What Does Denver Streets Partnership Do

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Jill

I am Jill Locantore and I’m the executive director of the Denver Streets Partnership.

And for those of us who are unfamiliar with the Denver Streets Partnership, which I feel like. It would surprise me that people were, would be unfamiliar with what you guys do. Could you share a little bit about the mission and just kind of some of the scope of work of the organization?

So we are a coalition of community groups who are advocating for people friendly streets here in Denver. And our shared mission that brings us all together is we’re trying to reduce Denver’s unsustainable dependence on cars. And driving as a primary form of transportation and reorient our transportation system and our communities to prioritize people rather than machines as the most important thing that we should be caring about.

So that includes a lot of different activities aimed at making it safer and easier and more convenient to walk and bike and take public transit. And also thinking about our. Streets not as just conduits to get from A to B, but as public spaces, um, where the community should come together and it should really reflect and support the life and the culture of the community.

Michelle

How did you even get involved in this type of organization, in this type of mission? Like what does your life look like to, to inform your decision making? To, to, to work with a really large group of very different people, to make our streets more of a living space.

It was definitely not a direct path.

It’s not the kind of thing when you’re a little kid, you think I’m gonna grow up and go into urbanism, try and make cities better, places to be. Um, it was really, it was through my lived experiences of I. Having to first be very dependent on cars. When I was growing up, um, I grew up in Colorado Springs, which is a very car dependent city.

It’s, you know, my neighborhood was, was pretty walkable. But generally to get around Colorado Springs, you have to have a car to get anywhere you wanna go. But then when I was in graduate school, I couldn’t afford to take a car with me. I was going to the University of Toronto in Canada. Um, and I was very fortunate that Toronto is a very different city from Car Springs.

It is in fact. Pretty easy to live in Toronto without a car. Um, because they have a really great public transit system. They’ve got a great network of sidewalks and greenways that connect the transit stations to the neighborhoods. Uh, they’ve been building out a great bike network, and I realized that that didn’t happen by accident, that there were.

Policy decisions that people were making that made that city livable, even for people like me who couldn’t afford a car. And I wanted to be involved in helping other cities be more inclusive and livable for everybody regardless of what their income was or their ability or their age, that everybody could get around freely and have that freedom of movement in their cities.

Michelle

You mentioned the word urbanism. I feel like I’m hearing this word a lot more often, especially when talking about. European cities, uh, the one I’m thinking of is Paris. I lived in Paris for a minute and I have been watching with great interest how they are changing the, the city corridor or the, the city core into a very like people friendly space and removing cars from the footprint in order to encourage more movement.

I don’t know that everyone listening is aware of what urbanism is and like this approach to life could impact them here in the us. Could you share a little more how you interpret the word urbanism and how you see it taking root in the United States?

Jill

Yeah. To me, urbanism is really just a love of cities and cities that have been designed for people.

You know, human beings are a social species. We like being together, and that’s the purpose of cities, is to bring people together and give them places to gather. And when we design them really well, they can be really awesome. You know, for thousands of years we designed cities on the assumption that most people would walk to their daily destinations, and that’s what created a lot of the European and South American cities that people travel to, to visit because they want to experience those kinds of places.

And it’s really only in the last a hundred years that we switched focus and decided we needed to actually prioritize cars and the movement of vehicles in our urban spaces, which led to, in my opinion, a, you know, a huge deterioration of those spaces. They became polluted, they became loud, they became dirty and unpleasant and unsafe places that we.

Nobody would want to be in that space unless you’re encased inside your gigantic vehicle. So for me, urbanism is going back to the roots of designing cities for people. They don’t have to be loud and polluted. They can be beautiful places where you can hear children laughing and people talking and bird singing, and it’s a place where we want to be and where we want to be together with other people.

That is, that is the purpose of cities.

Michelle

It’s 2025, the beginning of 2025 as we record this conversation, and I’m curious about how you. As an organization are thinking about approaching some of the initiatives that you are focused on with some of the, the energy that’s, that’s, that’s happening in the world right now.

I feel like there are headwinds and I wonder. When you have an organization such as this, when you have a mission such as, you know, create, designing spaces that we can truly live in and and enjoy with that type of focus, what are some of the things that you are doing to ensure that you can continue the work that you’re doing with the people that you are collaborating with?

