The Walled Garden City

Luxury developers embrace armed mercenaries and the suburban enclave as a model for Denver

LIV EXCLUSIVELY (Skyclub at The Spire); Live where you can impress your friends [...] a lifestyle that is everything grand (The Grand); LIVE LARGE AND LIVE LUX. HAVE YOU EVER DREAMED OF HAVING YOUR OWN PERSONAL BUTLER? (The Veranda at Highpointe); Welcome to the life above (Parq on Speer); Step into a life of grandeur. Live a step above. TOWERING DISTINCTION [...] LIVE ABOVE THE LINE (Country Club Towers); a life without inconvenience (Sugarcube); YOUR LIFE’S CAPITAL [...] A modern sanctuary (Modera Cap Hill)

Perhaps it began in 2007 with the Downtown Area Plan, or during the shale oil boom when Denver joined the likes of Riyadh, Austin, and Bismarck as one of the world's leading petro-capitals. The exact moment is unimportant. Sometime during the last twenty years of construction, a new way of living assembled itself in Denver. You could call it a lifestyle.

Many of the largest developers from Miami, Texas, South Carolina, Virginia, and DC have spent the better part of the 2000’s circling Denver for vacant lots and tax incentives from the Mayor's office. What they hope to import into Colorado is what architect Keller Easterling calls a “spatial product:” building-sized investments, nominally designed to house people, but implicitly designed to park real estate capital. In Denver and most of the United States, spatial products manifest as pricey condos, resorts, and apartments that speak a ‘placeless Esperanto’ of luxury; part home, part financial instrument; always looking a bit out of place and yet, like the architecture of the strip mall, unmistakably familiar. 

Their midwives are local governments desperate for a vibrant city. The result? Since 2014, “three of every five apartments built in [...] Denver came with rents that put them in the top one-third of the rental market.” This is the future on offer from Mayor Michael Hancock and the Downtown Denver Partnership (DDP), an association of major corporate donors with outsize influence on city planning. Like a hangover from the 20th century, a conjoined twin of Robert Moses and Ayn Rand has found its voice through the DDP. To them, the soul of the city is “the creators of industry, makers of place. Visionaries - for what’s next.” The exalted “Visionary City Builder,” to whom is owed a great deal, has displaced existing communities in pursuit of a glittering Sahara of corporate headquartering and, for the topic of this essay, apartments for a new kind of affluent resident. 

According to a 2018 demographic study of in-migration patterns, on average, that resident is a 27-year-old from out of state, making roughly 70 thousand dollars and significantly more educated than the average Coloradan -- a yuppie. Developers, under the aegis of a consenting city government and the DDP, have capitalized on this high-strung, high-income transplant, both hungry for luxury amenities and apprehensive of urban poverty. In return, Denver’s residential architecture has begun to reflect the preferences and fears of moneyed young professionals. 

Vertical Suburbs

Beached cruise ships turned luxury apartment complexes with aspirational names like “EVIVA,” “VERANDA” and “The Grand,” have come to dominate much of Denver’s skyline. Each offers a version of the same experience: fantasies of total wish fulfillment, a life unburdened, maximizing one’s “professional performance,” a fortified membrane to indulge the suburban agoraphobe. Advertising copy for The VERANDA -- Denver’s only luxury apartment complex with a lazy river -- came unexpectedly close to encapsulating the entire phenomena. It puts “the ‘urban’ in the ‘suburban’ ” according to the online brochure. Almost. VERANDA and other structures like it put the suburb in the city. A study by researchers Marcus Moose and Pablo Mendez found that despite the perception of condos and apartments as cosmopolitan urban dwellings, they replicate class (not to mention racial) segregation and modes of private transportation in the same way their dispersed counterparts do. This doesn’t bode well for the future of Denver’s traffic -- have a look at the “parking podiums” sprouting like concrete cysts. But the more immediate concern is that expensive high rises and their ilk aren’t just vertical suburbs, they’re a vertical subspecies of the gated community. 

Developers seem to have discerned through market research or some other corporate divination, that the perfect amenity-cocktail to capture a young professional is an enclave club-house workplace resort with lots of parking.  

Small electronic machines dispense a synthetic Springtime fragrance. A calculated ambiance of care-free euphoria is piped in through speakers. Lobbies, like travertine sarcophagi, so ruthlessly cleansed of contaminants that dust itself becomes the final intruder, an unwelcome reminder of death. At Denver’s most expensive apartment tower, The Confluence, leasing agents neatly stack copies of Reign on the lobby table, a magazine venerating Colorado’s new aristocracy. 

A promotional video for The Grand

The emphasis on securitization and exclusivity is striking. Massive “amenity decks” with lavish fob-access pools are patrolled by building staff on the lookout for someone who might sneak in to enjoy the water and shatter the carefully managed exclusion with a cannonball. And best believe the views are commanding. Residents aren’t encouraged to make themselves available to the existing neighborhood, but rather to drink in the surroundings from the safety of a 10th floor balcony. If this is all starting to sound like a J.G. Ballard novel, The SPIRE’s business model comes straight out of High Rise. Only units on the top ten floors of the building are granted access to the SkyClub, a “penthouse lounge [...] complete with billiards and gaming tables, personal wine lockers, an entertaining kitchen, lounge seating, multimedia [...] and an outdoor terrace.” The SPIRE advertises class segregation as a feature, and so does the broader logic of development that makes The SPIRE possible. Behind the glitter is an old American way of life, not a new one. 

