This story is adapted from The Metropolitan Revolution book and iPad app by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley. View other stories on Medium.

Annexation and Disunity

The Denver metro is known for a high level of collaboration between the city of Denver and its suburbs—which work together to fund cultural institutions, for example, or to launch a regional transportation initiative.

It wasn’t always this way. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the city and its suburbs waged a pitched battle over land, people, tax revenues, and race. It was a conflict happening, with regional variations, in metropolitan areas across the U.S. during that era.

The movement of middle- and upper-class whites to the suburbs made Denver officials anxious that the city would become, as one planning department study at the time put it, “the ghetto of the metropolitan area, containing in its population primarily the poor and uneducated and a few of the very wealthy.” One aspect of the struggle focused on integration. A lawsuit charging that the Denver school district concentrated black and Hispanic students in a few schools went to the Colorado and U.S. Supreme Courts, which ordered desegregation. The school board implemented an unpopular plan to bus students to achieve a better racial mix in schools.

Denver’s solution was to embark on a strategy of annexation, expanding the borders of the combined city and county. By extending its boundaries, Denver could capture economic and population growth on its edges. The mostly white families who lived in these areas would be brought into the Denver public school system, thereby easing busing pressures and mitigating white flight. Just as important, these land acquisitions would bring more of the region’s wealth into the city. Colorado municipalities depended largely on sales taxes for their budgets. As the annexed territory developed, the department stores, hardware stores, and strip malls within it would contribute to a stronger bottom line for the city.

A Growing City:

In the mid-1900s, Denver expanded its borders by annexing surrounding areas to capture economic and population growth around the city.

But many people living on Denver’s borders did not want any part of the city’s desegregation battles and busing schemes. Suburban towns like Aurora and Greenwood Village also wanted to be able to grow by taking a share of the territory between their borders and Denver’s—why should the city reap all the benefits of new development?

Between 1969 and 1974, a flurry of annexations and incorporations ensued, with both city and suburbs trying to grab unincorporated territory, and therefore the benefits of growth. A climate of fear existed on both sides, with Denver’s leaders worrying about being cut off from growth while suburban leaders and school districts feared being drawn into real or perceived “city problems.” In 1974, Colorado voters passed a state constitutional amendment that made it almost impossible for Denver to continue its annexation push.

These conflicts highlight the fact that the many governments within a metro are almost designed to fight among themselves. State laws make them largely dependent on locally raised tax revenues. People, cars, rails, and the nebulous entity known as the economy might flow seamlessly across their borders, but sales and property tax dollars rarely do. A dollar spent (and taxed), or a house built (and taxed), or a business opened (and taxed) in one jurisdiction is lost to any other. In metro after metro, individual communities that could work together—to harness their distinctive assets in innovation, to bring their region’s products and services to new markets, or to integrate new immigrants into their economy—often compete against one another for tax revenue. That competition can fuel a general sense of mistrust between neighboring communities, a mistrust that often derails regional action.

Although it took many years, Denver and its neighbors have moved from mistrust and outright “war,” as one scholarly article called it, to become productive collaborators on the metro’s biggest issues: economic development, arts and cultural amenities, and transportation.