Shaping Durango
Part II in a look back on how planners envisioned growth

In 1971, a group of Durango leaders issued what I imagine is the town’s first comprehensive land use plan – aside from the original 1880 plat. They acknowledged the town was changing and would continue to change, perhaps radically, as it transitioned away from a semi-industrial hub for mining, ranching and logging towns toward something new. They knew they couldn’t control growth but could have a hand in guiding it, and the plan they published as a special supplement to The Durango Herald was a sort of roadmap to follow.

The planners’ goals were ambitious but reasonable: limit sprawl, establish greenbelts along river corridors and open space along the town’s boundaries, further develop the tourism industry, develop a diversified, year-round economy, and provide decent housing for everyone.

More than 50 years have passed, and Durango clearly has changed and grown in ways the planners probably couldn’t have imagined. Yet their efforts and the resulting plan were remarkably prescient, and foresaw much of what would come. But did it work? Have we (i.e. Durango’s residents and leaders of the last half century) successfully followed the map? Or have we gone astray?

Let’s ponder each category of goals.

Limiting suburban sprawl and retaining the community’s environmental character: This one’s a bit of a mixed bag. Google “suburban sprawl” and you’re not likely to come up with an image of Durango. Sprawl’s definition is somewhat squishy and subjective, but when we talk about sprawl, we’re usually referring to low-density, single-family, car-oriented development. Durango’s core rates fairly low on the sprawl scale, especially when compared to, say, Farmington or Grand Junction. There is generally a decent mix of single-family and multi-family housing (although it’s not always distributed very well), and most parts of town are fairly pedestrian friendly.

Of course, this breaks down as one ventures away from the early town boundaries. The Bodo area, which was established as an industrial park in the ’70s but evolved into a mixed-use zone, is a disjointed, sprawling hodgepodge of I don’t-know-what, as is the Walmart/Home Depot area south of there. So much for retaining “the downtown as the ‘shopping center’” and discouraging “additional strip commercial development.”

Durango’s relative lack of suburban sprawl likely is a result of planning and topography – there’s just not a lot of flat, sprawl-ready ground in the town’s immediate surroundings. That has pushed suburban sprawl out into the former agricultural areas, such as the Animas Valley and out on Florida Mesa (where it takes the form of ranchette-rural sprawl). 

I’m giving us a 6 on this one.

Greenbelts and open space: In Durango’s early days, the banks of the Animas River were the designated industrial zone, and the waters were industry’s dumping ground. The mines and mills of the Silverton area sullied the waters with fish-killing acid mine drainage and tailings, then Durango’s slaughterhouses and sawmills and the smelter and, after that, the uranium mill, added to the yellow-gray soup with their own melange of pollution. By the time the river crossed into New Mexico, it was a toxic soup with a current. In 1971, the situation hadn’t improved that much. Tailings spills into the river were fairly common, and in Durango, the leftovers of industry still lined the river’s banks in many places.

So it’s pretty amazing the planners of the time were able to envision something far better, and even more incredible that those visions have been realized and then some. The Animas River is the town’s green, scoliotic spine as well as its heart and soul, and the River Trail provides a car-free artery from one end of town to the other. That Durangoans have access to so much of the river’s shore almost makes the astronomical housing prices worth it. Nearly as important are the open spaces, like Horse Gulch, Overend Mountain Park, the trails on College Hill and Animas Mountain. 

There are a few 1971 greenbelt goals that have yet to be achieved, however. Junction Creek also was supposed to have a greenbelt and trail along it (imagine taking that from town all the way up to the Colorado Trail). Didn’t happen. The plan calls for converting Turtle Lake and City Reservoir (on College Hill) into public parks. Nope. And the 1971 planners also wanted to make the Animas River north of town into a recreational mecca (with water skiing and ice skating!). While the extension of the Animas River Trail park and of the greenbelt up through Oxbow Park is a beginning, the grander vision never came to fruition, and the river banks through the Animas Valley are off-limits to public access.

This one gets a solid 9.

Housing: The 1971 plan devotes a lot to the topic of housing, but fails to anticipate the affordability crisis in which the community now finds itself. Back then, the planners in Durango were focused on “blight,” the proliferation of substandard housing, and “urban renewal.” This sort of “renewal” often entailed tearing down historical housing (often in lower-income areas and communities of color) and mixed-use structures and replacing them with parking lots, highways or crappy high-rises. A good portion of Denver’s downtown neighborhoods fell victim to the urban renewal wrecking ball in the ’60s, which converted a vibrant, human-friendly, walkable, mixed-use area into a quilt of parking lots (only to see it all built back four decades later into a modern, gentrified replica of the destroyed neighborhoods).

In Durango, it was the entire Santa Rita neighborhood, the residents of which were predominantly Latino, that was scraped to make way for a (sorely needed) sewage treatment plant. I see this as a glaring lack of foresight on planners’ part. Santa Rita was a neighborhood in the classic sense, a community, and it was erased virtually overnight, taking a significant stock of housing away from the town forever. And though it may have seemed logical to site the treatment plant at what then was the edge of town, planners should have known that the community would grow southward. Hindsight’s 20-20, I know, but a much more appropriate location would have been south of Home Depot.

The planners of yore endeavored to “make provisions” to “permit housing for low, medium, and high income groups.” What they didn’t realize is one day it would take a lot more than to simply allow developers to put up affordable housing. Planners and leaders would have to require it and subsidize it. This is one area where planning in Durango and just about everywhere has failed: Instead of planning ahead, and purchasing land and housing for affordable units when prices were still somewhat reasonable, most communities are reacting to exorbitant housing prices and trying to play catch up. That means forking out millions to buy or build a handful of affordable units when hundreds are needed.

I’m going with a 7.

Development of the tourism economy and increase year-round employment: Umm, yeah, I’d say we overdid it on the tourism economy. And like many other communities, Durango appears to have staffing shortages, even in the winter. So, success, I guess?

This gets a 12 out of 10 for accomplishing the goals – no matter how questionable they may now seem.

Infrastructure, streets, public facilities: These are more specific goals in the plan, some of which seem downright odd in retrospect. For example, they wanted to make the Horse Gulch road into a major traffic artery, which would have facilitated development in what is now an open space, recreational gem. They also wanted an arterial road to link County Road 203 with the Falls Creek Road near Turtle Lake.

And, apropos to current debates regarding the location of the main fire station: In 1971 Durango’s only fire station – which housed 10 firefighters – was located at 10th St. and 2nd Ave. Planners wanted two more stations, one south of town and one on the northeast corner of 32nd St. and Main Ave., which at the time was owned by the city.

The fire department established its own special district and has grown considerably since then (and the Durango department merged with surrounding, rural, volunteer departments), establishing stations on the south end of town, on the north end of town – albeit not in the planned location – and outside of town. It also moved its main station adjacent to the old power plant. Now the department plans to move into the old high school and current school district administration building in a residential area, but also just down the street from its 1971 location. This has triggered a brouhaha of near-epic proportions.

I’d give this one a 7.

A near-future Land Desk dispatch, and the third and final episode of the series, will look into the future and lay out a new road map pointing at what still needs to be done. 

The Land Desk is a newsletter from Jonathan P. Thompson, longtime journalist and author of River of Lost Souls, Behind the Slickrock Curtain, and the newly released Sagebrush Empire. To subscribe, go to: www.landdesk.org