My tenth high school reunion is coming up in June and my friends
and I have decided to go. In general, I’m
looking forward to going and doing some reminiscing, but mostly getting to know
people anew. For better or for worse, no
one will be the same as ten years ago.
The impending competition (isn’t that what these “reunions”
are really?) has gotten me thinking about my home town. Fort Collins is more of a city actually, yet in
high school it still felt small to me. It
has a
great downtown, fun local
hang-outs, and high school football rivalries (go Lobos!). There was also space—corners of major
intersections still had fields where you’d see foxes and coyotes, and a mile
from town the sky was actually dark at night.
It doesn’t feel small now.
Part of the Front Range growth boom, Fort Collins has grown by something
around 21,000 people since I graduated. 21,000!
This number gives me pause. Selfishly, I want Fort Collins to be the same
as it was 10 years ago, and it obviously is not. But getting cranky and nostalgic won’t get
me, or anyone else in the Front Range, anywhere. Still, a good hard look at the flabbergasting
growth that’s happened here—with a dose of “what we have and what we’ve lost”—can
help Front Range communities learn from the past ten years and allow for the
kind of growth that enhances their assets while reducing development patterns
that many Coloradoans are just plain tired of seeing. (Like the many unflattering photographs of
Colorado in
Dolores Hayden’s A Field Guide to Sprawl).
There is real opportunity here to shape the way the Front
Range grows in the next ten years in ways that are positive for natives and
newcomers alike. My hope is that the
class of 2006 can attend their reunions in towns across the Front Range and
recognize their downtowns, enjoy similar mountain views, and go to the same
local ice cream shops. Their towns will
be bigger, there’s almost no doubt of this, but with attention to informed and
collaborative planning now, I hope that they will also be better.
