By Mike Anton
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

HIGHLANDS RANCH -- It's big. On this, at least, everyone can agree.

The thoroughfares are as wide as interstates, the grassy shoulders as spacious as golf course fairways. Drive across the width of Highlands Ranch and as the odometer clicks along a thought comes to mind: When is this going to end?

The most amazing thing, though, may be this: After nearly two decades of construction and 20,000 homes, the work is far from over.

Far, far from over.

A dozen lanes from side to side, Highlands Ranch Parkway courses through Colorado's most popular development. When completed, Highlands Ranch will be home to 90,000 people.

Every day, hundreds of workers fill the air with the sound of hammers and saws and the beep-beep-beep of bulldozers moving earth. In brown fields within earshot of today's frenzied pace are big red signs that tell what tomorrow will bring.

''Future Housing,'' the signs read, and it's not hard to envision what it will be like.

Just look around. At the army of rooftops that march up one hillside and down another. At the trinity of house-garage-driveway that repeats itself again and again, interconnecting on the twisting streets like strands of DNA.

Twenty years ago, the ambitious blueprint for developing one of the Denver area's last, large ranches ushered in a new, supercharged era of growth on the Front Range.

The size and scale of Highlands Ranch -- 22,000 acres, ultimately 90,000 residents -- shocked people when it was unveiled in 1978. Roy Romer, then Colorado's treasurer, suggested the state buy the property and guide its development.

Today, Highlands Ranch still has the capacity to shock. It has, rightly or wrongly, become the poster child for suburban sprawl, a metaphor for the building boom that adds nearly 250 acres of development and 211 new residents to Colorado every day.

"I get a sense of alienation about the place. A feeling of being unanchored. A sense that you could be anywhere -- but nowhere special," said Kathleen Brooker, president of Historic Denver Inc. "It's the endless run of homes. There's no specific center to it, no pedestrian quality. It's a bunch of individuals living in their own pods. I just find it very boring."

Plenty of people do. Yet, with 60,000 residents, no development in Colorado has been more popular. Since the first homes went up in 1981, an average of nine people a day have moved into Highlands Ranch. Since 1984, its population has increased 20-fold. If it were to incorporate, Highlands Ranch would be the metro area's ninth largest city.

"People either love it or hate it," said Minerva Conrad, community relations director for the Highlands Ranch Community Association, one of the biggest in the nation. "I love it. I live here."

Call it a reputation. A stigma. Conrad knows Highlands Ranch has it. And like others who love the place -- its efficient roads, huge recreation centers and an order born of covenant controls -- she gets defensive when the subject comes up.

"It came up in my book club," Conrad said. "One woman in the club is looking for a place to live. Someone mentioned Highlands Ranch. Then someone else said, 'No, absolutely do not move to Highlands Ranch. You'll hate Highlands Ranch.' And I said, 'Excuse me?' And she said, 'Oh, not your house. Your house is beautiful.' What's she going to say at that point?

"It's an argument I can't win. They've got their preconceived notions of Highlands Ranch, and nothing I can say is going to change it. And these are my friends."

In the late 19th century, the arrival of the railroads ushered in a boom that left an indelible mark on Denver. As its population soared between 1870 and 1900, a ramshackle pioneer camp was replaced by a city made from brick. The stately homes of Capitol Hill and Curtis Park. Downtown's architectural treasures. LoDo's warehouses.

"Only a comparatively small part of the city of 1875 remains," Jerome Smiley wrote in his History of Denver, published in 1901. "The great majority of those who have continuously lived here since 1870 ordinarily find it hard to appreciate the magnitude of these changes."

Likewise, the boom that ends the 20th century is reshaping Denver and Colorado once again. This time, many are finding it hard to accept, let alone appreciate, the magnitude of the changes generated by the addition of 800,000 people in the past 10 years.

"When I first came here in the '60s, I loved the idea that you could climb a mountain and not see anybody, that you could kayak a river and not see anybody," said Dick Lamm, who unsuccessfully tried to stem the tide of growth during three terms as governor from 1975 to 1987.

"There was a time when it was a religious experience for me to drive to Boulder. It wasn't a drive -- it was a religious experience. Now, with all the development, I grieve every time I go up there."

As Colorado's population sails past the 4 million mark, opinion polls rank growth as the public's top concern. Yet for all the hand-wringing -- calls for no growth and slow growth, smart growth and managed growth -- the people just keep coming.

There are, of course, legal quandaries that make growth such a tangled issue, controversies over property rights and local control. A more fundamental problem, however, is that what separates good growth from bad often lies in the eye of the beholder.

What's ugly and what's attractive? Is a place the epitome of soulless sprawl or a good place to raise your kids? How many people is too many?

Depends on whom you ask.

"People hate traffic jams, but they love to travel," Lamm said. "They love where they live, but they don't like all those other people living there. I think there's a unique American character that we move to get away, and when other people are similarly inclined, we call it growth."

Since it burst to life, Highlands Ranch has been Exhibit A in the never-ending, always-evolving debate over how much is too much.

Its size and scope make it a convenient target. But its success also sheds light on what the Denver metro area has -- and will -- become.

"You can have outsiders say anything they want," said Jim Toepfer, who shepherded the development for California-based Mission Viejo Co. "If people didn't like Highlands Ranch, there wouldn't be 60,000 people living here.

"Some people would call this sprawl. I call this delightful."

A native of Wisconsin, Toepfer got a degree in urban planning and moved to southern California.

"It was just manna," he said. "It was 1956 and the air was just fragrant with orange blossoms, eucalyptus, sometimes lemon."

He was young and, with two partners, had a vision. They called it Mission Viejo. Critics said it was too far out in the country, but people flocked to it -- and later to its many imitators. In less than a generation, the California Toepfer fell in love with was gone.

