Ten years and a heap of change By David Olinger

Denver Post Staff Writer April 12 - What a difference a decade makes. Denver, in 1987, led the nation in empty offices and carbon-monoxide pollution. The Denver Dry Goods Co., its largest Downtown department store, closed for good that year. Lower Downtown was a largely abandoned warehouse district, a place where few but the homeless ventured at night. Record numbers of people lined up at unemployment offices across Colorado in 1987. It was a record year for home foreclosures, a record year for bankruptcies. Houses sat empty on suburban streets with fading "For Sale'' signs on their front lawns. Ten years ago, more people were leaving Colorado than moving in. All of this may seem puzzling to the 600,000 new residents of Colorado in the 1990s. But consider that a decade ago even government work was no refuge. Deficit-ridden Denver resorted to layoffs. State Capitol janitors fought to save their jobs. The entire sheriff's department in impoverished Costilla County ran out of money that October and shut down. The Denver Symphony? Temporarily out of business. Major League Baseball? Dream on. Hockey? Not here. The brightest spot on the horizon was a football team, the Denver Broncos, who made it to the Super Bowl in 1987 - only to get stomped by the New York Giants. The Broncos came home as heroes anyway, prompting a state government hungry for decent publicity to feature then-boyish quarterback John Elway in its come-to-Colorado campaign. Throughout its history, Colorado has been the mother of boom-and-bust. Beaver furs. Gold. Silver. Cattle. Oil. The state's fortunes rose and fell with the price of whatever commodity dominated its economy. The 1970s brought OPEC, energy crises and a Colorado oil boom. It was the decade of "Dynasty'' and its Carringtons, and of new schemes for mining the shale rocks in western Colorado that hold trillions of gallons of oil. In the 1980s the Carringtons skipped town. It was the decade of the oil bust, the S&L bust, the real estate bust. Now the boom is back. Colorado's unemployment rate reached a record low last month. Employers are worrying about worker shortages despite a population surge that has made Colorado one of the nation's five fastest-growing states. The fastest-growing county in the United States lies 20 miles south of Denver. Gone are the black economic clouds that hung over Denver in 1987. Lower Downtown now has a chic, New York-style nickname: LoDo. Abandoned warehouses have yielded to lofts, microbreweries, espresso stands and gourmet ice cream shops. The city boasts the nation's second-largest performing arts center, a new convention center, a new international airport and two new sports teams. Hockey fans now have the Avalanche and a Stanley Cup, baseball fans have the Rockies. And the Broncos just won the Super Bowl. Fading, too, is the notorious brown cloud that once shrouded Denver so palpably that a majority of corporate executives surveyed in 1987 listed the city's air pollution as a reason not to relocate to Colorado. Thanks to various pollution-control measures, the metropolitan air has not violated a federal standard in three years. All along the Front Range, where 80 percent of Coloradans live, the prosperous '90s have spread urbanity east onto the prairie and west over the mountaintops to high-country towns linked by crowded interstate highways. The economic forecasters who predicted in 1990, and 1991, and 1992 that this boom, too, would pass now see no end to Colorado's population growth. They suspect Colorado has transcended its boom-and-bust history with growing new industries - telecommunications, cable television, computer technology. "In the late 1980s the economy was very weak, people were leaving the state and moaning about how hard jobs were to get,'' says Bill Kendall, vice president of the Center for Business and Economic Forecasting in Colorado. "Today the economy is very strong. People are moving into the state - and complaining about too much growth.'' Yet the seemingly durable prosperity of the 1990s has not been spread evenly across Colorado. Nor has it come without costs. In north Denver - the historic home of new immigrants - a wave of urban restoration has sent apartment dwellers searching for cheap housing in older suburbs that already show signs of deterioration. Prosperity is a fading memory in much of rural Colorado, where many mining and farming towns have fewer residents today than they did in 1930. Western Colorado is finally beginning to recover from the great oil shale bust - by attracting people who come not to labor, but to retire. Others have come to escape the increasingly crowded cities of the Front Range, where commuters and weekend skiers commonly bring interstate traffic to a halt. Conflicts between Old West and New West at the spreading edges of urban Colorado have led at least a dozen counties and communities to enact "code of the West'' or "right to farm and ranch'' resolutions warning rural property buyers not to complain about the smell of cow manure. Those who yearn for some natural force to limit Colorado's human population growth may be in for a long wait. The most obvious limiting factor is water, but 4 million Colorado residents now consume just one-tenth of the water delivered by its giant reservoir and pumping systems. The rest goes to agriculture. Bill Reibsame, a geography professor at the University of Colorado who edited the trend-tracking "Atlas of the New West,'' calculates that Colorado cities could accommodate about 15 million residents by buying just half the water now used on Colorado farms. He sees nothing that will stop millions more from coming here. Where population migrations once followed jobs, now "people may actually go where they want to live - and create jobs,'' he says. "Colorado has a case of the terrible toos: too charming, too accessible.'' So, while the Old West copes with the new, the New West is suffering the arrival of a Newer West. Cross-country skiers who once shared gourmet meals in the seclusion of mountain huts now compete for space with newcomers seeking a cheap place to spend the weekend. Even the remotest reaches of Colorado, the dozens of 14,000-foot peaks that make it the most mountainous of states, are now so in danger of being trampled that the Colorado Mountain Club has advised peak-baggers to take the paths less traveled. Gov. Roy Romer, who inherited a belt-tightened government when he took office in 1987, appreciates the benefits the state's strong economy brings. But he also sees the tradeoffs of growing traffic and vanishing open spaces as its population boom persists. Colorado's growth "isn't going to stop,'' he predicts. "That worries me. I like it the way it is.''