new zoning code touches Baker, reveals Main Street plans for Broadway

Denver is presenting its New Zoning Code with a highly interactive community website — city staff are blogging, residents can sign up to comment, updates are fairly regular, and the site actively helps you find information …

the site’s purpose is to help Denverites grapple with a completely revized zoning code for the entire city; information is rolling out in stages; in May, the draft written code (7MB PDF) was released, with definitions for new form-based districts, and now maps for neighborhoods abutting Baker have been released, giving hints of what is in store for us

since the maps are being released on a schedule coinciding with meetings for specific City Council Districts, the map for Baker north of Alameda won’t be released until the 15 July meeting for Council District 9 residents; however an interactive map page shows the general scheme of the maps released so far; the map for District 7 has already been released, and it includes Baker south of Alameda as well as the east side of Broadway

getting more detailed maps is awkward — they are presented as PDFs by neighborhood at the bottom of a Documents & Downloads page; unlike other neighborhoods with partial coverage, Baker didn’t get a map for its District 7 portion — an omission that we hope will be remedied soon — however the maps for Speer and Washington Park West (the city’s names for what we think of as West Washington Park) give us a pretty good look at the zoning planned for South Broadway, and it is Main Street all the way, with zone codes including:

• C-MS-8
• G-MS-5
• U-MS-5
• U-MS-3

decoding hint: the first letter is the context: C=Urban Center, G=General Urban, U=Urban; next is the type: MS=Main Street; the numeral is an indication of density; more detail in the draft text

there is also a map for Athmar Park, which is interesting but not so indicative of what might be in store for Baker