Compared to planned neighborhoods like the North End and post-war planned suburbs from Bonnyville to Briargate, Old Colorado City and the historic Westside neighborhoods that surround it are a hot mess.
The houses, the streets, the architecture and the landscaping have never been constrained by high-falutin’ planners. Streets abruptly curve, dead end and loop around long-vanished buildings and swampland.
The Westside is historic because it’s been around for a long time — not because it was designed to be anything history-making. Westsiders wanted jobs and a place to live, merchants needed customers, bars needed drinkers and trolley cars needed riders.
Today, three-story houses on spacious lots abut shotgun cottages on narrow little strips of land. Zoning didn’t exist until a few decades ago, when much of the residential Westside was deemed to be R2, two-family residential. Before that, you could build whatever you damned wanted on your own damned property, as one longtime Westsider told me in 1999.
R2 meant that you could convert a single-family house into a duplex without rezoning, but if you wanted more units, you’d have to get the city’s OK. Not that it mattered for years, since the Westside was long considered an undesirable neighborhood, full of lowlifes, blue collar workers and eccentrics.
If you wanted to be closer to the mountains, you should live up on the Mesa, in Pleasant Valley, or leave town and head for Manitou Springs. Building houses in OCC? Dream on!
When we moved into a house a few blocks from OCC 25 years ago, we immediately loved it. Our neighbors were multigenerational Westsiders, who prized the history and feel of their historic streets. Within a few months, we bonded — and here we are after a quarter of a century.
We immediately loved it
As the years passed, the rest of the city noticed that the Westside had slowly become cool, chic and, best of all, reasonably affordable. We needed more housing, but how?
As entrepreneurs and homeowners figured out in the mid-2010s, you could build a separate house – an accessory dwelling unit, or ADU — on a tiny lot carved out of your side yard, or build a sweet little backyard rental. If the separate lot was already platted, or eligible to be, you could sell it to a builder and pocket the dough.
Take the 2000 block of West Bijou Street. Two substantial new homes grace the south side of the street, and another one graces the north. They’re all on small lots, with little separation from their neighbors.
Similar structures are dotted throughout the Westside, creating an unplanned, unanticipated and inconspicuous housing revival.
Pleasant Valley resident Amanda Miller Luciano was one of these small-scale entrepreneurs, buying a Westside house with an adjacent lot. She designed a house to fit on the lot, and sold the lot and the plan to an adventurous builder. It’s on the market now — a gorgeous, thoroughly modern and light-filled structure.
Whatever the use of the new houses — owner-occupied, rental, short-term rental — they contribute to our neighborhood. The lack of planning, the loose zoning and, above all, the welcoming vibe separates us from suburban economic segregation.
We’re a mixed bag: old and cranky, young and hopeful, entrepreneurial or stuck in the mud, but we’re here. Come and join us!
We’re not pretentious — and if we had a neighborhood song, I’d vote for Lowell George’s great anthem, “Willin’.”
I’ve been warped by the rain, driven by the snow
I’m drunk and dirty, don’t you know
And I’m still willin’ …