Residents decry home scrape-offs
A scrape-off showdown is taking shape in Denver, where home demolitions have jumped 63 percent in three years as developers remake the face of some of the city’s most prized neighborhoods.
In response, the Denver City Council is wrestling with a policy to save true landmarks, without giving residents too much control over what their neighbors can do with their property.
But residents in Washington Park, Hilltop, Park Hill and other neighborhoods complain that the city isn’t doing enough to stop rampant tear-downs for “monster homes.” They are going to court and filing landmark applications to defend their neighborhood charm - and property values.
“On our preservation hotline we get calls all the time about houses going down and ‘What can I do about it?’ ” said Nicole Hernandez, Historic Denver Inc.’s preservation coordinator. “But legally, unless the house is in an historic district or you can get a landmark designation, there’s just no protection.”
All the proposed demolition review will do is buy time to save those few older buildings that meet Denver’s strict historic and architectural criteria, Hernandez added. “It’s not going to save those little homes in Wash Park.”
Developers, however, fear that the proposed demolition ordinance could be used to block destruction of homes with dubious historic value, stifling Denver’s urban residential revival.
In Park Hill, longtime residents fear their enclave of stately homes and expansive lawns is giving way to “McMansions” shoehorned into subdivided lots.
Early this month, about 100 residents picketed outside a 1918 Craftsman-style home at 5335 Montview Blvd. in an unsuccessful crusade to save it from the wrecking claw. It was leveled to split the big lot for two custom million-dollar homes.
“My concern is that what we see as one of Denver’s last intact historic neighborhoods will just disintegrate,” said Elaine Gallagher Adams, a Park Hill architect specializing in historic preservation.
She said the destruction of what many would have considered their dream home has galvanized residents to find a mechanism to protect Park Hill’s unique character.
“Anger and tears kind of went their way . . . and now people are itching to do something proactive,” Gallagher Adams said.
Park Hill home-builder Steve Barrett, who demolished the house he owned, warned residents and the city: “Be careful what you wish for.”
The demolished Craftsman, Barrett said, was “an old house with all the warts,” rife with asbestos, lacking insulation, plagued with aging plumbing and cracking walls from a settling foundation.
He said many Park Hill and Hilltop residents are lining up to buy his luxury houses with up-to-date conveniences.
“My buyers are tired of living in these old homes with the drafty windows and always having to put money into keeping them updated,” he said.
Barrett noted that one of his typical demo-to-deluxe-home projects raised the property’s value fivefold to $1.2 million. “Does the city really want to see that tax revenue go away?” he asked.
Washington Park horror
Battle lines are being drawn in some of the city’s most prestigious neighborhoods.
In Washington Park, Robyn McDonald praised the careful demolition last year of two circa-1910 bungalows next to her South Lafayette Street home.
McDonald said it’s the new “monstrous home” rising in their place - tight on her property line - that’s giving her headaches.
After the contractor dug a 14- foot-deep hole for the new house’s basement, the earth in her side yard collapsed, toppling her fence, McDonald said. Her sprinkler lines and outdoor lights wiring also were cut.
Her 1910 house is settling. Cracks are showing in the walls, floors and upstairs shower tiles, triggering leaks that stained her kitchen ceiling.
After the builders dug up the alley with a giant excavator to access the sewer main, public works officials told her and four neighbors that they now have cracked sewer outfall lines that may cost thousands to repair.
“It’s become a nightmare, a house of horrors,” said McDonald, a single mom who said she’s spent more than $13,000 on engineers and surveyors.
Her new neighbors, Max and Ramey Caulkins, were apologetic when the problems began, McDonald said, adding that the couple and their contractor vowed to fix the damage.
But McDonald said when repairs weren’t done and her complaints mounted, relations grew less neighborly.
In January, McDonald sued the Caulkins, their contractor and engineer, accusing the builders of installing a faulty “shoring system” to prevent her property from sliding. Federal safety inspectors fined the contractor $2,625 for four violations related to the excavation.
McDonald’s lawsuit contends her neighbors’ “overly large house” violates zoning setback rules and in some places comes within inches of her property line for the purpose of maximizing the Caulkins’ southern exposure. The lawsuit also alleges that the two-story home violates city height restrictions.
The Caulkins’ are “good people and they’re good neighbors,” their attorney, Karen Wheeler, said. “My clients obviously disagree with most of what is being claimed by Ms. McDonald.
“Mr. and Mrs. Caulkins have made every effort to be good neighbors and satisfy Ms. McDonald’s concerns before she filed this lawsuit.”
Deal down the drain
In the West Highland neighborhood, John Locke and Keith Swanson were stunned when the $719,000 deal for their 1886 Victorian was torpedoed last month after a preservation activist got wind that it might be demolished for condominiums. The activist got the neighborhood association to seek local landmark status for the house.
