Our great city has faced many challenges in its past. One among many is how we manage growth. Whether it is job growth, increasing traffic, or access to services, Colorado Springs must find solutions to all these issues. What are some of the things that our city is doing to solve all these issues?
It is no secret that our population is growing. According to census bureau statistics, in the year 1960 our metropolitan area stood at a sizeable population of 146,237 people. With the growth of our city’s metro population, today’s numbers have increased to a population of 755,105, according to the United States Census Bureau, 2020 Census.
The Demography Office predicts that based off population trends the Colorado Springs Metro Area will surpass the population of 1 million by 2045. This growth has many people excited and many worried., Junior Nicolai Zuckerman said, “Colorado Springs is a city of migrants, and we have become bigger than we should be, and we have surpassed the resources we can consume.” Then the question remains, if we must grow, what is being done to prepare for it?
With an increase in population comes an increase in vehicles on the road. This means we need to accommodate the infrastructure to have more cars on our roads. The city is currently creating a north-south highway in the cities east out of what currently is Powers Blvd. The city recently has been working on a bridge at Voyager Parkway and Powers to get ready to extend Powers from Highway 83 to I-25.
This expansion will be funded by a 1-Cent Sales Tax by the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority, with the city council in talk to expand Powers down south to 1-25. The Colorado Senate also passed legislation to put an overpass at Airport Road. This is a huge step for our city to get ready for our future because our city can finally have a belt way to push traffic out of very busy areas of our city into places people want to be quickly.
What drives a city to grow? When asking this question, the answer is obvious; jobs. Without jobs we can’t make money, and without money we can’t live our lives. Over the past 20 years Colorado Springs has added many big businesses to our city such as In-N-Out Burger, Whataburger, and Amazon. This means there are more jobs and more of a drag for people to move to our city.
With this comes rezoning to commercial districts with two major zones coming. The first is The Kettle Creek Center up north at Powers, and Highway 83. The other is the first of its kind for Colorado Springs, a 27-story mixed use skyscraper named ONE VeLa located Downtown. More business coming has many people excited senior Bella Hunsucker said, “more businesses coming is a good thing because people have more places to go to, and more places to work.”
As time goes on, old infrastructure starts to break down and look depleted, ruining the value of cities and historic communities. With investment into those communities to keep the infrastructure alive, we can keep those communities thriving for the long run. Downtown Colorado Springs in the past was quiet and slow for a major city, and recently we have seen much investment into reviving it, turning it into the classic downtown we see in most major cities, a place people want to be. We continue to see year after year new buildings popping up downtown, with them giving a huge economic impact to the area.
The city recently finished two major projects downtown, the US Olympic and Paralympic Museum and Weidner Field. Another is on the way as well with District 11 investing 100 million dollars to renovate Palmer High School to account for the recent population growth, and depleting Infrastructure. For the foreseeable future, downtown Colorado Springs will keep growing into the proper downtown it deserves to be.
Although I wish the growth of our city would slow or even stop, I realize people can make their own decisions about where they want to live. The sad part about living in one of the most beautiful parts of the country is people want to come here and stay here. Because of this, we need to come up with solutions to grapple with the growth we are dealing with and plan for the future, and what we want for our city. Colorado Springs is a great place to live, and we all seek to keep it that way, so it’s very crucial we plan our growth in a way that seeks to benefit the city and its citizens the most.