Folks in the Denver Metro area? What does that look like? Because I feel things are changing so quickly. Just in general, in terms of funding, in terms of, you know, coalitions, in terms of just. Mood and energy, how do you navigate that right now and stay true to the work that you’re doing?

Jill

Yeah, it’s definitely easy to get discouraged or stressed out with everything that’s going on in the world. At the national level, we’re so polarized. There are these deeply entrenched culture wars that are happening, but I feel much more optimistic about what we can do at the local level because it really matters when you truly share space with other people, and it’s not just.

Anonymous names on the internet that you’re arguing with, but it’s people that you might run into at the grocery store or see riding on the bus or just bump into when you’re walking or biking around your neighborhood. I think there’s still a lot more sense of community when we are in these shared spaces together and this desire to work together to make our our community better.

And that’s even more important now when we’re struggling to define what is our community at the national level. What does it mean to make the US a better place? Sometimes that feels very hard to answer that, but I think we can agree on, you know, we want our neighborhoods to be safe. We don’t want people to.

Feel like their lives are in danger, just trying to cross the street. We don’t wanna be exposed to high levels of pollution, noise pollution, or air pollution. We wanna breathe clean air and we can work together right here in Denver at that local level to try and make the kind of community that we wanna live in together as people who share physical space.

Michelle

It’s funny. So I grew up in Boulder and Denver, and Boulder is really interesting because just how it’s laid out in the design of this city. It’s, it’s the most walkable, one of the most walkable cities, obviously in the state. Obviously mountain towns are tinier and they’re easy to walk around, but for a city that size is so walkable.

I never needed a car there. Transit was easy. Denver’s different because it’s just gotten so big. It encompasses a lot of different neighborhoods with different types of needs. If you had unlimited funds to activate different parts of the city, I. What would that look like and, and why would those activations matter to you?

What would you do if you had unlimited funds?

Jill

So, if I was queen and had unlimited resources, I would really focus on what I like to refer to as Denver’s main streets. These are the, the heart of our transportation. There are the streets, like Colfax Avenue, federal Boulevard, Colorado Boulevard, Alameda/Speer. That’s where not only are the largest number of people traveling every day, but that’s where the destinations are too, that, that people are trying to get to. That’s where a lot of the great small, locally owned businesses are. That’s where a lot of schools are anchor institutions, places where people can get medical services or social services.

The problem today is that a lot of those streets are designed like highways. Again, they’re prioritizing space for cars and movement of vehicles, and they’re not very pleasant places for people to be as. Human beings, not as occupants of a car, but if we can transform those streets to actually be more people oriented.

So reallocate less space for cars, more space for people walking, more space for people biking, more space dedicated to fast and efficient transit. And start making them feel much more like the places that they truly are. So having trees and greenery, having art, having benches, having pedestrian scaled lighting, all of a sudden they’re functioning much more as true main streets.

I. Again, where the community comes together, where we are living out our daily lives and we’re doing it in a way that’s enjoyable and not stressful and not killing us. And really, we’re only talking about like 5% of, of Denver Street Network, but if we can transform that 5% of the streets, it would. Impact the city overall and completely change the quality of life for everybody.

Whether you live here or work here or just visiting, you would have a very different experience than you do today.

Michelle

One of the projects that I’ve spent a lot of time kind of observing is the 16th Street Mall redevelopment Now. For people who are newer to Denver, this is not the first time that they’ve worked on the mall.

When I was a little kid, there was literally, and this is gonna totally date me, but there, there was a maie enough when I was a little kid and an ice skating rink at the eastern side of the mall. So, um, throughout my life I’ve seen them, the mall do a lot of different things. I worked in Tabor Center when I was a high school in high school.

In their food court. It was a great job, by the way, and it’s really interesting to me. First of all, I would’ve had it be completely car free. I would’ve not had the shuttles. That’s just my personal preference, but I actually really love what they’ve done. I love how they’ve. Expanded the walking space. I love the activated seating areas.

I think that as we get into summer and our, and just the overall fatigue with the project, uh, we move past that and we can focus on bringing organizations, retail events and things like that into this space. It’ll start to do what. What they envisioned 16th Street to do. But when you have a multi-year investment and a revitalization project, one of the things that I’m struck by is how Coloradans don’t believe that downtown.

