Photographs line the walls, plants sit on windowsills and a Buddhist altar is arranged atop a dresser.
Nearly every surface of the living room is covered by an item or memento collected by Thin Soe, Ye Ye Thin and their five children over the years in their three-bedroom apartment in Denver’s East Colfax neighborhood. Since the Burmese couple first moved in 16 years ago, after arriving from a refugee camp in Thailand, the rental has become their long-term home — as they’ve struggled to keep up with the rising costs in an area where they don’t always feel safe.
The rent has more than doubled during that time, rising by $300 per month just in the last year to nearly $1,600. Now retired, Soe and Thin have received financial help from their adult children as they’ve stayed in the older complex, which has other immigrant and refugee tenants.
“I couldn’t buy a house” in more than a decade of working in factories, said Soe, 66, through a translator earlier this month. “That’s the hardest thing for me.”
About 63% of residents in Denver’s East Colfax neighborhood are renters. The larger East Colfax Avenue corridor, which stretches into Aurora, is among metro Denver’s most ethnically diverse, home to large communities of immigrants, refugees and day laborers, because of its relative affordability. Even as costs have risen, East Colfax has remained among the last lower-cost areas to live.
But longtime residents fear changes on the horizon could force them out, as leaders of both cities seek to bring new development to the corridor and launch revitalization projects.
As The Denver Post took stock of changes in neighborhoods along Colfax Avenue over the last decade, it was clear that East Colfax already is evolving, with rents increasing and newcomers pushing the average household income higher. Residents and business owners have been squeezed more each year — particularly as COVID relief programs have come to an end.
“I don’t know if we can stress enough the amount of crisis that we’re in,” said Brendan Greene, executive director of the East Colfax Community Collective, a neighborhood advocacy group for residents and businesses.
The Post spoke to dozens of residents, business owners, community leaders, elected officials and experts about plans for the corridor. While city officials expressed excitement for new investments in the often-neglected area, some neighborhood groups and residents worried about proposals that they said had failed to take the current residents and businesses into account, risking increased displacement.
Within Denver, the East Colfax neighborhood largely spans from Quebec Street east to Yosemite Street, and from Montview Boulevard south to 11th Avenue. But the larger East Colfax area extends eastward to Peoria Street in Aurora, with commonalities across the cities’ border.
The neighborhoods have older homes and buildings and host some of what Denverites consider the best restaurants with international fare. Some of the Colfax corridor’s motels, previously known for drugs and prostitution, have since been shut down or abandoned. But this stretch of the major thoroughfare has maintained a somewhat gritty reputation.
“We’ve let the corridor languish for decades”
The area has come under increasing pressures of gentrification, experts say — meaning it’s seeing an influx of wealthier, often more educated people who are changing the social characteristics of the neighborhood.
That dynamic also requires disinvestment from an area, whether by the city or property owners, before new investment comes in, said Jeremy Németh, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Denver who’s conducted research on gentrification and displacement. While the displacement of longtime residents often results from gentrification, it doesn’t necessarily happen at the same time.
“We’ve let (the East Colfax) corridor languish for decades and decades, and people have suffered from that,” Németh said. “And now that we’ve run out of other places to invest in, developers need to put their money somewhere, they need to put their capital somewhere. And so this is the place to do it.”
Among the challenges faced by residents of East Colfax are rising rents in apartments that are in disrepair and the Denver neighborhood’s status as a community with neither a recreation center nor a library branch.
Németh and advocates attribute the disinvestment to years of systemic racism, from redlining to leaving communities of color out of decision-making.
Denver city officials labeled East Colfax a priority neighborhood in a neighborhood equity and stabilization analysis in 2018, and again in 2022. About 60% of residents were determined to be at risk of involuntary displacement in 2019, while about 30% of residents were living at or below the poverty line.
Census estimates show that between 2012 and 2022, median rents increased by 40% within East Colfax’s Denver boundaries, to nearly $1,500 per month. During the same decade, the average household income increased by 61% to nearly $73,000. The rent and income increases were adjusted for inflation.
While many Denver neighborhoods have grown quickly, East Colfax’s population declined by nearly 6% during that period. Its racial composition was largely stable, though the non-Hispanic white share increased by about 4.4% during that time, to about 41%, census estimates show.
According to research by the Colorado Equity Compass, residents are vulnerable to involuntary displacement as the area experiences more economic growth, has too little affordable housing and sees rising income inequality.
In the broader area, residents have opposed new housing developments, including condo and townhome projects approved by Aurora city officials in 2022. They have expressed worry that the projects will push nearby property values and rents up so significantly that they can no longer afford to live there.
Ludi Bonilla, a 42-year-old mother of three, has lived in the Denver part of East Colfax for 14 years. She worries about getting pushed out and not having anywhere to go.
“Life now is not easy,” she said as she packed boxes at a food bank run by the East Colfax Neighborhood Association and Counterpath.
The Honduran immigrant cleans houses for work, but that slowed significantly during the pandemic. If it wasn’t for a state mortgage assistance program, she said she would have lost her house. But her work hasn’t picked back up.
In the meantime, Bonilla volunteers at the weekly food pantry started during the pandemic, something she said she’s had to rely on herself at times. Earlier this year, she temporarily hosted a Venezuelan family she found staying in a park.
That’s part of what she loves about East Colfax, she said — the community working together.
Concerns about city plans, development
Denver and Aurora have made investments along East Colfax a priority in recent years, and city leaders have said they are trying to work with residents and business owners to ensure they won’t be forced out of their neighborhoods.
