Ben Kelley sits back on his front porch and looks out across the street at the row of new townhomes, the field of weeds, the boarded-up crack den, the ad for luxury duplexes, and fumbles for the words to describe his neighborhood.
He adjusts his baseball cap, which he wears backward. He squeezes the TV remote, which he brought from the living room. He scratches his bare chest, which is beefy after years of pumping iron. And he smiles.
"The ridiculous," he says at last, "has become the sublime."
Ben and his wife, Vicki, live in a green cinderblock home at Monroe Street and Alameda Avenue, at the southern edge of the Cherry Creek neighborhood. They've been there for three years, renting for $900 a month, but already their bungalow has become an anomaly: It's one of the last original houses on the block. Practically all of the others have been bought by developers, demolished and replaced by earth-tone synthetic-stucco duplexes with two-car garages and $400,000 price tags.
"This is the last outpost of Cherry Creek," Ben says, surveying his little patch of front yard. "You can't find much more contrast than this. This is truly a mishmash of old and new."
It's a Sunday morning, and Ben and Vicki putter around in shorts and bare feet, contemplating brunch. She pads between the porch and the living room, shushing their three woofing dogs, and he works up a four-alarm rant about the demise of Cherry Creek as he knew it.
"Everything is so screwed up, it's hilarious," he says. "There's nothing to do now but laugh."
Ben is a Denver native. He grew up two miles from Monroe Street in the Country Club neighborhood. Vicki is a native, too, although she grew up in Aurora. Between out-of-state jobs and time away at college, they returned to Denver to see their hometown grow, prosper, settle down, then grow again. Change comes in cycles--they understand that--but the current "great land grab" is something they've never seen.
"In the Eighties, people rushed in, bought mansions in Cherry Creek and filled them with art and antiques. Then the economy would rumble, they'd get divorced, they'd move out, and things would quiet down," Ben recalls. "But this is far worse. This is whatever people can afford. This is whatever they want to do. In the Nineties, anything goes."
Ben got his first taste of the building frenzy about six years ago, when he graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder, returned to Denver, began his career as an impressionist painter and rented a house on Clayton Street and Sixth Avenue. The bungalow was modest and somewhat run-down, but Ben imagined himself buying it one day and raising a family there. He never got the chance.
On a lark, one of his neighbors decided to sell her home, an old grocery store that she had spent loads of time and money renovating. A realtor friend offered her a proposition: Would she sell the home if he could get $250,000 for it? The neighbor thought her friend was crazy, but she agreed to give it a try for a month.
It sold within a day.
"After that, it was a chain reaction," Ben says. "Older residents knew they could get top dollar for their homes, so they started selling. Then the developers came in, leveled the houses and started again."
A month after his neighbor sold her house, Ben received a form letter in the mail. He had been evicted. Despite an impeccable record as a tenant, he was given thirty days to leave. A developer had bought the bungalow sight unseen. And it wasn't even for sale.
"It was spooky," Ben says. "Just like that, I was out."
On his last day on Clayton Street, as he packed his final box, Ben met the developer, who looked all of eighteen years old. The developer's partner had bought the house next door, and they thought it would be fun to renovate them both, play the market and sell at a huge profit. Which they did. The developer bought Ben's rental for $175,000--and a year later sold it for $350,000.
"When Cherry Creek started to change, they called it the 'concrete cancer,'" Ben recalls. "At first I thought that was silly. But now, good God almighty, it's true. And if this is a cancer, then we're in the middle of the corpse. There's no remission here. The body is dead."
Ben moved to Monroe and Alameda, figuring he was far enough from the epicenter of the development boom. He figured wrong. As soon as he settled into the green cinderblock bungalow, neighboring houses began to fall.
"Whole blocks were taken down," he recalls. "I jumped from the frying pan into the fire."
Across the street from Ben's rental, three yellow houses once stood, one brick and two wooden. They weren't in the best of shape, he recalls. The yards were overgrown, and one house didn't even have indoor plumbing. But they had personality, character and a sense of community. Like other bungalows on Monroe built just after World War II, the homes had shade trees, flower gardens and kids running around. Now there's nothing there but knee-high weeds, puddles of water and chunks of concrete.
"This area is losing whatever [history] it had," Ben says. "It's sad."
But it isn't just nostalgia over the old neighborhood that upsets Ben and his wife. It's the neighborhood that's replacing it. The people moving in seem more interested in making impressions than communities. They arrive from the West Coast or back East with loads of money and look down on Ben, Vicki and the other natives from the tinted windows of their brand-new Land Rovers.
"It's like a play," Vicki says. "They're all posturing to see who can look more important. There's an Australian guy who paces back and forth on his sidewalk with a cell phone. He acts like something big is going to happen at any minute. And when it does, he wants everyone to see."
"Green is king here," Ben agrees. "Those people all have cash. All they want are their two-car garages and addresses in Cherry Creek. And you know what? They could care less about you if you don't have what they have. It's like they're royalty."