Is nice or they had that one really disturbing experience between 2020 and 2022 because it was really disturbing at that time. Um, and they cannot believe that things have changed like it’s a living space. How do we encourage people to come back to these spaces that we’ve worked so hard on to make them better and spend time there and, and I mean, people.

Other Coloradans, because that’s actually been the one thing I’ve been like, I go downtown, I work for myself, and I go downtown willingly, um, to to, to explore and to look at things and to watch all the tourists. And there’s a reluctance to believe that it’s a place to go. How do we get through to people that these places that we’re investing in are worth a second chance?

Jill

You hit on a really important point. A lot of times what’s holding us back is lack of imagination that we’ve experienced our cities or our streets or particular neighborhoods. In one way, and we have a hard time imagining that it could, we could experience it differently, that it can evolve and change and become something different.

Um, and so many of us have at this point grown up in communities that are very car centric and it’s all about moving cars and parking cars and, and, and, or we’ve had a bad experience downtown where we felt unsafe for whatever reason, and, and we don’t wanna go back. And so the challenge is. Sparking people’s imagination of what’s possible and, and that things can change.

And I think that was the tremendous value of the Veeva Streets events that we did a couple years ago. We took these streets, Broadway and Welton. I. That connect two neighborhoods that are really very close to each other. I mean, baker and Five Points are not that far apart, but how we typically experience it, it’s hard to get from Baker to five points, particularly if you’re walking or you’re biking.

There’s no safe or comfortable way to get there. And so for a few weekends over the summer to transform that space and show people what it’s like. If you could walk and bike all the way from Baker to Five Points and you had this huge expanse of public space to do that in, and we filled it with musicians and vendors and games for people to play.

It really opened, I think, so many people’s eyes of what’s possible in this space if we reimagine it and think about it differently than we have in the past. And I know with the reopening of the 16th Street Mall, um, the Downtown Denver partnership and the city are thinking about doing similar kind of activations.

On the 16th Street Mall programming it, inviting people to come into that space, experience it in a new way. Um, and that’s definitely worth doing. And I, I really wanna see us do it again on streets like, like Broadway and, and Welton and, you know, any of those main streets that I mentioned, federal, Colfax, Colorado.

Right now we’re having a conversation about the Arts district in Santa Fe. So many people wanna come and walk in the street on Santa Fe and enjoy the amazing art in that district and patronize the local businesses. And the city’s initial reaction is it’s too many people and so we have to stop doing it.

They should have the opposite reaction, like. Clearly this is what people want. This is what brings people back into the center city, is having that kind of programming and activation and opportunity to occupy that space. We should be figuring out not only how to support that, but expand it and allow it to happen more frequently in more spaces, not just downtown, but throughout the city, wherever people are interested in having those kinds of events.

Michelle

Okay, so you touched on two of my favorite things. Um, first of all, when I tell you that the Viva Streets activation in particular, and I ranked that as the number one event of that year, and the only thing that was frustrating, which I know you, you’re like, uh, it rained. How does it, it never rained. It rained I think out of the two of the four days, like it rained and it wasn’t like kind of rain, it rained.

And so that was so shocking to me and very confusing, but I. I loved the Veeva Streets event because of a couple of things. I actually follow the Ciclovia event in Columbia, and one of the reasons why I wanna go to Columbia is to participate in that event. I also participated in an an event, a se Lavia.

Like event that happened in Park Hill several years ago, I can’t remember. I feel like it was 2017 and it was just amazing. It was a neighborhood focused event, but it was many, many, many blocks. It was a long route and it was just so amazing. So much fun. I felt so safe. I didn’t live in the neighborhood.

My mom and I rode our bikes from our prospective neighborhoods. We met up and then continued on to participate in that, and I just remember just raving about Viva Streets, but also thinking this is a huge undertaking and. I felt like, and this is my own personal opinion, I felt like, I was like, why isn’t this state and I could be wrong.

So correct me. I was like, this is something that I feel like the state’s marketing budget should be allocated. A perc, like a percentage of the marketing budget should go to events like these because if I were a person. Who came from outta town and experienced that, it would blow my mind. And I know this because I met people on the street who were visiting from outta town, and they were blo, their minds were blown.

