NOREEN; Sprawl and a city divided
Bluff Creek Court constitutes the new frontier in Colorado Springs.
In a brand new ZIP code, 80924, and about 300 yards from the Black Forest treeline, the city’s latest street has four houses and a fifth under construction. They are more than 15 miles from downtown Colorado Springs, which is not visible from the neighborhood because of intervening hills.
“It’s not even on Mapquest or Google,” said Sabrina Williams, a Pine Creek High School student who lives on the street. “We have to give people directions.”
Williams’ home is part of the Cordera development, which has about 350 homes, with plans to have about 1,400 at full build-out. With great vistas to the west and south, it is a beautiful area.
Reggie Graham, who sells houses for Saddletree Homes, says the Cordera models cost from between $450,000 to $600,000.
“This is the only community in the city where every street is a cul de sac,” Graham said. “It’s great for families, just by the way it’s laid out.”
One man’s cul de sac is another man’s dead end, but it’s not just traffic flow.
This might sound horrific to longtime residents: The city’s old west side consists of anything west of I-25. The new west side is anything west of Academy Boulevard.
Westsiders and downtowners have no reason to go to Cordera.
Corderans don’t have much reason to go downtown, and that's a problem. It doesn’t bode well when there are more neighborhoods that feel unconnected and whose residents don’t feel they have the same stake in the city’s affairs.
For instance, the homeless debate that has raged in downtown is not even incidental in Cordera, where the homeless population is zero. The city is having a harder time just agreeing on what the important issues are, much less how the issues should be decided.
You can’t blame the west side for its intense interest in the homeless camps. You can’t blame Cordera for not being particularly concerned.
“That’s the challenge,” said Mark Tremmel of the Springs-based Tremmel Design Group. “How do we envision our community?”
With 185 square miles, Colorado Springs is bigger than Denver, Orlando and Atlanta. It will take a while for the in-filling to occur here, but it’s going to happen. Sprawl allows more people to live cheaply, but it has its own baggage — especially that part about building consensus.
Tremmel said Colorado Springs is hardly unique: “It’s a little worse out West,” he said. “We grow so fast. It has so much to do with growth.”
Lamenting annexations that were done a long time ago is useless. We’re better off trying to figure out how to get the community on the same page, because we all can’t live on the same cul de sac.
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