WATKINS — Burt Eaton left Aurora more than 20 years ago, moving east to seek peace and quiet on a windswept piece of prairie not far from Watkins.
Now urban life is creeping up on him as plans for an expansive 9,000-home community, dubbed Prosper, take shape on more than 5,100 acres of farmland surrounding his house.
The $600 million mixed-use project, which got preliminary approval from Arapahoe County last month, is just one of several giant residential communities poised to rise from the ashes of one of the worst housing implosions in generations.
It joins 12,000-home Sterling Ranch, the first phase of which was approved by Douglas County in January, and 10,000-home Green Valley Ranch East in Adams County as the latest mega master-planned developments to put outward pressure on metro Denver’s footprint.
All told, there are more than 31,000 home lots in the metro area’s residential pipeline, according to Metrostudy. All but 2,600 of those lots are in the suburban counties ringing Denver.
But developers of Denver’s next fringe communities aim to dispel the notion that their plans represent nothing more than the next wave of suburban sprawl, insisting that these future communities will be designed with an eye toward walkability, connectivity and community.
For Eaton, 68 and retired, the specter of an expanding metro area into places as yet untouched by suburbia presents a direct encroachment on his quality of life.
“I don’t like it, but I don’t think there’s a lot I can do about it,” he said as he attached a reflector to a post near his driveway off South Watkins Road. “I don’t think anyone out here likes it — but money talks.”
Eaton is like millions of others living on the edge of America’s cities, shielded from the noise, traffic and urban density by tracts of open land. That solitude was buttressed for the better part of a decade by a down economy that put homebuilding plans on hold.
But as the economic picture brightened considerably in the past couple of years, the Denver market finds itself with record low home inventories, skyrocketing rents and galloping housing prices.
That means residential projects that had gone dormant are being dusted off and put in play — particularly those out on the suburban fringe. Most have 20- to 30-year horizons to completion.
“We’ve been in a major slowdown for the last five years, so it looks pretty good right now,” said Brad Calvert, Metro Vision manager for the Denver Regional Council of Governments. “There’s tons of pent-up demand.”
Recent market data bear that out. Just 4,079 homes were available for sale at the end of February, according to the Denver Metro Association of Realtors, which uses a wider 11-county definition of the metro area. That’s only a quarter of the 12-year average of 16,717 homes available for sale at year’s end.
A home’s average time on the market has plummeted to 45 days in February, compared with 108 days in 2011, and led to fierce bidding wars among buyers.
Meanwhile, the median home price in the metro area has increased to $286,500, according to Zillow. That’s a 14.7 percent jump in one year. By contrast, the median value of a home nationwide is $178,500.
The rental picture is even more frenzied. Zillow reports that metro Denver rents, including homes and apartments, rose more than triple the U.S. annual average in January — 10.2 percent versus 3.3 percent. The average monthly rent in the metro area is now $1,827.
Primed to expand
With a DRCOG projection of 4.3 million people in the metro area by 2040 — there are 3.1 million now — housing experts suspect that the nearly 1,000 square miles the city and its suburbs occupy today is primed to expand.
And much of it will need to be absorbed by the millennial generation — the 75 million-strong cohort born largely in the 1980s and 1990s.
Despite millennials’ urban-hipster reputation, Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University in California, said they are not much different from previous generations.
“Millennials are getting into their 30s and want to settle down — and places close in are very expensive, and the schools may not be so good,” Kotkin said. “They are going to move out for the same reasons people always have.”
A National Association of Homebuilders survey released this year found that 66 percent of millennials want to live in the suburbs, 24 percent seek a rural home and 10 percent are sold on the city center. The main reason cited by those favoring the suburbs in the survey is the desire for more space.
That’s what prompted Mark Kluth, a 29-year-old expectant father, and his wife to ditch their 900-square-foot home near Olde Town Arvada last year for a much larger and newer house in the Buffalo Mesa neighborhood in Commerce City.
“We wanted a bigger house to have room for our growing family, and the house size we wanted we just couldn’t afford in (the closer-in suburbs of) Arvada and Westminster,” Kluth said.
His commuting time to his state job in downtown Denver has nearly doubled compared with where he used to live, but he said it’s a small price to pay for more room and a neighborhood where plenty of other couples their age are raising young children.
“It’s been great,” he said. “I think it’s a great place to have a family.”
Millennials, however, won’t be satisfied with the suburbs of their grandparents’ era, warns Chris Leinberger, a land-use strategist. They want a walkable and amenity-rich area with a more urban-style feel and alternative transportation options.
As proof, he points to today’s hefty price premium for homes in Denver’s Highland neighborhood versus homes in suburban Highlands Ranch — a dynamic that was the reverse 30 years ago when the Highland neighborhood was beset by urban problems.
But Leinberger isn’t convinced that builders are ready to abandon the cookie-cutter suburban sprawl model that has been panned by urban planners for years.
“Homebuilders are not producing what the market wants because they don’t know how to do it,” he said. “It’s building buggy whips when the market wants cars.”
That jeopardizes the long-term viability of distant suburbs, he said.
Susan Daggett, executive director of Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute, said it comes down to how new neighborhoods are designed.
