denver's older neighborhoods.  Now, however, they struggle with rising rents, and the windfalls of gentrification have gone to their slumlord landlords, rather than to them.  These people remain in the same neighborhoods that now lack the old pillars of their communities who have moved to the suburbs, and can have uneasy relationships with their new gentrifying neighbors for whom the feeling is mutual.

Why Are We Still Waiting For FasTracks?

According to 9News:

We are now a year away from the commuter rail running from Denver Union Station to Denver International Airport. The tracks are done and ready to go, but it is still going to take some time for passengers to be able to the rail out to DIA. The 56 cars that will be running on the commuter rail all need to be tested for 1,000 hours. RTD also has to determine how the bus routes along the East Rail line will be affected and changed. 

When the commuter rail opens the first train will run at 3 a.m. and the last train will leave at 1 a.m. It will run every 15 minutes during peak times and 30 minutes during other times. The proposed cost is a flat rate of $9 to the airport, and the same $9 fee for if you are traveling round trip to the airport in the same day. 

The promised trip time from DIA to Union Station on the East Line is 35 minutes, comparable with cars in light traffic (excluding time to park and get to the terminal from a parking space), and quite a bit faster in rush hour gridlock, particularly when construction is intense or there are accidents on the route.

Meanwhile, the line along I-225 from the existing 9 mile station to I-70 at Peoria, which will open in 2016 is also well underway.

The line is nearly 60 percent complete. . . . design work on the entire project [is] 99 percent complete and all seven light rail bridges are nearing completion. All eight stations are currently under construction and an overhead wire has been strung to just north of the Iliff Bridge.

It sounds like the DIA line will open before the I-225 line does, despite the fact that the I-225 line won't need to test the cars because it will be a light rail line, rather than a commuter rail line like the one to DIA that uses a different kind of cars than those currently in use in Denver's transit system.

The 9News story intimates that the East Line might open in the spring of 2016, rather than near year end, as the cynic/pessimist in you is inclined to assume.

The line from Union Station to Wheat Ridge (the Gold Line) and commuter rail from Union Station to Westminster (the Northwest Rail Line), which will basically be a one stop spur from the Gold Line at first, will also open in 2016 as well, as will bus rapid transit service to Boulder.

Analysis

A Natural Experiment

The new lines will provide an interesting natural experiment in transportation economics.  The nearest real competition to DIA is about an hour and a half away to the South in Colorado Springs from DIA, and there are no real competitors to DIA in any other direction.

Some people drive to DIA.  There is a premium priced express bus service already offered by RTD to the airport from various stops around the metro area called "Sky Ride.", as well as non-express bus service to some nearby destinations.  Taxis, van services, limos, hotel shuttles, and Uber all serve the airport, and so do friends and family dropping people off, and people taking their own cars to airport parking and shuttle parking.  The total traffic in and out of DIA is unlikely to be seriously impacted by the transit service, so it boils down to market share.

Which means of transportation to the airport will decline when some people choose to take commuter rail to DIA instead?

Will friends and family that previously provided kiss and ride service to the terminal now do the same with a light rail stop?  Will taxi, van and limo service suffer?  Will SkyRide traffic decrease?  Will hotel shuttle traffic fall off?  Or will it free up spaces in shuttle parking?

Surely, all of these modes will take hits.

Sky Ride Impact

"Sky Ride" may be almost completely replaced.  Commuter rail isn't subject to the perennial highway gridlock that slows down buses, the price will be comparable, and rail offers more convenient entry points that the limited number of Sky Ride stations.  All but a handful of light rail stations will offer direct access to Union Station or another DIA commuter rail line.

Shuttle Parking Impact

Impact on shuttle parking may have a lot to do with the availability of cheap, long term parking options at light rail stops.  If one could get long term parking within walking distance of a light rail stop for $2 a day, this would make it an attractive alternative to shuttle parking economically for trips of three days of more, and shuttle parking customers already accept rubbing shoulders with fellow travelers and a certainly amount of delay, and have also proven that they are price conscious.  It is probably faster to drive to a long term parking light near a light rail stop and take it to the airport (often with one transfer between rail lines), than it is to drive from home to a shuttle parking lot, await pickup by a shuttle bus, and then take the shuttle bus to the airport.  But, if long term parking isn't available at light rail stops, this won't happen.

I suspect that premium parking trips right next to the airport will take a smaller hit, and that the impact will be intermediate for terminal economy parking.

Kiss and Ride Dropoff Impact

It is an hour and a half to two hour round trip for a friend or family member in the area served by light rail to drive someone to the airport, drop them off, and return home, while it would often be a ten or fifteen minute trip to take the same person to a local light rail stop.  Will this shift trips?  It depends.

Kiss and ride directly to the airport is probably a little bit faster than taking the train, and many people see the drive to the airport, at least, as quality time to catch up with a friend or family member, rather than a pure chore.  It will be interesting to see how many people spring for an extra $9 round trip DIA ticket to accompany a traveler all of the way to the airport, even though they aren't going themselves.  I suspect that few will, except in the case of unaccompanied minors, even though it makes quite a bit of sense.

