Denver, Colo. – In 1999, Landri Williams was vice president of community affairs for Forest City, the company that developed Stapleton. It was one of the largest infill projects in the United States, and he was in charge of bringing the communities together. Taylor shares his experience of integrating the existing communities with the new development.
What role did you play with Forest City?
Part of my responsibility was community relations. That meant going out and listening, more than telling the story about what this picturesque new development was going to look like years down the road. It was very difficult to say, “This was what it was going to look like,” when there had been nothing comparable to what it would look like.
My job was to listen to what they wanted it to look like – to make sure their dreams were coming true about this blighted land that had existed in the surrounding communities. And to ensure them that we were going to capture that in the redevelopment.
The people understand that there are going to be challenges along the way. But they want to be part of those challenges. They don’t want to be looked at as separate from what’s going on in their own backyards.
What were the people’s biggest concerns?
The biggest concern: was it going to be something that added quality to their existing neighborhoods?
It is difficult to build new sitting next to old and feel that there’s an integration of values between the older neighborhood and the newer neighborhood. Their concern was: how do you actually do that?
As you now look at the homes in Stapleton, you’ll notice that most of the homes have the front porch. People in Denver are known for their porches and their trees. The architectural structure mimicked the old homes. We wanted to make sure that the streetscape looked like Denver.
We also have homes that are priced for all incomes streams. We forcibly made sure that our homebuilders provide homes of different income levels from the $100,000 up to $1 million. And we integrated the footprints of those different homes in the same neighborhood, so that you didn’t have to have one area that was the million dollar homes and another area that was the lower-price homes. Within a two block area, you can find homes from the 200,000 up to the 800,000 area to provide the mixed diversity.
We have had people waiting in line because people really do want to live next to each other. People wanted good schools, safe neighborhoods, and open spaces. People of all ethnic backgrounds wanted those things, so all we had to do was make sure that we provided enough options to attract people of every kind of income and diverse streams.
Did people from the surrounding areas benefit from jobs?
When we had our first retail development, it was my responsibility that those retailers first sought after available employees from the surrounding neighborhoods. We gave them incentives to do that.
We made it a one-stop shop for them. We would simply say, “Give us the profiles of the type of people that you want to hire, and we will do the first screening process for you.”
We provided a select group of individuals from which to choose from, keeping in mind that those people came from the surrounding neighborhoods. They enjoyed that and knew the benefit from hiring from surrounding areas.