And so I feel like having a more, uh, sometimes for our leadership and, and it could be in any state place or whatever, you have to give them a different. Perspective, but where they’re coming from. So I care that it’s like a livable street and what have you, but they might hear, are we getting revenue? And so I, I am wanting to give the argument.

Well for tourism, we should share this and encourage people to come and then also collaborate with RTD and do the zero fare for better air during the summer. That’s how I dream of things happening because it just seems like such an obvious. Collaboration and thing to do. Am I just talking crazy?

Jill

No, I wish you were in charge.

I wish there was a lot more public funding support for these types of events. ’cause you’re right, it is a huge lift to put them on and especially when they are community driven, which is what makes them so special, right? Is that they are. Designed and planned and programmed by the community that lives here in Denver.

You know, we’re not inviting in corporations to come and do a kind of festival that would be generic and the same as you would experience in any city. It’s specific to Denver and it reflects who we are and the great diversity of neighborhoods and people that we’ve got here in Denver, but it takes a lot of time and money and effort.

Which for the community is a lot to ask for the city or the state. In the grand scheme of things, the amount of funding it would take for the city or the state to help subsidize these events is not a whole lot, especially compared to the cost of like infrastructure changes. Mm-hmm. Ultimately long-term rebuilding these streets, like the reconstruction of the the 16th Street Mall, you know, that was hundreds of millions of dollars.

But programming and activating that space by supporting the community with these types of events is not a huge lift, but it does, it would make a very big difference if we had more public subsidies from the city, from the state to put these events on in the first place and help them be sustainable. You know, there’s.

Not a business model where it’s gonna generate a lot of money and rent and pay for itself directly. It can help support the local economy and support the low school businesses and support the general tax base for the city. But we, it would really benefit from having that public subsidy to help make events like Veeva Street’s, like the First Friday Art Walk in the Santa Fe district, like the event in Park Hill.

Like the night markets that we helped get started underneath the Colfax Viaduct on on Federal Boulevard. There’s a huge appetite for these events and just a little bit more public subsidy would go a long way towards making them a sustainable thing that we could do all the time and be known for. And like you said, people would want to come here to come to those events.

How do you fund this work? Do you need for us, the listener to. Send in pledges. What does it look like to fund this type of work if there aren’t large subsidies to help you do this kind of work?

Yeah, we’re very, as the Denver Street Partnership, we are very dependent on donations from foundations. We get grant funding from foundations as well as individual donors.

And to be honest, it’s, it’s kind of bleak out there right now. Like there’s. So much need, and especially with what’s happening at the federal level and you know, clawing back of federal funding that supports all kinds of important programs. There’s a lot of demand on foundation funding right now and on individual donors.

So we have to be a very scrappy operation. Um, and sometimes it’s kind of incredible what we’re able to get done, you know, with. Duct tape and chewing gum and volunteer time, but it’s exhausting too. And so it is, you know, every dollar that we receive from an individual or a foundation is really meaningful in supporting this work and, and helping us sustain it going forward.

Michelle

By the way, I absolutely love First Fridays on Santa Fe, but it’s my view that they all, that the road has to be shut down because it is so popular. I think it’s just a, as an attendee, I, I enjoy it better when we can just move freely in that space. I’ve started attending the August event, which I think is the one where they always shut the street down because I just, I feel safer, and so maybe the conversation is how can we make this.

A thing where we shut it down, it being Santa Fe guys, so that guests and community members can move about freely and lean into the fact that it’s such a popular event.

Exactly. It’s so clear that that’s what the community wants. And right now the reason the Santa Fe district only does that once a year in August is because it’s expensive to do, and now even that one August event is in peril because the city’s.

Putting even more requirements on everything that the district has to do to make sure that it’s safe during that time. Whereas I think the city should be doing the opposite. They should be stepping up and bringing resources to the table, not only to support the August one, but allow them to do that in July and June and May as well, and rise to meet this demand that the community is clearly asking for.

What are some of the activations that you’re most excited about, um, coming up this year? Like what are things that you, you are currently working on, uh, that we might be excited to attend this year?

Jill

Um, actually we don’t have many events that we’re involved in this year. Again, because of funding. Um, we, we didn’t get funding renewed or the level of funding required to do some of the types of events that we’ve done in the past.