Different Kinds of Visitors and Hotel Shuttle Impact

Travelers from the eastern seaboard, Chicago, San Francisco, Europe and Japan headed for a downtown hotel may find it perfectly natural to take a train from the airport to the city, and college students are always eager to be a bit adventurous and to pinch pennies.  On the other hand, visitors from major American cities who aren't used to using transit may be more reluctant to use it in Denver.

But, hotel shuttles, because they are free and provide a fairly direct trip to a destination in a strange city may still be competitive with rail, at least on days when traffic isn't too bad.  It will be interesting to see if hotels start to offer East Line voucher options to replace hotel shuttles until guests reach Union Station.

Taxi, Limo, Van Service and Uber Impact

Taxi, limo and van service and Uber all offer point to point travel that rail cannot, and both taxi and limo service serve the least price conscious customers.  I suspect that these services will see little decline from destinations outside downtown, but may take a hit on the DIA to downtown route is the service makes a good impression in terms of cleanliness and safety, and good shuttle service from Union Station directly to downtown hotels is implemented.

Ski Travel Impact

In its present form, the 2016 expansion of FasTracks is unlikely to have any material impact on what people flying into the DIA for ski trips in the mountains do.  There is no avoiding going from plane to a shuttle bus to ski resorts eventually (assuming that affluent ski travels continue not to choose slow and dirty Greyhound service from downtown Denver, or Amtrak to Glenwood Springs (and then bus on to Aspen and Beaver Creek or perhaps Vail) from Union Station which is slow, unreliable and infrequent.

The norm of taking a shuttle bus directly from the airport to resort on I-70 will probably continue to be the norm for these travelers for the foreseeable future.  And, realistically, even if the state legislature or initiative petitioners got a high speed rail to the mountains proposition in the ballot in 2016 and were swiftly approved for federal funding while Congress was controlled at least in part by Republicans, it would probably take until 2030 or so to complete.  More realistically, it would take until 2018 for the political forces to align for that kind of proposal, and probably longer, if that ever happens.

Economically, high speed rail makes much more sense from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs (where it is cheaper to build and there is greater population density to support the traffic) than it does from Denver to the mountain ski resorts.

Real Estate - At New Light Rail Stops

Meanwhile, real estate near stops, particularly "luxury apartments" are springing up near almost every stop in the system as the system expansion makes these apartments effectively closer to everywhere in the system, particularly to downtown and the airport.

Real Estate - Downtown, The Tech Center and Cherry Creek

Metropolitan Denver has basically three "downtown" areas where people go to work in professional offices.  One is the true downtown, one is the Cherry Creek mall area which is rapidly becoming a financial center that is home to investment firms and small business loan oriented banks as well as high end retail, and one is the Denver Tech Center.

The 2016 expansions in RTD should be to make downtown offices and entertainment options much more attractive to almost everyone in the metro area, while reducing the number of commuters and entertainment customers who drive to downtown and park their cars there, possibly leading to a shift in land use from parking which will have a somewhat diminished demand, to office and entertainment uses which will have greater value.  As a result, every kind of downtown real estate use, from parking to office space to commercial space to residential space will probably increase, probably with spillover property value surges for neighboring areas that have recently gentrified into thriving, high rent apartments for yuppies.

The Cherry Creek mall area is very pedestrian friendly once you get there, but isn't close to light rail or to reliable, frequent bus service that makes it unnecessary to consult bus schedules.  It won't be impacted much at all by the 2016 FasTracks expansion.  The expansion of office space in the Cherry Creek area, due mostly to zoning changes, however, has brought new housing to the Cherry Creek area as well, and the increased population density of urban oriented people may increase demand for transit options to link Cherry Creek by high frequency bus service to light rail stations and downtown.  Previous attempts to do this have repeatedly flopped due to insufficient demand, but the growth in this secondary downtown area may have finally reached a tipping point.

In principle, the 2016 FasTracks expansion could also greatly impact the Denver Tech Center, which has a rail stop at every major arterial street connected directly to the metro area wide rail and bus rapid transit grid (although it is quite inconvenient to reach by bus).

But, DTC is on a spoke, rather than a hub, which means that many commuters will still need to transfer at Union Station to get their by rail, and DTC is, by design in order to keep out the riff raff and to prevent workers from being distracted, very unfriendly for pedestrians and anyone else who is bus service dependent travelers once you get there.  If you've taken the bus to work, which is feasible in DTC, if awkward, so long as you keep a standard 9 to 5 schedule for your work day, your prospects for leaving the office for lunch or an errand during the day is almost nil,  Also, DTC doesn't have a shortage of free parking for shoppers and office workers who go there now, so there is no less economic pressure to switch to rail to avoid parking expenses and inconvenience.