They rarely introduce themselves, say hello or stop to talk, Ben says. And when they do, they complain about culture shock.
"This town has been inundated and desecrated, and people come up and say, 'We thought people in Denver were friendly. Why isn't anyone friendly?'" Ben says. "And it's like, 'Because you just tore my best friend's house down.'"
"We don't live in a neighborhood," Vicki adds. "We live in an area with a bunch of houses."
And those houses, Ben says, "have shelf lives that can't be more than fifteen years." He has watched them rise from the ground. He has seen the materials used. He has seen the craftsmanship. And he has seen competition among developers.
"It's a race to see how quick they can get them up," he says. "What I heard is three months. And it's all particle board, synthetic stucco, black paper and spackle. The walls are so thin you can push a screwdriver through. My wife and I can sit in our living room and listen to our neighbors having conversations."
"When they're hanging pictures, it sounds like they're pounding our door down," Vicki adds. "They're like dorm rooms."
Construction is so shoddy that repair trucks have become as common as steel dumpsters. One complex had the roof replaced after a year, another had busted water pipes, and another had concrete buckling on its patio.
"No one from the city is policing it," Ben says. "You watch the city council on TV, and any proposal having to do with Cherry Creek passes, no problem. But no one wants to discuss that, because it all equates to money. And everyone wants it to last."
Then there's the crime. With new construction and new money come new criminals, who sleep along the Cherry Creek bike path and prowl the neighborhood.
"This is the new land of opportunity," Ben says. "People come here to see if they can take advantage of you. They see if that gate is unlocked or if those tools can be ripped off. They come here to steal."
"On any given day, we see a dozen people walking down the street who don't look like they live in these houses," Vicki adds. "They look like they can't even afford to live in houses. I'm careful when I'm alone here."
The boarded-up shack across the way used to be a crack den, Ben says. The owner wanted to sell to developers but couldn't get the price he wanted, so he rented. Unfortunately for the neighborhood, he attracted more drug addicts than investors.
"Five blocks from the Cherry Creek Mall and there's a crack house!" Ben laughs. "You've got riffraff rubbing elbows with some pretty elite people here. This is truly a unique neighborhood."
It's also a neighborhood of traffic.
Each day, a dozen motorists overshoot the mall and use the street in front of Ben's yard as a U-turn zone.
"Those bastards will turn around on my lawn," he says. "They'll say, 'Oh, well, this is a ghetto anyway, so let's just leave.' I'll be standing outside watering my lawn and they'll barely miss me. It's like, 'Okay. Have a nice day, you bastards.' And they all have out-of-town plates!"
But it gets worse. Each day at 3:30 p.m., Ben will tell Vicki he's heading off to the gym, but if she needs him he'll be stuck in the north turn lane on Alameda Boulevard. Sure enough, ten minutes after he leaves, Vicki will walk out into their front yard and see Ben waving from the gridlock.
"All these people complain about Denver drivers, but all the drivers are from someplace else," Ben says, laughing.
The sad thing about it, Ben says, is that he and Vicki have tried everything to make their rental into a home. They've cultivated rosebushes, kept the lawn trimmed and tidy and nurtured a giant cottonwood in their backyard.
"I love all things green," Ben says. "There aren't many large trees around; they've all been ripped down. So we have more than the usual number of birds and squirrels all trying to roost in one place. Environmentally speaking, that should give you an indication of what's going on. Developers drive by that tree all the time and can't wait to get it down."
No matter what the Kelleys do, their homely cinderblock bungalow sticks out among the stately townhomes like a dandelion on a golf course.
"We're part of the attraction now," Ben chuckles. "People drive by and look at this simple little house and laugh. They slow down and point when we're sitting outside. They say, 'Holding out, are you?' 'You know it's only a matter of time.' 'Nice try. Just let it go.' But it's like, 'Why? So you can build another instant house?' But we decided to keep the lime-green paint. It's a deterrent. If you're a criminal and you see this house, then the mansion next door, which would you go to?"
It would be funny, Ben says, if there weren't so much at stake. He and Vicki are trying to save, buy a home and start a family, but with the overheated housing market, they're worried.
"I grew up here. I'd love to have my kids grow up here. But I don't think that's possible," Ben says. "There's a huge money machine in Cherry Creek now, and we're caught in the middle of it. If you rent, you don't amount to a hill of beans here. You're at the mercy of the situation. And the situation is changing so fast, we never know when this house will be next. Every time the owner calls or visits, we freak out: 'Well, this could be it.' It's a waiting game. It really is. The title of this article should be 'Nervous.'"
Until they get the word, Ben and Vicki will cross their fingers, tend their rosebushes and sit back on the porch and watch the new Cherry Creek unfold around them.
"All of the old families and all of the natives have been cleared off," Ben says. "It's like a huge reunion whenever you see someone you know in the Safeway. And the conversation always starts with how things have changed. When I drive around town, I say, 'Remember when so-and-so lived there?' 'You know what used to be here?' 'Remember that restaurant?' I'm only 32, but I sound like an old man.
