Roger Cobb has spent his life in Denver, bouncing around different neighborhoods before coming to settle in Northeast Park Hill. When he rides his new motorcycle — named Purple Rain — around the city, he notices how community resources are distributed.
“If you cross (Quebec Street), there’s about six, seven, eight different pools over there,” Cobb said last week at the Northeast Park Hill Coalition’s June membership meeting. “We have, really, two.”
Celeste Leonard, 14, drops into the deep end of the pool from the slide at the Hiawatha Davis Jr. Recreation Center in Denver Friday, June 21, 2024. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
His neighborhood is instead known for its plethora of marijuana businesses — a presence that’s controversial for some residents. Northeast Park Hill and other areas that are home to Denver’s marginalized populations have the most marijuana cultivation facilities and stores in the city.
Although they’ve attracted a high concentration of cannabis businesses, elected officials and neighbors say their communities struggle to secure other public and private investments, including grocery stores, recreation centers and amenities like splash pads. Those concerns led the city to limit the neighborhoods where new cannabis businesses can open.
“I would like to see some more resources provided by the city more than anything, so that we can live, work and play once again,” Cobb said.
As of May 30, the Denver neighborhoods with the most marijuana cultivation facilities include:
Northeast Park Hill: 28
Montbello: 24
Elyria-Swansea: 19
Overland: 16
College View-South Platte: 13
The neighborhoods with the most cannabis stores are:
Overland: 13
Northeast Park Hill: 11
Baker: 10
Five Points: 10
Montbello: 8
Valverde: 8
Since the city started publishing its list of neighborhoods of “undue concentration” in 2021 as part of a regulatory overhaul, the same areas have remained at the top. That year, Northeast Park Hill and Montbello tied for the most cultivation facilities with 32 each, while Overland had the most stores with 14 locations.
Several of these communities are among Denver’s most diverse neighborhoods. Northeast Park Hill’s population is 42% Black and 26% Hispanic or Latino, according to its neighborhood profile fact sheet. Elyria-Swansea is 84% Hispanic or Latino, while Valverde is 77% Hispanic or Latino, the city reported. Five Points is a historically Black neighborhood once called the “Harlem of the West.”
In these communities, the presence of the marijuana industry — where only about 19% of the business owners identify as minorities in Colorado, as of July 2023 — receives indifference from some residents and dismay from others.
“I don’t think it helps our community to have people walking around like zombies,” said Abdur-Rahim Ali, imam at the Northeast Denver Islamic Center (Masjid Taqwa), on Tuesday. “We already have a large number of people who are on psychotropic drugs, and, with the addition of marijuana, it’s just not a good mix.”
Larger leaves drop to the floor during a de-fanning process at Native Roots Mothership cultivation facility in Denver Friday, June 21, 2024. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
Community impact by marijuana businesses
Molly Duplechian, executive director of Denver’s Department of Excise and Licenses, acknowledges that “certain neighborhoods were getting more stores and more applications and more businesses.”
Several reasons contribute to that, including zoning codes, real estate costs and proximity restrictions that require marijuana businesses to be at least 1,000 feet away from schools and other facilities.
However, communities with high concentrations of marijuana businesses have worried about the potential impacts on youth usage, commercial real estate values and the areas’ cultural and historic significance, Duplechian said.
“We heard from some community members that they wanted to have other opportunities for other types of businesses to come into their neighborhood,” such as grocery stores, she added.
As a result, Duplechian’s department put a restriction on opening new stores or cultivation facilities in those neighborhoods of “undue concentration.” Marijuana businesses also have to comply with rules about advertising and odor control.
Giant evaporative coolers that filter the air from inside the Native Roots Mothership cultivation facility to them bring odorless air back out Denver Friday, June 21, 2024. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
However, odor complaints reported to Denver’s Department of Public Health & Environment aren’t typically an issue for cultivation facilities.
Only two neighborhoods on the city’s high-concentration list had complaints filed from May 2022 to May 2024: three in Northeast Park Hill around the Denver Police Department’s District 2 station and two in Overland, DDPHE spokesperson Ryann Money said. No issues were found.
Since marijuana tax revenue collections began in February 2014, Colorado’s Department of Revenue has received a total of about $2.7 billion through April 2024.
Denver has collected almost $491 million in taxes and licensing fees since recreational marijuana sales started in 2014 through 2023. This year, 29% of marijuana tax revenue goes toward homelessness services, 28% to affordable housing, 14% to the Herman Malone Fund to support minority-owned businesses, 12% to education, 9% to regulation and 8% to enforcement, according to city data shared exclusively with The Denver Post.
Any extra money is allocated to the city general fund for city services, so “there are literally pot for potholes in Denver,” said Excise and Licenses spokesperson Eric Escudero. For instance, marijuana taxes helped build the Carla Madison Recreation Center on East Colfax Avenue, Duplechian added.
The decline in marijuana sales has led to nine cultivation facilities shuttering across the five most concentrated neighborhoods in the past year.
“We’re now 10 years into this, and I think we just are kind of seeing some stabilization and some of the novelty wearing off of it, too,” Duplechian said.