But tensions remain, particularly as people worry about developers coming in and either tearing down and replacing their current homes or businesses, or pushing them out completely.
Erik Duplessis, the owner of Precision Kutz and Stylez at 7233 E. Colfax Ave., has rented the barbershop’s space for nearly two decades.
He’s concerned about losing his business, he said, as the city invests in new developments and improvements. Those include the planned construction of the Colfax Bus Rapid Transit project directly outside his shop. He says he’s been denied city grant funding for help multiple times.
Rather than attracting new businesses, Duplessis said the city should invest in legacy businesses like his Black-owned salon.
“I would like to see more outreach and resources … made readily available to the businesses so we can also educate ourselves on not only just being tenants, but actually becoming owners of these properties that we’ve invested in for so long,” he said. “We’ve got so much equity in the community, and you feel that it’s like you’ve worked it — you’ve worked the land. And … now is when the new developers come in.”
In 2020, Denver’s planning department completed the East Area Plan, which details long-term development goals for the East Colfax, Hale, Montclair and South Park Hill neighborhoods. It also includes a vision to mitigate involuntary displacement of residents amid gentrification pressures.
And the plan puts a focus on small business anti-displacement strategies, said Curt Upton, Denver’s neighborhood planning manager, because about 75% of the businesses in the Colfax corridor are independent and locally owned.
City initiatives in the area have included mixed-use development projects such as the recently opened The Rose on Colfax, which includes income-restricted housing and child care, along with grants for existing businesses and public investment in the Colfax BRT project.
Upton said the city is also working to stabilize existing affordable housing and invest in community land trust properties. He noted that the only two significant new development projects in East Colfax over the past five years have been affordable housing projects.
In 2019, the East Colfax Neighborhood Association unanimously adopted its own neighborhood plan — almost as a preemptive counter to the city plan — and called it an anti-displacement plan. It stated that “plans for East Colfax must include concrete policy proposals, zoning, and other solutions that acknowledge the full extent of this crisis. ALL development, investment, and financing must take place through an anti-displacement lens.”
In Aurora, Mayor Mike Coffman said revitalization and development efforts don’t have to lead to displacement. He said that outcome mostly can be avoided by not tearing down existing affordable housing, though he recognized that making the East Colfax corridor a more desirable place to live would increase property values.
Coffman wants to see East Colfax return to the bustling economic corridor he remembers from when he was a child.
Now 69, he said a lot of factors contributed to the decline of Aurora’s former central business district, including retailers not being able to keep up with competition and the city moving its municipal building out of the area. Many of the same buildings remain, but he called the area a shell of what it used to be, leading to an uptick in crime and other problems.
Still, Coffman said, “I believe the area has an incredible future.”
With the redevelopment of the nearby University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and new projects to the north, near the Stanley Marketplace, he expressed hope the city could help stimulate redevelopment in the corridor, including creating more of a residential environment, with multiple housing options.
Seeking more intentional investments
Denver City Councilwoman Shontel Lewis, who has represented East Colfax residents since her election last year, is intimately familiar with involuntary displacement. She said she left Five Points, the neighborhood where she grew up, because she couldn’t afford to stay.
One of the first meetings Lewis had with East Colfax residents was about what they’ve needed from the city, including new traffic-calming measures, construction of sidewalks and resources the low-income communities have lacked as they’ve historically been ignored.
She’s pushed for investments both in infrastructure and the people who already live there — with a focus on listening to their needs and understanding the impacts of changes in the community.
“I don’t want a sidewalk in East Colfax if it means that that investment is going to be the reason that I don’t live in East Colfax,” Lewis said. “How do we ensure that when we make that investment that that investment keeps folks in those communities?”
The East Colfax Community Collective is looking to cities in other states where communities have taken development into their own hands.
The group has partnered with a national organization, becoming the fifth pilot site for an innovative program. It would allow the community to purchase apartments in the neighborhood, using that ownership to stabilize the rents in a significant portion of the units. A smaller share of the units would be rented out at market rates to subsidize the stabilized units. The money for purchases would come from fundraising, grants and rent payments.
“Long term, we really want to get up to owning thousands of apartments in this corridor over the next 10 years,” said Greene, with the East Colfax Community Collective.
Other organizations are finding ways to provide more affordable housing. The Fax Partnership in 2022 bought two East Colfax motels and has plans to convert it into stable housing, though redevelopment won’t start until 2028. The organization is also managing the new East Colfax Cultural District to try to preserve the area’s history and current businesses while supporting new development.
Board Vice Chair Darion Mayhorn, 33, says he recognizes the challenges of achieving a balance between community change and ensuring that people can stay in their longtime neighborhoods.
Mayhorn bought a home in East Colfax in 2016 after coming to Denver from out of state, likely making him what people would call a gentrifier, he said. Although he is a Black man living in a diverse area, he moved in on an engineer’s salary that’s likely higher than the incomes of many of his neighbors. His mom and brother live with him in the three-bedroom house.
He doesn’t think change is necessarily a bad thing — and neither is the fact that people from other areas are moving into East Colfax. But it’s important to be deliberate about developments and improvements made to a community, he said, to ensure they’re not changing its fabric but improving upon the diversity and history that already exist.
“With intentional effort, with support from local government — maybe even state and federal government in some ways — there’s an opportunity for East Colfax to not become another example of the classic gentrification story,” he said.
Correction (updated at 12:30 p.m. on April 30, 2024): Due to a reporter’s error, the original version of this story misstated East Colfax’s distinction in Denver in terms of recreation centers and library branches. The neighborhood is among those in Denver without either type of facility.
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