Denver has a new way for paying for sidewalks
Taking a walk through downtown Denver with Jill Locantore, you can’t help but notice the poor condition of the city’s sidewalks.
“We are on Colfax Avenue, which is one of Denver’s main streets,” said Locantore, who runs Denver Streets Partnership, a pedestrian and transit advocacy group. “It’s got an amazing collection of locally owned businesses, schools, churches, government institutions. And it’s also designed like a highway.”
Like a lot of commercial and residential streets in Denver, Colfax isn’t the most pedestrian-friendly. The sidewalks are often broken or cracked. But at least they exist, which isn’t something you can say about all of Denver.
In most areas, it’s a given that cities take responsibility for things like potholes and road construction. But with sidewalks, it’s not so simple. In many U.S. cities, property owners are responsible for upkeep. That often leads to sidewalks in terrible condition — if they exist at all.
“That’s very common in a lot of U.S. cities,” Locantore said. “We fell so hard in love with cars and thought we’d never need to walk or use any other form of transportation again.”
But in Denver, voters did something unusual in 2022: They chose to levy a fee on property owners to fund sidewalks, voting in favor of a ballot measure led by Locantore and other pedestrian advocates. Now, the city is responsible for a massive new piece of infrastructure.
Proponents of the new program see it as an equity issue. Gregory Rowangould, an associate professor of civil environmental engineering at the University of Vermont, has researched the topic.
“Sidewalks were generally in more disrepair in lower-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods that had more people of color,” he said.
In Denver, it used to be that property owners were responsible for sidewalk upkeep in front of their homes or businesses. Now, that’s the city’s job.
Rowangould said there are other U.S. cities that do that, but usually, there’s not enough funding. That’s the case in Burlington, Vermont, where he lives.
“I think we recently increased the amount of money available for sidewalk repair, but they can repair something like three miles a year,” he said. “We’ll never, never be able to fix all the sidewalks.”
In Denver, most property owners will pay $150 annually starting in January. That should bring in about $40 million per year. With that kind of money, the goal is that the city can build and fix all sidewalks in a decade. Before the ballot initiative, the city estimated it would take 400 years to do the job.
Denver homeowner Larry Leszczynski said he thinks the new fee will ultimately be worth it.
“Financially, I think it’s still a big win for the homeowners,” he said.
Years ago, he shelled out $500 to repair one small piece of sidewalk outside his house. A few weeks later, a trash truck cracked it again. He said he thinks the new program will be an improvement, as long as the city can actually deliver.
“I guess with the state of the way the sidewalks were maintained previously, it’s kind of a low bar,” Leszczynski said.
But it’s ambitious. No one really knows how much this will actually cost or where to get all that concrete. Some people are worried about shouldering the new costs, even with discounts for low-income property owners.
If it works, advocates like Locantore think Denver could be a model for other cities.
Walking through downtown, she pointed out where Denver’s sidewalks have room for improvement.
“It’s got lots of dips and tripping hazards. If you were in a wheelchair, you would have a very hard time traversing this, so you would probably be in the street with cars,” Locantore said about a sidewalk we were on.
But if all goes according to plan, these and other sidewalks in the city will be much more traversable in a number of years.
Stories You Might Like
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