In Northeast Park Hill, the Native Roots Cannabis Co. cultivation facility is about 1,000 feet from the Sand Creek Landfill in what Liz Zukowski, director of public affairs, described as a heavy commercial and industrial area. Cultivation facilities are restricted to certain zone districts, and they’re difficult to relocate because of their layouts and equipment.
“These are the areas where the city designated cultivations to be,” Zukowski said. “The former city council created the licensing and zoning scheme and associated maps for marijuana businesses, which follow historically racist redlined areas.”
Hundreds of employees work at the Native Roots location, which opened in 2013, and they frequent local restaurants and retail stores, Zukowski said.
“Marijuana cultivations create no more stress on the neighborhoods than the Caterpillar site across the street, the nearby (Colorado Department of Transportation) locations, or the SaltBox facility next door,” Zukowski said.
“How do we mitigate some of the harms?”
In Denver, a cannabis store is required to take part in a “needs and desires” hearing with the community to prove it’s wanted in that location, and businesses must develop community impact plans, the Marijuana Industry Group reports.
Denver Councilwoman Shontel Lewis, who represents Park Hill and Montbello in District 8, hasn’t heard concerns from her constituents about the concentration of cannabis shops or odor from cultivation facilities, said spokesperson Vince Chandler.
Instead, residents are asking her to tackle larger issues — and those include adding more community amenities, such as crosswalks, traffic-calming measures and multilingual signage for parks and roadways.
“Why don’t we have that concentration of positive amenities?” Lewis said, pointing to Denver’s zoning codes as a possible area of improvement. “How do we mitigate some of the harms that communities have had to endure for decades from a lack of city investment?”
Park Hill neighbors are pushing to build green spaces, grocery stores and co-ops.
“This is the only community that does not have access to a simple grocery store,” said LaMone Noles, vice president of the Northeast Park Hill Coalition, on Tuesday.
She wants to develop a business district between 38th Avenue and Smith Road to boost economic activity. Her area once benefited from the presence of Stapleton International Airport in the nearby Central Park neighborhood. Denver International Airport replaced Stapleton in 1995.
“They’re talking about live, work, play — we’ve been there, done that, right in this neighborhood,” Noles said. “We need to get it back.”
Abel Maldonado-Ramirez, 9, practices his soccer skills at Montbello Central Park in Denver on Friday, June 21, 2024. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
In Montbello, residents hope to build “parks that are just as lavish and beautiful as the parks that you might see in Central Park,” Lewis said. They’d like to expand the Montbello Connector — a free ride-share service offered to commuters by the city.
A recent win: The community is getting its own senior technology lab in the Arie P. Taylor Municipal Center on Peoria Street for elderly residents to gather and access the internet, which is set to open this summer after seven years of interest.
Along the southern end of the district, East Colfax residents want to cool off in a splash pad because they lack shade and pools.
The city’s participatory budgeting process was supposed to fund this lower-cost water infrastructure, Lewis said, but “that piece of the project had gotten lost.” She’s still waiting on updates, including a price estimate.
“For East Colfax, Montbello, Park Hill, the feeling is that they’ve been historically overlooked when it comes to investment in those communities: both investment in the infrastructure amenities, but also the people,” Lewis said. “It feels like they’ve just kind of been forgotten.”
Frustrations, but fewer complaints
Councilman Darrell Watson represents Globeville, Elyria-Swansea and Five Points in District 9, and he’s balancing supporting small businesses like cannabis dispensaries and advocating for residents’ quality of life.
Marijuana businesses and liquor stores are often located on less-expensive property in low-income neighborhoods, “and it’s usually in Black and Brown communities,” Watson said.
He’s “not shocked” that his district is listed among the neighborhoods with a high concentration of cannabis businesses.
“I would love for our communities to have a high concentration of rec centers or high concentration of parks,” Watson said. “We don’t have those.”
However, according to data that he obtained from Denver 311, “we have more complaints about alcohol and liquor stores and bars that sell alcohol than cannabis,” Watson said.
He wants to ensure that cannabis and alcohol businesses are treated equitably within the city’s regulations.
Still, Armando Payan, a longtime Globeville resident, remains frustrated by the number of marijuana businesses operating throughout his district in northern Denver. His neck of the woods is often tied to its eastern neighbor, Elyria-Swansea.
“We don’t need the marijuana industry in our community,” said Payan, president of a group called the United Community Action Network (UCAN) of Metro Denver. He’d like to see the city put more limits in place, lamenting that Denver uses his zip code, 80216, “as a dumping ground.”
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Instead, he hopes for progress in his community spurred by innovative methods like solar panels that produce direct current electricity, giving residents more independence.
“We want this part of the city to lead the rest of the city in terms of quality of life,” Payan said.
But Truman Bradley, executive director of the Marijuana Industry Group, says he’s watched cannabis businesses extend helping hands over the years, working in line with registered neighborhood organizations (RNOs) to build up communities.
“Even from the early days of legalization, cannabis businesses have been deeply involved in their communities because it’s the right thing to do,” Bradley said. “Whether its neighborhood cleanups, walks for charitable causes, community food drives, or planting trees alongside RNOs, examples abound of cannabis businesses doing good in their communities.”