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Front Range Even as developers snap up farmland from Fort Collins to Pueblo, there's room to grow -- for now By Lisa Levitt Ryckman LOUISVILLE -- This is a story about how 175 miles seems shorter all the time.
About how developers vacuum up land between Fort Collins and Pueblo while counties toss around words like "smart growth" to describe their plans for the open patches on the map. About how one day in the next century, people might be able to walk across rooftops from one end of the Front Range to the other and never touch the ground. This is about how one family gave up a farm that has become an island surrounded by the city of Louisville, acres that once grew barley and corn and might eventually sprout a crop of $400,000 homes -- or become a playground for people who live in them. It's the story about the present and future of urban Colorado as a new century dawns, a story that repeats itself, day in and day out, up and down the Front Range.
On the day John Hartnagle's livelihood was auctioned away, the Broncos had a playoff game, so maybe fewer people showed up to bid. They stood out in the field the Hartnagles have leased for 20 years, 80 acres tucked between U.S. 36 and the Flatirons, and looked over his farm equipment and trucks, the last vestiges of the life he'd known for most of the past three decades. The land that Hartnagle had farmed here belongs to Jack Bowes' family, whose relatives homesteaded it 110 years ago. Bowes' father farmed it, and his father's father, but he decided as a young man that he wanted a more predictable life. The parcel, where his mother still lives, is surrounded on all sides by Louisville: a hospital, a school complex, and houses, houses, houses. It is ironic that the development around Bowes' land has stymied the sale and development of his own. The city of Louisville has capped its population at 20,000, and another crop of houses would put it over the top, so Bowes is a little late. The city has space for only a few hundred new residents. On a bright day in January, though, Louisville lost one more farmer. "If you're going to farm on the Front Range, and you're going to buy land, you have to be a rich man already," said Hartnagle, who farmed for 24 years before taking a 10-year respite. In 1996, he became a farmer again, because his sons wanted to try their hand. They grew corn and alfalfa on the Bowes' land and 320 acres near Platteville. "It never was profitable," Hartnagle said. "It didn't even make the payment on itself for three years. We bought a farm on $6-a-bushel corn, and it was as low as $1.71 last year. It wasn't possible for us to survive." Hartnagle estimates he lost about $300,000, and even after giving up his land and home, he's still $150,000 in debt. "It left us without the ability even to come back and just farm the leased land," he said. At the auction, a pickup truck went for $1,000, but no one seemed to want to pay even that for a combine normally worth seven times as much. "Come on, folks," the auctioneer implored, but it didn't matter. Hartnagle said he'd hang onto the equipment. He couldn't afford to let it go so cheaply. "Boulder County is becoming a rich man's county," Hartnagle said. "I don't know if there are any people left who live on a place and own it and make their living on it. They've sold out to development or open space."
If the specter of Los Angeles looms large, it is no wonder. Farm, ranch and pasture land has disappeared from Colorado's landscape at an average of 456 square miles for each of the past 24 years, much of it gobbled up by houses for hundreds of thousands of new residents, said Lance Fretwell, deputy state statistician for the Colorado Agricultural Statistics Service.