"We left there just at the right time," Toepfer said. "I do not enjoy going back to southern California and going through all of the traffic."

Colorado, too, was love at first sight. He is 71 now, retired, but Toepfer still remembers the day in 1977 when he drove across the cattle ranch south of Denver. He marveled at the waves of grass that rolled out to the horizon. At the deep arroyos, dry washes and rock outcroppings that etched the country.

An earthmover clears onetime ranchland for a new high school and park in Highlands Ranch.

In Highlands Ranch, Toepfer had another vision.

"I looked at it and said, 'My gosh, this is a beautiful piece of ground. What potential!"' Toepfer said. "I could see a beautiful town being created."

What has evolved is 97 percent white, affluent and settled. The median household income of $79,145 is 68 percent higher than the metro area's. Three of four adults in Highlands Ranch are married, and nearly a third of the population is under 17. The percentage of people who completed college, have a white-collar job and own their home are all well above average. Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats nearly 3 to 1.

Not surprisingly, 88 percent of residents commute to work alone in their cars.

A marketing study of ZIP Code 80126 sheds light on the fabric of the suburban idyll at a time in America when the average new home measures 2,200 square feet.

People in Highlands Ranch attend hockey and football games far more often than they go hunting or to auto races. They don't buy oven cleaners but do hire professional carpet cleaners.

They like gourmet coffee beans, imported beer, low-cal frozen entrees, brie cheese and pita bread. They do not have a taste for instant grits, cigarettes, malt liquor, regular frozen dinners or jerky meat snacks.

Many have Internet access, brokerage accounts, American Express cards and second mortgages. Many own digital tape players and oral irrigation devices, whirlpool baths and fax machines.

Few own chain saws.

One thing most people there do have, however, is a previous address in the metro area. The stereotype is that Highlands Ranch is swarming with escapees from California. The reality, figures from the Internal Revenue Service indicate, is that the vast majority of people who moved to Douglas County in the past decade "escaped" from Arapahoe, Denver and Jefferson counties.

Phil Scott grew up in Jefferson County, back when much of the south suburbs were still farm fields. As a boy, he hunted pheasant on the Highlands Ranch, where steel heir Lawrence Phipps Jr. had been running cattle and holding hunts and polo matches since buying the spread in 1937.

"If I were one of the Phipps, this would still be a 22,000-acre cattle ranch," Scott said. "But that's not what's real. This place was never going to stay the same. But is it a blight? No. This is not just another development. It's a community."

And in the beginning, the community consisted of Phil and Kaye Scott.

In 1981, with some luck in a sales lottery -- and a little help from Mission Viejo officials looking for a young, married couple to convey the right image for their new development -- the Scotts became the first residents of Highlands Ranch.

"It was a setup," Phil Scott said. "They engineered the closing so we'd be first."

As a gift, they were given a steer.

The meat is long gone, but the Scotts are still here -- in their third Highlands Ranch home, a five-bedroom, four-bath two-story with a finished basement on a cul-de-sac.

"You get a feeling of country living out here," said Phil, who's 52 and works laying underground pipe. "The parks, the rec centers -- everything here is first-class. It's a great place to raise kids."

They have lived 18 years in the vortex of the building boom and have learned that the dreams we seek for ourselves are being sought by others, too.

"In our first two homes, we had great views of the mountains," said Kaye. "But they slowly disappeared as people built in front of us."

When an Outback Steakhouse, Le Peep restaurant and a Diamond Shamrock gas station went up across the street from their second home, neon drowned out the night sky. When plans came for a 24-screen movie theater down the street, the Scotts decided the traffic would be too much. They and their two teen-agers moved to higher ground.

"You learn to adjust," Phil said matter-of-factly. "I've lived in Colorado all my life and I've never had that provincial attitude so many here have that somehow this is all mine and you can't come. You can't close the door behind you."

It's not hard, though, to find people in Highlands Ranch who wish they would.

"There's constant building all the time. I just wish they would stop," said Jeannette Fossel, who moved here with her family six years ago from New Jersey. "All the open land is being taken away. It's not the community it was when we came."

In many ways, however, it is. Karen Black sees to that.

She's the community association's architectural supervisor, one of five full-time staffers who perform the delicate task of ensuring that Highlands Ranch doesn't change its appearance even as it puts on weight.

"We're very aggressive," said Black, a friendly but tough former home economics teacher whose job requires her to be part cop, part Martha Stewart. "If we weren't here doing this, Highlands Ranch would look very different, I can tell you that."

Black will receive more than 3,000 proposals from homeowners this year on everything from paint jobs to basketball hoops. She'll also send out a record number of letters informing people they're out of compliance with the covenants. Through June, there had been 2,284 letters.

"Wind chimes are a real problem," Black said as she tooled around a neighborhood in her spotless Honda Accord looking for violations. And there they were: Weeds and faded paint. Unauthorized fences, oversized tool sheds, a wheelbarrow out in plain sight.

"We have good compliance. Most people who receive a letter are pretty embarrassed," she said. "Some residents are resentful because they can't individualize their homes. But no home can stick out."

It's all part of the plan -- the plan Jim Toepfer helped draw up, the plan he says works even if some people don't like it.

"There are people who say Highlands Ranch is horrible and that growth out here should never have occurred. And then you've got people who live out here and live and die by it because they're so happy with it," he said. "I'd be lying if I said I don't mind traffic, because I hate traffic. And I especially hate it when I have to leave this community. If all other communities had planned properly back in the beginning, you wouldn't have near the congestion you have today."

"Look, the Front Range is going to get bigger," said the man who saw the future of Colorado long ago. "There will be development all the way from here to Colorado Springs. I don't look foward to that. But I don't worry about it either. I'm just so happy with my little piece of the world here."

October 3, 1999

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