Is This Your Beautiful House?

The Denver Dilemma: Be Careful What You Wish For

It all started with the traffic: It was going the wrong way, straight out of Colorado. The economic downturn of the late 1980s and early 1990s hit the Denver area sooner and harder than it hit many other cities. In the mid-1980s, 25% of all jobs in the area were in the oil industry or in other natural resources-based businesses. Within a year or two, those industries were hit hard. Vacancy rates in downtown office buildings were approaching 30%. In 1987, there was a net migration out of Colorado for the first time in a generation, and the trend continued for four more years.

The oil-and-gas business was on the way out, although other parts of the business community still believed in the region's strength. "Nobody really wanted to leave," remembers Glen Sibley, a longtime player in the local real-estate scene. The locals banded together to form the Greater Denver Corporation (GDC) and set to work.

The GDC's primary goal was to create 100,000 new jobs in the metro area by 1992 -- an 11% increase. The group's strategy: Figure out what the city was missing that outside companies would find attractive, and then provide it to lure businesses to Denver. The city's environmental treasures and access to recreational activities were advantages, but they weren't enough. So the GDC fought hard for a new international airport. It also campaigned for a series of targeted tax hikes: one to support a new ballpark to bring professional baseball to Denver, another to provide ongoing funding for the city's cultural institutions.

As the economy improved in the early 1990s, these moves paid off. Prominent names such as Sun Microsystems and Level 3 Communications either established major presences in the area or, in some cases, started up businesses there. More people have moved into Colorado than have moved out every year since 1992, with the net gain peaking at almost 80,000 people in 1994. The Colorado Division of Local Government expects the Denver metro area to grow by roughly 33% in the next 20 years, from about 2.37 million to 3.15 million. The projections for the state's population growth are even higher. Silicon Valley may still be a magnet for dreamers, but Colorado is the true "New West." And no place in the region represents its frontier quality better than the state's biggest subdivision, where bold investors made the biggest bet of all on the area's future.

Highlands Ranch: Just Like the Suburbs, Only Bigger

There are no traffic jams in Highlands Ranch. The six-lane avenues that move cars in and out of the development were designed to accommodate all of the people who would ever live there, so the streets still aren't filled to capacity today. Why not build such luxuriously large boulevards when there's so much land to begin with?

At one point, Highlands Ranch really was a working cattle ranch. For much of the middle of the past century, the land was owned by the family of former U.S. senator Lawrence Phipps. Oil tycoon turned movie baron Marvin Davis led a partnership that bought the land in 1978 and that then flipped it to the Mission Viejo Co., developer of much of the California city of the same name.

Mission Viejo, then a subsidiary of Philip Morris, pressed on, and in 1981, the first family moved into the community. Interest rates at the time were so high that builders had to subsidize mortgages for most of the buyers. Nevertheless, a persistent trickle of families moved in, and the numbers increased every year. Growth slowed toward the end of the 1980s -- but never stopped.

From the beginning, the development focused on one target customer. "We were trying to appeal to younger families," says Joe Blake, 65, who landed the position of president at the Denver Chamber of Commerce, thanks in part to his 20-year track record of helping to build Highlands Ranch. "We wanted to attract people who wanted lots of open space connected by trails and who wanted large parks with great recreational opportunities. And we were also committed to building a great school system. We helped finance and build the first elementary school there."

In fact, for all of the debate about growth and sprawl, no one disputes the quality of the amenities that have been built into Highlands Ranch or how attractive those perks are for young families. Three large recreation centers serve Highlands Ranch, and each one includes a full complement of top-of-the-line exercise equipment. Among the three centers, there are several swimming pools, both indoor and outdoor, and there is a zero-depth pool that small children can enter as if it were the waterline on a beach.