The Prospect neighborhood of Longmont, Colorado, is in many ways the embodiment of the modern American dream. On warm days, you can see kids out on their scooters and skateboards, enjoying the low-traffic streets. Perfectly manicured yards flaunt the low-water native species landscaping that the city encourages to replace turf. A playground and a dog park sit next to a public square for outdoor concerts, replete with space for food trucks to pull up.
Zoned as a mixed-use district, the neighborhood has a block-long commercial strip with often-empty glass storefronts. There’s no signage to advertise its boutique shops and restaurants to people outside the community, so it’s mostly residents who take to the broad sidewalks, enjoying the calm atmosphere as they walk to Pilates class or grab a baguette from the European bakery before strolling over to their self-owned real estate agency or accountancy.
Idyllic and idealistic, the Prospect neighborhood’s award-winning new urbanist design was the brainchild of the developer Kiki Wallace, who bought 80 acres of his family’s tree farm in the late 1980s to create a more livable antidote to suburban sprawl. After a bit of a back-and-forth getting the design and construction to align with Wallace’s grand vision, Prospect became the go-to neighborhood in one of the fastest-growing cities in the US. Longmont’s population has doubled to over 100,000 residents since 1990, its proximity to the Rocky Mountains a draw for tech transplants from the coasts.
Yet a look at housing prices – Prospect’s median sales price in 2023 was nearly $1m, including both single-family homes and condos – raises the question: livable for whom?
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It’s easy to point out the benefits of walkable districts like Prospect, starting with less car use: bringing jobs closer to lower-income employees and eliminating the need for expensive individual transport seems like a no-brainer. Yet the jobs located in Prospect appeal more to professionals and the self-employed; there are few wage jobs in the neighborhood and many of the residents commute to nearby Boulder or Denver.
Shortly after the neighborhood’s first houses came on the market in 2002, Dwell Magazine, the go-to design periodical out of San Francisco, designated Prospect “America’s coolest neighborhood” due to its architectural distinction. Modern penthouse lofts line the rooftops along the commercial strip while 4,000-sq-ft homes with requisite front porches stand side-by-side on tight half-acre lots, their fenced-in backyards flanked by carriage houses and detached garages designed to keep cars out of sight.
In the years since, Prospect’s housing prices have boomed. Today, the rare single-family home for sale can command over $1.5m and be off the market within a week.
“The streets are narrower, the lots are smaller. It ought to be moderately affordable,” says Marcia Martin, the Longmont city council member representing the ward. “When people began seeing how, frankly, wonderful it was, and how different and beautiful it was, they bid up the price of the real estate. Prospect could be an example. It’s just a tragedy that it became so expensive.”
Prospect became an exclusive address because it offered something rare: relative safety and a sense of community. The residents know each other by first name and often held Friday night open houses in the pre-pandemic era, inviting neighbors to mingle in their homes. It’s the kind of place you hear doesn’t exist any more.
“I love that we have a walking neighborhood,” says Jen Louden, a writer who moved there from Seattle seven years ago. She quickly found friends, joining a running group and partaking in the open houses. Now a member of Prospect’s social committee, Louden has helped to plan events like a Thanksgiving turkey trot or pandemic-era “random acts of kindness” bingo, which saw neighbors leaving cookies on others’ doorsteps to help them feel less isolated.
“There’s so many friend groups in the neighborhood. And that’s one of the things I really love. That we can walk to dinner and see our neighbors and just have these spontaneous neighborly dinners like: ‘Oh, you’re here let’s sit together,’” says Louden. “We got really, really lucky.”
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What Prospect doesn’t have, along with affordable housing: racial diversity. Like much of Colorado, Longmont is predominantly white, with only about a quarter of residents listing their race as Hispanic and 1% as Black on the 2020 census. The Arapaho Native people who once settled along the St Vrain River relocated, for the most part, to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming in the late 19th century, though there are monuments to them scattered around the city.
Those race dynamics can make for uncomfortable conversations, as a significant moment in the city’s development history occurred after members of the Ku Klux Klan took over the mayorship and several aldermen positions in 1923. In 1925, when the governor of Colorado was himself a member of the Ku Klux Klan, the group went on to grab a majority on the city council and school board. The members fired longstanding city officials who disagreed with their politics and began appointing their friends to positions of power. Among their development projects was the Chimney Rock Dam, an attempt to dam the St Vrain River upstream and afford the drought-stricken town “water security”. While residents fought back, voting the Klan out of official roles in 1927, it’s unclear what measures have been taken to rectify the issues that their anti-immigration sentiment stirred up. Nearly a century later, officials acknowledged the dark chapter; local historians today use their ouster as an example of the results that active civic engagement can achieve.
But as in many communities across America, a lack of diverse housing stock has entrenched class divisions in Longmont that also split along race lines. “Prospect is very white because it became very expensive very fast,” says Martin. “But it was not designed to be that way. Many of the houses have carriage houses or auxiliary dwelling units that really, legally, were intended for students or lower-income people.”