Colorado grew faster than the Philippines, Cambodia or Sudan between 1990 and 1996, at a rate of 2.4 percent a year, said policy analyst Judith Jacobson of the University of Colorado at Denver. By 2020, the metro area should encompass another 165 square miles and 700,000 people -- like adding another Denver and another Aurora, said Larry Mugler, director of development services for the Denver Regional Council of Governments. "It's not preordained that it's going to be all strip malls from here to Fort Collins," he said. "There's a trend to call this smart growth: how to grow in a way that reflects our values and the lifestyle we want to have. "At least it means you sit down and think about how you want to grow. We have our urban areas that appear built out, but they're always changing." There is room to grow, which is both the metro area's blessing and bane. DRCOG had projected an increase to 3,900 people per square mile by 2020, but the area already has surpassed that, with density at 4,146 people over 530 square miles from Longmont to Castle Rock. That means more people are packing into less space, which Mugler calls "anti-sprawl." And compare that with Los Angeles at 7,400 residents per square mile, San Francisco at 15,500 and New York at 23,700 -- cities that already are built out. "If the trends in the '90s hold, by 2020, places like Longmont and Brighton would still be free-standing," Mugler said. "But if you talk about what's going to fill in, if it's two-acre ranchettes, it's not going to look too free-standing." From Denver to Fort Collins, on both sides of I-25, prime farmland is becoming subdivisions or pasture, Fretwell said. "We're continually losing what I call the productive farms in Colorado, and we're picking up more of the ranchette-type things," he said. "All along the Front Range, people are buying 5-acre tracts, building a nice home, having a llama or horse or two. We lose one big farm of a couple thousand acres and instead have 200 farms that have one or two animals. "There's a point at which you can't pay what the land is really worth and make it worthwhile to farm," he said. The result is more crops and livestock concentrated in fewer and larger operations, which can afford to invest in the land and make the most of the latest high-tech farming methods. In a survey for Great Outdoors Colorado last October, more than 64 percent of 600 Coloradans listed preserving open space, farmland and land along rivers as their top priorities for the lottery dollars GOCO distributes. Seventy-five percent also said the state is growing too fast, and 73 percent agreed that because of that, Colorado should hurry to buy more open-space land. Sixty-three percent were willing to spend their tax dollars on it. Since 1994, GOCO has spent more than $140 million on outdoor projects ranging from trail maintenance and park creation to open-space purchases, including farmland, preserving nearly 75,000 acres. Last year, $4.9 million went to preserve about 20,000 acres of open space, and that piece of the GOCO pie is about to get much bigger. In the next decade, GOCO expects to spend 71 percent of the $500 million it will receive on land, water and wildlife protection, a 50-percent increase over past years. "Most people want to see us preserve land now," particularly urban land, GOCO spokeswoman Chris Leding said. "The majority of people live here on the Front Range, and not everybody can afford to go other places and enjoy wide open spaces," she said. "One of the difficulties is, land in the metro area is much more expensive than other places in the state. "That's one of the challenges -- that, and the fact that there are so few tracts left."
Jack Bowes lives in Longmont on a 10-acre parcel that once had a view. "Now I can't even see the top of the mountains," he said. "No, I don't like it. But I also figured when I bought my property that it would probably happen someday. "If I wanted the view, I could have purchased that (adjoining) property -- if I had the money -- and left it vacant so I could see the mountains." Five Front Range counties -- Larimer, Boulder, Jefferson, Douglas and El Paso -- have banded together to preserve 150 miles' worth of mountain views and the rare ecosystems that flourish where the plains meet the Rockies. In Boulder County, which has a tradition of open-space acquisition, most of the backdrop from the Jefferson County line to Lyons already has been preserved. "There are limits being reached in people's minds on the Front Range," said Peter Fogg, Boulder County's long-range planning manager. "They're asking for something other than what they've been seeing." Boulder County's open space staff has more than doubled in the past four years, Fogg said, to handle the huge task of managing the land they've acquired. "It's sort of like the dog chasing the car -- what happens if you get it? You can't just paint it green on a map and walk away from it," he said. One solution for farmland: lease it back to farmers like Hartnagle. "That's a great way to make sure it's well-maintained," Fogg said. But one farmer, Jack Bowes' father, years ago predicted a nonstop city from Boulder to Denver, and Bowes expects that to happen in 10 years. "A lot of people want to live on the Front Range of Colorado," he said. "If they can't live in Louisville, live in Erie. If they can't live in Erie, they live a little farther east or a little farther north. "The developers supposedly come in and ravage and pillage and plunder, but if there was no need for their product, they would not be developing," he said. "There are very few developments with vacant lots that are not being built on, and there are very few finished homes that are vacant." That might explain the public's urgent desire for more open space -- even though different communities might have very different visions of what that space is for. "Is open space to provide recreation or is it to preserve natural resources or is it to buffer communities from each other whether they like it or not?" Fogg said. In Boulder County, resource preservation and buffering top the list. In other counties, recreation might come first to win public support for the open-space concept. But some people care little how open space ultimately is used; they consider the whole process like treating cancer with an aspirin. "For Boulder and most of the Front Range, it's too late -- it's already been ruined," said former farmer Hartnagle. "It was a pretty nice place, 40 or 50 years ago."
March 28, 1999 Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society |