Although we are working on a art project that I’m pretty excited about, it’s focused on raising awareness of how terrible most of our bus stops here in Denver are in terms of providing a dignified experience for people who are waiting for the bus. Um, and. Building community support for making the changes we need and policies and funding to provide a more dignified waiting experience for people riding the bus.

So basically we’re installing art, uh, at a few different bus stops across the city that invites people to interact with it and share their. Stories about what it’s like to be somebody who’s dependent on the bus and what they experience on a daily basis using this form of transportation. ’cause a lot of time those people are, are invisible, right?

So much of our decision making is driven by wealthier people who have the option to drive everywhere they go and they just aren’t. Paying attention to what it’s like to be a, a transit writer and somebody who’s truly dependent on that experience. Um, so we’re gonna be releasing some information soon about the specific bus stops where we’re installing the art, and definitely wanna encourage people to go visit the step bus stops, check out the art, and if they’re a transit writer, contribute their stories about what it’s like to ride transit in Denver right now.

Michelle

I have been writing Denver’s Transit since I was in high school, no younger forever, and I don’t own a car. I can’t wait to check out these installations. If you could do me a favor and share how we can financially support Denver Street’s Partnership, just anything that you’d like to leave us with before I ask a final question.

It’s very easy to support our work. You just go to our website, Denver Streets partnership.org. We’ve got a, a big donate button on the homepage. Again, every little dollar helps. We love our recurring donors who set up a donation every month. It can be as small as $5, but that adds up and, and shows a sustained commitment.

And there’s other ways you can get involved. It doesn’t have to be financially if you sign up for a newsletter. We pretty frequently have opportunities to volunteer at events, participate in rallies, submit comments or testimony to, to city council, and all of those are ways that help support our work.

And this is my final question. We talk primarily about Denver because we’re here, but in your travels across the US in the world, what are some of the cities or activations or spaces that you’re watching with interest? As it relates to urbanism and creating living spaces for the humans who live there.

So what are some of the places that you’re like, you gotta check this out.

Jill

I have never been there. It’s on my bucket list, but I really wanna go to Paris. Not only because it has always been an amazing city, but they’ve really shown just over the last five years. How much change is possible in a relatively short period of time and how beneficial that change could be.

Um, they’ve really been focusing on building out their bike network downtown and reallocating space on streets in the city center to prioritize movement of people outside of cars. The most dramatic impact that it’s had is on the air quality. You mentioned earlier how bad the air quality is in Paris and that it affects people’s skin health.

Um, but we’ve, there’s been a dramatic decrease in air pollution and increase in the quality of air just over the last few years specifically ’cause they’ve been changing their streets to prioritize people moving outside of cars. Another city that I actually have had the, the pleasure of visiting, um, is Copenhagen in Denmark.

I was able to join the, the trip with other city leaders. That happened back, I think in, in 2019. You know, it’s very famous for having prioritized bikes and transit and pedestrians. Um, but part of. What I enjoyed so much about being in that city. It’s a very large city population-wise, but when you’re in the center of the city, it’s so quiet because there’s so few cars.

There’s tons of people, but there’s not a lot of vehicles. And so you could have a conversation with people in a normal. Tone of voice. You didn’t have to shout to be heard. You could hear children laughing, you could hear birds singing. You could just sit quietly and read a book and and relax. And it was so stressful coming back to the United States and my neighborhood and sitting in my neighborhood pub, which is awesome, but it’s right on 17th Avenue and all the traffic roaring past, and I think that’s.

A benefit that we often forget about is noise. It’s very damaging to our health. It’s stressful. There’s evidence that it contributes to heart disease and all kinds of health problems. We don’t have to put up with it if we’re willing to reprioritize things other than cars, we can have a beautiful sound environment and I, I’m really looking forward to that with the, the Colfax BRTI think that’s an unanticipated benefit that we’re gonna get from reprioritizing space on Colfax, away from cars is suddenly it’s gonna be a place where you wanna hang out on the patio and you can have a conversation and you can be relaxed and enjoy being in that space.

Michelle

Thank you so much for your time. I’m so excited to continue supporting the work of Denver Street’s Partnership to participate in the events. I will watch with interest to see what’s next, and I just appreciate all of the hard work that you do. Thank you so much for having me.