It’s a weed-choked, post-apocalyptic strip of quirky businesses and industrial blight.
Driving up North Nevada Avenue, you drive through perhaps the most eclectic corridor in Colorado Springs, passing the former Johnny's Navajo Hogan, the Rad Hostel, a BPO Elks meeting hall, the National Cybersecurity Center, the Windows of Heaven Catholic bookshop, the Brutalist-style Birdsall Power Plant, a closed-down greyhound track and the End of the Trail Motel.
The spanking-new Wavebrite car wash may be the architectural crown jewel of the strip.
But that could all change in the next 10 to 15 years.
Yes, this is ground zero for the city of Colorado Springs’ Next Big Idea.
You remember City For Champions? The Downtown Redevelopment Project? The Briargate project?
North Nevada is where the city is dreaming its newest dreams.
Could nondescript NoNev become the next RINO? A sleek new tech and R&D hub? UCCS’ bustling new entertainment district?
All of the above?
Yes, yes, yes and yes, says a prestigious panel that just spent the last week in the Springs taking tours, meeting stakeholders, and rubbing elbows with city officials to spin up plans for the city’s next great redevelopment project.
Their proposal, presented to the public Friday: Turn the corridor into an innovation neighborhood that will be a magnet for knowledge workers, tech startups and research firms connected to UCCS.
“You’re now at a juncture, we believe, in the community to determine what you want your city to be in the future and how you want to be known,” said Glenda Hood, former Orlando, Fla., mayor and chair of the panel. (How many times have we heard that refrain?)
The panel, operating under the auspices of the Urban Land Institute, envisions a vibrant, new realm supercharged with tech incubators and startups, restaurants, open space, an arts district for creative industries, a new health clinic, a “coffee culture” and a dedicated rapid bus line or light rail, all anchored by Big Tech firms eager to do business with all the defense and health industries in town.
The panel envisions converting Birdsall into a research and development hub for energy reliability. They imagine changing zoning in the area to densify housing dramatically, paving the way for 6,000 more families to live there, including a large increase in student housing for UCCS.
They see a restitched, better integrated neighborhood, with village centers and office clusters, a neighborhood that embraces rather than ignores Monument Creek to the west.
Perhaps the Cybersecurity Center becomes a whole cyber-campus, and the old greyhound park turns into open space laced with bike trails linking UCCS and the new innovation neighborhood.
“The panel recommends that you transform this corridor into a thriving, diverse, sustainable innovation neighborhood that is authentic to Colorado Springs, a neighborhood, if you will, rooted in aerospace and defense, health and sports tech, climate security and resilience,” summarized Hood.
Examples of such neighborhoods that some of the panelists have been involved with include Cornell Tech in New York City; the Fitchburg Technology Neighborhood near Madison, Wis.; the Innovation District of Chattanooga, Tenn.; the Impact Beloit project connected to Beloit College in Wisconsin; Atlanta’s Beltline; and Memphis’ Riverfront project.
The end hope is that such a redevelopment better connects UCCS with downtown and “pieces the area better into the fabric of Colorado Springs.”
To pull it off, the panel proposes an independent redevelopment corporation operating outside of city government.
This corridor has been “passed through and passed over for years,” said Hood. “You’re the city of champions. It’s time to have a new champion for the North Nevada Avenue corridor.”
Why zero in on the North Nevada corridor? Exactly because it is so faded and dissipated, a semi-blank canvas ripe for reinvention. And more than anything, its proximity to UCCS.
“There is a life cycle to certain parts of a city,” said Chris Jenkins, CEO of the Norwood Development Group, who is an enthusiastic backer of the plans. “And at some point, as the economic, the cultural use starts to near the end of that cycle, you need reinvestments.”
The city went through this same super-panel process in 2012 for City For Champions, which gave us the new visitors center at the Air Force Academy, the Hybl Sports Medicine and Performance Center, the Ed Robson Arena at Colorado College and Weidner Field downtown. The projects essentially jumpstarted the city’s economic recovery after some dark days that decade when the city was forced to shut off streetlights and stop watering parks.
“I don’t know what it all can become,” said Jenkins, “but ideas that are out there … how do we focus on what could it be to really attract young STEM talent to our city? We’ve got young people recognizing that Colorado Springs is a cool place to live, raise families, but how do we maybe focus on something that will create jobs for them?”
Jenkins thinks its important to leverage the leadership of Colorado Springs Utilities and UCCS in the area, since they both have important presences there. He believes they can be “institutional anchors.”
UCCS Chancellor Jennifer Sobanet wasn’t directly involved in the planning exercise, and was just seeing the proposals for the first time Friday morning. But she was positive about the presentation, saying it dovetails wonderfully well with their C3 Innovation focus on campus.
C3 stands for Curiosity, Creativity, and Community, and C3 Innovation is a hub of multidisciplinary collaboration on campus meant to push students, faculty and the community “to push the boundaries of research and discovery.”
This exercise was just a first step of course, and the report was a very big picture, high-level affair, using big words like “catalyze,” “revitalization,” “synergy,” “drivers of transformation” and “metabolize development.”
And the panelists seemed to want the proposal to be all things to all people.
The four cornerstones were:
• Research and development tech hub
• Sports performance tech hub
• Active innovation neighborhood
• Health and wellness tech hub
Kind of like: Hey, let’s knit everything Colorado Springs does well into one amazing neighborhood.
We truly do have multiple identities in Colorado Springs: Olympic City USA, outdoor mecca at the foot of America’s Mountain, military powerhouse, home of Space Command and Space Force.
So it was probably inevitable you saw a bit of that divided personality in the presentation Friday.
Hood rightly noted one of the challenges in Colorado Springs is our inability to zero in on single priorities sometimes.
“We’ve observed that you enjoy a plethora of plans and organizations and committees that do very important work,” she said, drawing laughs. “But we also observed there has often been difficulty in finding what the real priorities are, or to be able to focus or the ability to act quickly among the leadership because of that plethora of organizations. And then there are many partnerships, boards, districts and authorities … the division of responsibility and accountability remains difficult to determine.”
So all that will be speed bumps in the road to remaking North Nevada, but our mayor could use a bright, shining project like this to distinguish his tenure.
If our problem is focus, this project probably needs a bare-knuckled leader to drive one identity for the neighborhood and drive it hard.
I’m kind of hoping that aerospace eventually emerges as the dominant focus of this corridor. Let’s call it Space Belt or Spaceway, and make it look like that cool neighborhood around Star Fleet Academy in “Star Trek 2009.” We already have Space Force and Space Command, the Space Symposium and the Air Force Academy here, where our new Space Guardians train. And UCCS is already partnering with Space Force on a new aerospace engineering program.
Colorado has the second-biggest space economy in the country (the biggest if you measure it per capita.) I'd say let’s create a place where space companies and the defense industry can totally “synergize.”
And a post-apocalyptic roadway from hell, seems to me, is the perfect place for science fiction to become science fact.
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