[CPEO-BIF] Denver's (CO) Cherokee-Gates project

[Lenny Siegel <lennysiegel@gmail.com>]

Downtown, Not Just for Yuppies
	
In Denver, thanks to low-income and environmental justice activists, a 
new mega-project will include affordable housing and good jobs.
	
	
Tara McKelvey
American Prospect
June 18, 2007 online


Tim Lopez walks along the 800 block of south Lincoln Street in the Baker 
neighborhood of Denver on a clear May afternoon. Trucks roar along a 
nearby highway, and the street is littered with broken flagstone, 
cigarette butts, and a flattened Miller High Life can. The block ends at 
Interstate 25, two blocks from an abandoned plant, Gates Rubber Factory, 
and when the wind dies down, the air smells faintly of sewage. The most 
disturbing thing about the neighborhood, 44-year-old Lopez explains, is 
not the noise, smell, or litter. It is hidden in the grass.

"It's a monitoring well," says Lopez, pointing to a metal plate sunk in 
the soil near the street. "They drill for groundwater and test for TCE," 
a suspected carcinogen called trichoroethylene.

In October 2002, fumes from TCE, an industrial solvent, were discovered 
in the area, and this block, says Lopez, turned out to be "one of the 
most contaminated areas." Lopez says executives with Cherokee Denver 
LLC, a real-estate development company that owns the factory and the 
surrounding 50 or so acres, as well as city officials, were initially 
sanguine. "The company was saying, 'There's not a problem,' and the city 
was saying, 'There's not a problem,'" he recalls. "We were saying, 
'There's a problem.'"

...

For the entire summary, see
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=downtown_not_just_for_yuppies
There is a charge for the full article.

--


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org


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