Two city proposals are working their way through Hilltop this summer, and neighbors keep talking about them as if they're the same kind of threat. They aren't. One touches a corridor. The other touches every lot.
The Colorado Boulevard Bus Rapid Transit project and Denver's citywide Unlocking Housing Choices zoning initiative both showed up in the same Hilltop Neighborhood Association newsletter this July, filed under the same header of things residents should watch. But look at where each one can actually reach, and the shapes are opposite. Knowing the difference matters if you're trying to figure out which meeting is worth your Tuesday evening.
The Fight With a Fence Around It
The Hilltop Neighborhood Association defines its own territory with unusual precision: bounded by Colorado Boulevard on the west, Alameda on the south, Holly Street on the east, and 8th Avenue on the north. That western line is exactly where the BRT fight lives. CDOT's plan would bring dedicated bus lanes to the stretch of Colorado Boulevard between I-70 and the Southmoor station, and whatever gets built there stays on that boulevard. It doesn't relocate to Holly Street or drift into the interior.
That doesn't make it small. This is a $300 million project, and the neighborhood's position on it has shifted over the course of the year. In April, HNA described itself as still in listening mode, gathering information before taking a stance. By a June 23 board meeting, the association had moved to formal opposition, arguing in its position paper that two of the current design alternatives, which would eliminate a general travel lane in each direction, could substantially slow traffic along the corridor based on CDOT's own modeling. The board's stated worry is that drivers pushed off Colorado Boulevard will look for shortcuts through residential streets like Monaco Parkway and Holly Street.
Not everyone in the neighborhood agrees on what to do about it, even if they agree something needs doing. Michael Atkins, the HNA's vice president, put it plainly in April, ahead of a CDOT open house at the Clayton Early Learning Center on May 13:
"Colorado Boulevard is old, a mess, needs to be fixed, needs to be changed."
His question was never whether the corridor needs work. It's which of CDOT's four alternatives, one of which is simply doing nothing, actually solves the problem without dumping cars into the neighborhood. Other residents at that May 13 meeting weren't as convinced fixing was the point at all. Wayne Graham, another Hilltop resident, wore a hand-lettered "No BRT" sign to the open house and told Denverite flatly, "I would not spend $300 million to do it."
None of this resolves quickly. CDOT expects to settle on a preferred alternative sometime in 2026 or 2027, with construction not likely to start before 2030. Whatever gets decided, it gets decided on Colorado Boulevard. The fence holds.
The Fight Without One
Unlocking Housing Choices doesn't have a fence. Denver's Community Planning and Development department is advancing a citywide rewrite of the zoning code covering every SU, TU, and RH district, the designations that cover most of Denver's traditional single-family blocks, and Hilltop's interior is built almost entirely on that kind of lot. City Council is scheduled to vote on Phase 1 by the end of 2026.
The mechanics matter more than the headline. The draft wouldn't ban single-family homes. It would cap how large a new single-unit house can be, while granting a bigger allowable footprint to anyone who builds a duplex, triplex, or fourplex instead. There's an infill bonus for developers who keep the original house standing and simply add units behind or beside it, and an affordability bonus for those who deed-restrict a portion of new units. The intent, according to the city's own framing, is to make building several smaller homes on a lot pencil out better than building one large one. In a neighborhood where the standard move for decades has been the opposite, tearing down a mid-century ranch to build something bigger, that's a real reversal of incentive, not a cosmetic zoning tweak.
The citywide case for the change rests on a lopsided number. City data reported by Denverite in late July found that only about 10 percent of Denver's housing stock currently sits on lots with two to nine units, while 42 percent of the city's homes are detached single-unit structures. City planners and a handful of council members walked a middle-housing tour through Elyria-Swansea on July 29 to show what that kind of building already looks like on the ground elsewhere in Denver, an implicit argument that neighborhoods like Hilltop are the exception the rewrite is aimed at, not an afterthought. Coverage of the proposal has named Hilltop directly, alongside Washington Park and Belcaro, as one of the established neighborhoods homeowners worry could see its lot-by-lot character reshaped if the rezoning passes as drafted.
Zoning has been on HNA's list of core responsibilities since before BRT was a topic of conversation. It's the first item named among the association's stated areas of activity, ahead of traffic, crime and safety, schools and parks. That's not new urgency. It's the same job the association has done since the 1950s, when it formed in the wake of a 1951 plane crash near Bayaud Avenue and spent its early years lobbying to move flight paths off the neighborhood entirely. The specifics change. The habit of showing up doesn't.
What Neither Proposal Touches
| Colorado Blvd BRT | Unlocking Housing Choices | |
|---|---|---|
| Boundary | Contained to the corridor forming Hilltop's western edge | Applies to every SU, TU, and RH lot in the neighborhood's interior |
| Who decides | CDOT, RTD, the City and County of Denver, Arapahoe County, Glendale, and DRCOG | Denver City Council |
| Timeline | Preferred design expected 2026-2027; construction not before 2030 | Phase 1 vote scheduled by end of 2026 |
| What actually changes | Lane configuration and station placement on the boulevard | Allowable size and unit count on individual residential lots |
Set side by side, it's easier to see that neither of these debates has anything to say about Cranmer Park, and that's worth sitting with for a moment. The park's sundial dates to 1941, commissioned by George Cranmer after he bought a house on the edge of what was then Clayton Park and hired landscape architect Saco Rienk DeBoer and artist Arnold Ronnebeck to build a formal terrace with mountain-peak etchings and a working timepiece accurate to Denver's latitude. Vandals dynamited the original sundial in 1965. A replica went up in 1966, funded by a citywide fundraising push through the Denver Junior Chamber of Commerce. Weather and another round of vandalism in 1992 wore it down again, and a community campaign called Save the Sundial, working with The Park People, raised most of the money for a full restoration completed in 2020.
That's four separate rounds of neighbors deciding the sundial was worth saving, none of which had anything to do with a bus lane or a zoning code. The same is true of the small cluster of businesses that has anchored the Holly Street edge of the neighborhood for years: Kazumi Sushi, Locanda del Borgo, and Fierce45 sit within a block of each other, joined by longer-running names like Park Burger and Pete's Fruits and Vegetables, where owner Pete Moutzouris has stocked Greek imports and fresh produce for more than four decades. Graland Country Day School, where HNA holds its board meetings on the first Tuesday of alternating months, has been doing that just as long. Whatever Council or CDOT decides this year, none of it moves the sundial or closes the deli.
If you want to follow either fight directly, CDOT keeps its Colorado Boulevard BRT project materials posted online, including survey links and meeting summaries. Denver's Unlocking Housing Choices page has the draft text amendments and the schedule for the Council vote. HNA's own newsletter archive tracks both from the neighborhood's specific vantage point, which is really the only vantage point that matters if you live inside those four boundary streets.
The two proposals will likely resolve on different clocks, in different rooms, decided by different bodies. One will end at a curb. The other could end at a property line running through the middle of a block you've walked past for years.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home you already own in Hilltop, or you're trying to understand how either proposal might shape a future purchase in the neighborhood, Jan Nelsen has spent decades reading Denver's inner-ring neighborhoods block by block. Get Your Home Value and start the conversation from an informed position.