“If they’re not transit-oriented and people have to get in their cars to get to work or the grocery store, they can’t really be called self-sustaining,” she said.
Admittedly, Daggett said, housing in Denver is costlier than comparable units on the fringe, but if the greater transportation costs of living in suburbia are factored in, “suddenly the somewhat more expensive housing (in the city) is more affordable.”
Jeff Vogel, legal representative and land planner for Prosper, said those heading up the project are keenly aware of the dynamics younger families are looking for in modern suburbs.
“We don’t want to just be an eastern metropolitan addition — we want to be a mixed-use community,” he said.
In other words, Vogel said, they are striving for a self-contained place that offers enough shopping, schools and jobs that residents aren’t forced into their cars.
Plans call for Prosper to have schools, a medical facility, a library, 30 miles of trails, a commercial main street, and 8 million square feet of commercial space among its 9,000 homes. Nearly a third of the development will be set aside as open space, Vogel said.
Prosper could provide up to 25,000 jobs, mostly along the Interstate 70 corridor that will form its northern boundary, he said.
At the same time, the project will be designed to feel like part of the landscape from which it came.
“It will be reminiscent of an eastern Colorado town,” Vogel said. “Having a continued agricultural element is our calling card.”
“Radiating outward”
Strategic planning also is going into Sterling Ranch in Douglas County, promises Jim Yates, president of the Sterling Ranch Development Co.
Sterling Ranch, with more than 12,000 homes and 2 million square feet of commercial space at buildout, will feature nine villages “radiating outward from an amenity-rich town center and grand civic gathering place,” according to its website.
It will, like Prosper, have swaths of open space, miles of trails and “pedestrian-friendly planning and design.” Yates challenges the notion that Sterling Ranch is suburban sprawl in the traditional sense of the term.
“Every two to three decades, there’s a fundamental change in housing — now there’s more efficiency and technology,” he said. “There is this ability to build into this suburban location urban components.”
Cheri Meyn, president of the real estate consultancy Genesis Group, said technology allowing home offices and employment centers on the edges of the metro area — including the jobs-rich Denver Technology Center and the burgeoning RidgeGate corporate complex in Lone Tree — will help blunt the worst effects of suburban sprawl.
Already, she said, more established suburbs such as 30-year-old Highlands Ranch are beginning to shake off their sleepy bedroom feel.
“It’s a town now,” Meyn said. “What was characterized as sprawl 10 years ago has matured into inclusive neighborhoods of retail, commercial town center and denser, walkable neighborhoods. It’s suburban infill.”
And as Highlands Ranch, with nearly 35,000 homes, approaches completion, Douglas County’s long-range-planning supervisor, Curt Weitkunat, said sites for new homes are planned out carefully.
The county, he said, has long targeted its northern third for growth while leaving other parts rural and untouched.
Arapahoe County takes the same long-range approach, according to its planning division manager, Jan Yeckes. The I-70 corridor has long been targeted as a growth area, she said, but there are limits.
“There are areas (farther east) that would stay agricultural in the foreseeable future,” Yeckes said.
Despite the new approaches to suburban development, for many it still means gobbling up virgin land. Last month, 40 or so people protested plans by a developer to set traps in a large prairie dog colony near Interstate 25 and Meadows Parkway so that Castle Rock Promenade, an enormous retail complex, can be built.
Just last week, a vocal group of residents showed up at the Castle Rock Town Council meeting insisting construction be postponed until the animals can be relocated.
Water, and its long-term availability, is undoubtedly the top concern regarding potential overdevelopment in the Denver metro.
While those heading up Prosper and Sterling Ranch say they have acquired the water they need from mostly non-groundwater sources, water levels in Douglas County are dropping 5 feet a year because of heavy pumping, according to state and federal data.
Colorado is facing a projected 163 billion-gallon shortfall of water by 2050, say state water planners.
Eaton, whose 20-acre property is in the middle of Prosper’s site, is concerned about plans by the developer to sink deep wells in the area.
“I don’t know how it’s going to impact our water out here,” he said.
A few miles up the road, Watkins Grain Elevator co-owner Dave Kissler admits he’s “conflicted” about the prospect of thousands of rooftops sprouting up nearby.
“The residents of Watkins enjoy a very quiet, high quality of life. Would that change?” he said. “Of course it would.”
But Kissler is not naive about the metro area’s inevitable population explosion over the next couple of decades. With a slight air of resignation, he conceded things can’t stay the way they are forever.
“We have to share,” he said. “Everyone needs a home, don’t they?”
John Aguilar: 303-954-1695, jaguilar@denverpost.com or twitter.com/abuvthefold
Median home price, Denver metro — $286,500
Percent increase in a year — 14.7%
Median home price, nationally — $178,500
Percent increase in a year — 5.4%
Average rent in Denver metro — $1,827
Entitled lots in Denver metro — 31,000
Metro home inventory in February — 4,079 units
12-year year-end average inventory — 16,717 units
Average time on market in February — 45 days
Average time on market in 2011 — 108 days
Sources: Denver Metro Association of Realtors, Zillow and Metrostudy
