This City Is Getting Serious About Sidewalks. Will Others Follow Suit?

Like a lot of cities, Denver’s sidewalks are marked by gaps, cracks and narrow stretches.

About 40 percent of Denver’s more than 3,000 miles of sidewalks are substandard, according to a 2019 report: Either too narrow to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or missing from the network entirely. Many more miles are in disrepair. For most of the city’s history, sidewalks have been built on an ad hoc basis — by developers creating or filling in neighborhoods, by individual property owners, or by the city carrying out a redevelopment project. Once the sidewalks are built, it’s a property owner’s responsibility to maintain them.

“What we’ve seen between the number of deficient sidewalks, the many, many, many hundreds of miles of sidewalks that need repair, and the 350 miles of missing sidewalks,” says Geneva Hooten, a planner in Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, “is that that system doesn’t work.”

And now, it’s about to change. This summer, Denver is starting work on its new Sidewalk Enterprise Program, a rare commitment by a city to build out and maintain a sidewalk network at an urban scale. The program, which grew out of a 2022 voter-approved ordinance backed by citizen advocates, imposes a fee on every property in the city. Proceeds from the fee, a $150 annual flat rate per property with additional “impact fees” for larger properties, are put into an “enterprise fund” which can only be spent to build and maintain sidewalks. The city began collecting the fee in January, and the Denver City Council on Monday approved two contracts worth a combined $75 million to begin construction and repair work. Hooten says the work — a mix of “shovel-ready” projects to fill in sidewalk gaps as well as spot repairs requested by residents — should begin immediately.

Most cities leave the burden of sidewalk maintenance to property owners. But few ever force owners to do anything about their sidewalks, even when they’re in serious disrepair, says Mike McGinn, the executive director of America Walks and a former mayor of Seattle. That creates a patchwork of pedestrian infrastructure instead of a real network in most places. And it reinforces existing inequities in the built environment, with well-resourced property owners able to keep up with maintenance and poorer communities in disrepair.

“You get a situation where if you’re an advocate and you want sidewalks, you go to the city and they say, ‘It’s not our job,’” McGinn says. “But the city through its actions is making sure it’s no one’s job.”

Some other cities have developed programs to fund sidewalk maintenance beyond a project-by-project approach. Los Angeles launched a $1.4 billion program to prioritize repairs in 2016. Ithaca, N.Y., established a series of Sidewalk Improvement Districts with repairs funded with an additional property assessment. Nashville included funding for sidewalks in a transit referendum that voters approved last year. But Denver is going farther than other cities in taking ownership of the entire sidewalk network.

Advocates had been pushing for Denver to improve its sidewalk network for years. The city’s own pedestrian master plan, released in 2004, called for the city to take a more active role in maintaining what it described as “a $500 million dollar transportation asset.” But there wasn’t political momentum to pay for the necessary work, says Jill Locantore, executive director of the Denver Streets Partnership. Locantore spearheaded the “Denver Deserves Sidewalks” campaign in 2015. A few years later, Denver set aside some money for sidewalks as part of a general obligation bond. But at the rate of repair made possible by that funding, it would have taken 400 years to complete the network, Locantore says.

“Nobody felt like the problem was being solved,” she says.

Locantore and other advocates later developed Denver Deserves Sidewalks into a ballot initiative, asking voters to approve a fee to pay for sidewalk improvements. They needed 12,000 signatures to get the measure on the 2022 ballot, but they gathered more than 20,000, Locantore says.

“It was really one of the easiest things I’ve ever done,” she says, “because all you had to say was, ‘Do you want better sidewalks in Denver?’ and people were like, ‘Yes.’”

The initiative passed with about 55 percent of the vote. The city then took some time to tweak the ordinance and establish the fund before it started collecting the fee. The new sidewalk fee is combined with a stormwater fee that feeds a separate dedicated infrastructure fund. Hooten says the city has worked to create a programmatic approach to various repair scenarios so that it isn’t dealing with each sidewalk repair on a case-by-case basis. In some neighborhoods, for example, the city may need to encroach on private property to create a sidewalk of minimum width to be ADA compliant; it’s developed a process for handling those cases so they’re not subject to individual negotiations each time. It’s also establishing a “field fit” protocol that allows contractors to do repairs much more quickly based on existing conditions, rather than adhering strictly to written plans.

With the first contracts being approved, Hooten says she hopes residents see the results right away, and for a long time to come.

“I see the success of this program hinging almost entirely on how many sidewalks we can fix, we can rebuild, and we can build,” she says. “The proof will be in people walking down the street and seeing a brand-new sidewalk and being able to say that was built because of this new sidewalk program.”