Murdered Out

Entrance to the Denizen apartment’s amenity space

Like the gated suburb, the walls of the fortress-apartment express a besieged imagination, drawn from the wellspring of racialized paranoia and fear of the poor. And if architecture is a diagram of the unconscious, where does the unconscious rupture into view? “Strategic armoring of the city against the poor is especially obvious at the street level,” a young Mark Davis observed in his critical history of Los Angeles. Walk down 17th past the train yard till you reach Union Denver -- you know, the new apartment complex with an integrated Whole Foods on the ground floor -- then turn and look at the benches to your left. Notice the steel loops which split the benches into small segments? That’s called hostile design and it’s meant to make sure those without beds can’t sleep there. The hostile design of the immediate public space foregrounds a host of active security measures within and around each structure that serve a similar function. 

You’re forgiven if you don’t share my alarm. My first reaction to the creeping norm of apartment securitization was no different than my reaction to finding out that luxury GreyStar properties perform DNA tests on errant dog poop in order to hold residents accountable: a harmless, highly bureaucratic way of life, camouflaged by lobby music and amenities. Then the tendency towards control began to look like any other feature in a property’s competitive service offering, something to be upgraded like a pool or a coffee machine. While few apartments internalize exclusivity and security to quite the same level as The SPIRE, that is, exclude their tenants from the best amenities based on which floor they live on, most are intent to wall off the outsider. At a bare minimum, the buildings in question mobilize concierge and electronic key systems to enforce a logic of “controlled access.” Amenity decks hover out of reach of the passerby. Palatial luxury apartments like Sugarcube take securitization a step further, boasting a “security team” that “maintain[s] a daily patrol of hallways and common areas.” 

In 2018, some developers* around the city began to employ the services of a private paramilitary group called Front Range Patrol (FRP) to menace the local homeless population. The amenity-security nexus didn’t seem as funny anymore, outfitted with blacked-out Hummers -- “murdered out” in the language of car modding culture. Affixed to the side of each FRP patrol car is a thin blue line/Punisher skull, a reference to Marvel's Frank Castle, the vigilante who rejects due process in favor of extrajudicial murder. On their website, FRP describes the value they bring to a client. “Front Range Patrol works for you to help eliminate the unwelcome problems on your property once and for all [...] by eliminating these problems and cleaning up the community, property values increase which in turn, bring positive clients and residents back to the community.” A friend remarked on FRP’s likeness to another group of mercenaries who drove murdered out trucks: Blackwater. They remind me of the German Freikorps. So, with a growing list of luxury apartments on the offensive, “fortress” maybe isn’t as accurate as “forward operating base.”

Developers would argue that FRP and services like it reduce risk to property and residents. That’s an honest answer and perhaps the best explanation for what’s going on here. 

What looks safe to the investor/developer is what looks safe to the suburbanite: a ‘mall without walls,’ where high-status consumption is encouraged and other forms of behavior, or existence, are deemed undesirable, then criminalized. As Stephen Graham wrote in Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, “some open city cores are now being reorganized as patchworks of private business improvement districts, beholden to the agenda of local businesses and often equipped with their own security organizations. Geared towards improving the quality of life of more affluent consumers, these security enterprises are charged with the exclusion of people who do not belong.” The soul-brand of Denver may be a Life is Good t-shirt, our collective ethos somewhere between a wellness jihad and a sincere desire to live and let live, but the specter of paramilitary violence directed at the state’s most vulnerable residents obliterates the myth that there is anything inherently compassionate about yoga on high rise roof decks. Giving up the pretension of innocence is a prerequisite for imagining an alternative urbanism. 

A People’s Design?

Keep your eyes to the street and you’ll find the seeds of other Denvers. There’s Arroyo Village which opened this month on West Colfax, a private affordable housing development partly financed with city loans. The complex is co-located with a shelter for women and trans people, offers permanent supportive housing units at 30% of the area median income (AMI), and an additional 95 units far below market rate. The yellow brise-soleil and staggered purple/blue paneling don’t look shabby either. While neither affordable nor public, The Economist apartments by City Park are a brave example for other developers looking to build something handsome and upscale but unsullied by backward design practices. Units range from 300 to 600 square feet and there’s no onsite parking to speak of, potentially a first for Denver. Looking outside the state, Chicago’s housing authority has introduced a new model of public housing that co-locates branch libraries within the project. Instead of a wallet-skewering coffee shop, securitization, or a gloating amenity deck, the (public) amenities for these affordable apartments include free WiFi, computers, and other services like “entrepreneurship classes and English-as-a-second-language instruction,” per a New York Times report on the subject. This is design at its best, intent to listen and respond to local subtleties, and informed by the inclusive spirit latent in architecture: that of the house and the shelter, the place of gathering, the “right to the city.”

It bears repeating: developers and city governments that take seriously their responsibility to the communities they affect are exceptions to the rule. For now, at least, Denver’s growth will continue to reflect the arid imagination of the luxury spatial product, generating apartment enclaves which betray a deep ambivalence to public life and civic responsibility, while criminalizing the collateral damage. “Your life’s capitol” is the slogan for Cap Hill’s new Modera high rise. It could also be the motto for a world unto itself, celebrating the fragmentation of society into themed clubhouses, just as gated suburbs did for a previous generation. And at the terminus of luxury urbanism and class segregation stands FRP and their dark vision for Colorado.

Your tenants or business clients deserve to live and work in a peaceful environment without beingin [sic] fear caused by the deterioration of the society that we all live in today.  

* This essay borrows an alternate definition of the word (Securitization) from urban theorist Stephen Graham. Securitization in this context refers to the application of physical security measures to buildings and infrastructure  

* Properties known to contract FRP at the time of publishing: One Observatory Park, Denizen, RINO Arts District, Venue on 16th, IMT at Civic Park, Mason at Alameda Station, The Douglas