The 22-page application states that the house at 3825 W. 32nd Ave. meets the required two of three criteria - architectural and historic significance - for city landmark designation.
It’s called a model of the Queen Anne-style and the former home of Denver’s 30th mayor, William F.R. Mills, and the late film and TV actress, Spring Byington, star of the 1950s television series December Bride.
Locke, who said he didn’t know at the time that the buyer planned to tear down the house, is fuming that the West Highland Neighborhood Association approved the landmark application in April without notifying him.
The landmark filing caused the buyer to back out. The owners were forced to knock at least $45,000 off the asking price. Because a historic designation could permanently halt destruction and restrict alterations of the home, another prospective buyer said he wouldn’t consider closing until the city rules on the landmark designation in late summer.
“Look at the can of worms that gets opened,” said Locke, 56.
While he supports preservation of buildings that “truly have historic value,” Locke said current law “allows anybody with 250 bucks to file a landmark application. Whether it goes through or not, it basically puts you on hold with what you can and can’t do with your property for months.”
Open to abuse
Brent Zboyovski, president of the West Highland Neighborhood Association, regrets how it happened.
“That this can be done without the consent of the owner is pretty troubling to me as a property-rights person,” said Zboyovski, who abstained on the vote.
“I could see this being abused so easily,” added Zboyovski, who thinks the city needs higher restrictions on someone seeking landmark status over the property owner’s objection.
Denver’s demolition debate has been simmering for years. But it boiled over during the Christmas holiday week when a developer knocked down a 1938 building at Washington Street and Speer Boulevard after neighbors urged saving it as a landmark.
The building was once the home and office of Lowell Batchelder, a respected Denver architect who did the interior design for the Brown Palace Hotel’s Palace Arms and Ship Tavern restaurants, the Brown Palace West and Denver Country Club. Historic Denver Inc. said the demolished building epitomized the Streamline Modern/International architectural style, rare in this country but prevalent in Europe during the 1930s.
“People in the neighborhood were in shock,” said Lisa Purdy, a historic preservation consultant and resident who said the developer agreed to continue talks in January.
Denver needs demolition review, she said, to stop “irresponsible developers who get a whiff that something is historic . . . and tear it down to get rid of the problem. So, the community loses a really valuable asset.”
Purdy’s view is disputed by John Pfannenstein, president of Rockmont Capital, the Denver investment company redeveloping the site for a mid-rise building to house its headquarters, condominiums and possibly a bank.
“What we had there was an old, outdated building that was full of asbestos that had no historical or architectural significance according to more than a dozen prominent Denver architects and developers” consulted by the firm, Pfannenstein said.
He said the firm has followed through on getting residents’ feedback on creating an “architecturally significant” building that complements the neighborhood.
City steps in
The Batchelder building dispute spurred Denver to grapple with adopting a demolition review process used by most major U.S. cities.
Currently, only buildings within Denver’s more than 40 historic districts are protected from demolition.
Outside those districts, federally registered historic buildings can be knocked down unless someone files a city landmark application.
Now, the City Council is considering demolition permit review for all buildings, regardless of age, to allow the landmark staff to sift for those few buildings that might meet strict landmark criteria. The city would only issue the demolition permit 10 working days after the applicant met requirements, including confirmation that they notified adjacent property owners.
If the review concludes that the building could be eligible for landmark designation, officials would notify council members and neighborhood groups representing the area, along with preservation advocacy groups. The filing of a landmark application would halt demolition at least four months.
City Planning Director Peter Park has estimated that fewer than 1 percent of the roughly 800 buildings targeted for demolition annually would warrant landmark consideration.
But Park has worried aloud that neighbors may abuse landmark applications just to thwart scrape-offs of unremarkable houses.
“We have a strong concern about maintaining the integrity of preservation (safeguards),” Park said at a recent meeting of the council’s Blueprint Denver Committee. “If it is misused to just stop change and stop demolition that folks may not want to see happen . . . it really does erode the integrity of preservation.”
The development community is proposing a more “proactive” approach - updating the city’s historic building inventory, said Jerilynn J. Martinez, chief spokesperson for the Home Builders Association of Metro Denver. That way, neighbors, prospective buyers and developers will know early on that a building is a potential landmark.
Neighborhood groups are exploring other “tools” to tame the scrape-off frenzy.
The Belcaro Park Homeowners Association won a key April victory when a judge upheld the group’s authority to use its covenants to block a developer from knocking down a smaller home to build one three times bigger and twice as tall.
Since then a half-dozen Denver neighborhood groups have called asking for advice.
“It’s people concerned about new development in established neighborhoods that threatens to alter the existing character of the neighborhood,” said David Neslin, former president of the Belcaro Park Homeowners Association. “Those concerns seem to get short shrift from the city’s planning department, and so people are wondering what, if anything, neighborhoods can do to address this themselves.” www.rockymountainnews.com
