Bringing Beauty Into The Street
You can call Laura Aldrete a lot of things: an athlete (a competitive high school soccer player, the 52-year-old still moves with grace); an adventurer (Aldrete spent her early 20s traveling and working in Central America and still backpacks here and internationally); a mom (her sons, Alex and Aristedes, are teenagers). But don’t call her a native. “I refuse to use that term,” the executive director of Denver’s Community Planning and Development (CPD) Department says. “I would never want to offend the Native American population by presuming I am the first here, that I am of this land. I also think that there is a presumption that if you are from here, you have more authority than whoever comes into our city, and we want people to come. Besides, everybody came from somewhere else, say, five generations ago. That attitude is disruptive to evolving us forward.”
Aldrete is sitting at a conference table in her office in the Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building. It’s early January, just three months after she’d been sworn in to her new role, and she’s still getting used to the space. Only a few personal touches hang on the walls: a painting by her mother, a map of Denver, a small string of prayer flags. Taped discreetly behind Aldrete’s desk is a sheet with the names and photos of City Council members and districts. Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by former New York City department of transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan sits in the middle of the table. Aldrete’s been meaning to read it, but first she’s getting caught up on her department.
CPD’s boilerplate says its mission is to “envision, enable and ensure a better Denver.” Translation: If it’s got to do with land use—whether that’s putting a building in the ground or taking one out of it—or city design, Aldrete’s office is involved. Which is why it’s a little surprising that for most of its 162-year history, Denver hasn’t had a cabinet-level Community Planning and Development department. In fact, CPD is among the youngest of the city’s 11 cabinet-level departments, having only been officially established in 2002.
Today CPD has 300 employees. Some ensure fire and building code compliance; others help residents navigate permitting processes, like those for adding an egress window or an accessory dwelling unit (such as a mother-in-law suite); and still others collaborate with citizens to help develop the vision for what Denver’s many neighborhoods and public pockets will become. Over the course of her 20-plus-year career, Aldrete has worked with many of CPD’s branches—as the city’s point person for the redevelopment of Stapleton,
