THE VALLEY IN THE SHADOW
EARLY THIS PAST WINTER, FLATBED trailers hauled bulldozers and backhoes into Sun Valley, a neighborhood mostly made up of affordable housing projects that stands in the shadow of downtown Denver. Passersby watched from behind a wall of chain-link fence as the massive machines rumbled toward a row of homes. Many of the men and women there that morning had spent much of their adult lives within the roughly half a square mile that comprises the neighborhood, a semi-industrial zone between Federal Boulevard and the South Platte River that includes Broncos Stadium at Mile High. A backhoe cut into the corner of a midcentury public housing unit—one of dozens of homes to fall that day—the wall of brick and stucco crumbling onto a concrete slab. With each sweep of the metal bucket, the slow transformation of Colorado’s poorest neighborhood had begun.
When Brock Knight walked to the 7-Eleven with his mother a few days later, the 10-year-old stopped on the sidewalk in front of the fence. He’d seen the plans on mailers that were sent to his parents and on poster boards at one of the community centers: renderings of the midrise apartment buildings, wide streets, and grassy open spaces that would soon replace the acres of public housing he’d come to know so well. The Sun Valley projects were the backdrop for much of Brock’s brief life, and now they were disappearing—with the promise of something better, or at least different, for the nearly 800 people who called them home. Many of Brock’s friends moved away as the bulldozers began to arrive, relocating to seemingly faraway places like Aurora and Englewood. To Brock, the neighborhood already seemed emptier, lifeless. And here was further proof. The old buildings had been scraped from the land, the toppled remains hauled off and replaced by a patch of snow-speckled dirt. Staring into the vacant lot, Brock wondered why his world needed to change.
away, on West 11th Avenue, in one of the two-story rowhouses across from Fairview Elementary School, a 95-year-old blond brick building where, this past spring, he was in fifth grade. Fairview has two large playgrounds, a community garden, and a blacktop basketball court with two hoops. A grassy field pushes toward a trio of soon-to-be-demolished water tanks and obscures a view of Denver’s skyline to the northeast. The nonstop of vehicles on I-25 to the east sounds like an ocean’s incoming tide. On Friday afternoons, volunteers from a community group called Hope in Our City brings boxes of granola bars and miniature oranges to the school playground. On those days during the school year, dozens of kids would spill out of Fairview and spend the afternoon shooting hoops or throwing footballs in the field or kicking soccer balls off the school’s caged windows.