Like many other cities, Longmont is facing a housing crunch after real estate prices soared during the pandemic. In 2022, a 25% year-on-year increase drove them to a median of $615,000, a figure that has slightly cooled in recent months. Though that’s less than half of what homes in nearby Boulder go for, many smaller single-family dwellings, including the carriage houses in Prospect, have been converted into Airbnbs, tightening the market further.
It’s not unlike what has happened in major cities including New York and Boston, but Longmont’s size and general lack of tourist sites makes the move to short-term housing in an expensive rental market a bit more confusing. To counteract these rising prices, the Longmont housing authority has implemented an affordable housing plan that should see 12% of new rental units made available for low-income residents. Yet a loophole allows developers, including the Michigan-based Shaheen Development, which specializes in new urbanism and is taking over the last phase of development in Prospect, to buy their way out of the obligation.
Though Shaheen Development did not respond to a request for comment for this story, Peter Shaheen, the company’s vice-president, spoke of “luxurious, condominium-quality homes that are available on a rental basis” when presenting plans to the city council for approval. With nearly 170 units planned, including condos and duplexes, Shaheen Development has chosen to pay the 12% fee in lieu of incorporating equitable housing into their plans.
The result is that the middle-class frontline workers – the teachers, nurses and firefighters that form the backbone of these communities – have been priced out not only of Prospect but of Longmont as a whole. “You want these people to live inside your community,” says Martin. “It’s a huge class penalty for them to not live here – for them and for us.
“City planners sort of missed the point of Prospect by not building any more neighborhoods like that,” Martin says. “The message should have been: ‘We need to build more of these. We need to make a city where live/work becomes a way of life.’”
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Taylor Wicklund, a 33-year-old landscaper and Longmont native who is active in the community and serves on the transportation advisory board, has watched his neighbors oppose another urban development plan near his home.
“Density actually reduces the vehicle miles traveled,” he says. “But walkability’s a tough sell because it’s trying to do something that a lot of Americans have never experienced.”
Recalling time he spent in Sweden and New Zealand, Wicklund, who usually commutes to his landscaping job by bicycle, says: “I just want to walk to the grocery store. Why do we have to have cars on every road?”
The truly walkable car-free lifestyle still looks to be a long way off, especially with limited access to light rail and other forms of public transportation in the region. “The transit problem is the hardest,” says Martin, who notes that even though the city has created a patchwork of bike lanes, the bike and pedestrian network isn’t functional yet. A lot of people, she says, don’t even have bikes. And even though new urbanism as a philosophy promotes walkability, the development at Prospect will include expanded parking infrastructure to accommodate the vehicles the new residents will surely bring.
While there are transit buses that operate regularly and free of charge, their long, circuitous route connecting Longmont with Boulder makes them a less attractive alternative. “What we need to do is to provide multi-modal transit that is appealing enough when you compare it to the $20,000 a year it costs you to maintain a single-occupant vehicle. Then public transit looks good,” Martin says.
Yet some of the opponents to development in Longmont and elsewhere argue against expanded access to transit, using a similar line of thinking to the one that caused white flight in the 1980s: a fear of higher crime. “If you listen to council meetings, you know the conversation is pretty much the same. A lot of the public just doesn’t want change,” says Wicklund. That fear of change, whether it has a basis in racism or not, comes in part from a lack of understanding of the issues that rapidly growing towns face.
“You know, the problem isn’t density. A lot of people think that crime happens because of density but that is just not correct,” says Martin. “Crime happens because people are stuck in their neighborhoods, because young people are unsupervised, because their parents are working a job and a half each. And there’s nothing for the kids to do.”
Walkable, kid-friendly neighborhoods that are accessible to people of all income levels might alleviate that boredom while community cohesion grows.
That sounds like the kind of community that Daphne Delvaux, an employment attorney in San Diego, has found herself longing for in recent years. “Where I grew up, everyone I know lived within a 10-minute radius,” says the Belgium native. She added that in Europe, central squares were at the heart of a community, and it wasn’t uncommon to run into people you knew. Such gathering points don’t exist much in the US, and where they do, they’re often commercial.
Delvaux notes that many car-centric communities – which are neither safe for cyclists nor conducive to getting people on buses – treat parents almost like “glorified chauffeurs”. After a recent surgery, she put out a call for help with childcare and household duties and found no one came. “And it’s not because people are less kind or less generous. People are really busy and tired in their own lives. People live far away. It’s a different thing to go 10 minutes down the road rather than 30 or 40.”
The experience led her to create a popular Instagram story asking: who gets to raise their children in a village today? A place where kids can run between homes or a mom can ask a neighbor for help?
The answers that came in were split. Some mothers lamented not having such a village, while others noted they’d paid a premium to buy in the “right” community. Raising kids in open, walkable communities, one said, seemed to be an option only for those who could afford it. Delvaux cites, for example, nearby La Jolla, with its laid-back, walkable downtown. The median home price was $1.8m in January 2023, according to Redfin.
While creating more points of neighborly contact may be a first step for developers, city planners and transportation officials, creating livable, kid-friendly communities also requires more active involvement from everyone.
“Americans have gotten a little complacent,” says Wicklund. “But really if we want affordability, we want walkability, we have to start saying things to the policymakers. There’s this reluctance to take action, even if that action is as small as showing up to a city council meeting. Or taking your bike.”
