EDITORIAL: Regatta Plaza urban renewal pitch points to Aurora’s expensive and inevitable future

Here we go again. While Aurora officials may fancy themselves in the growth and development business as Anschutz, Buckley, airport and water industries continue to blossom, in reality, it’s about decay and revival in the state’s third-largest city.

This week, reporter Brandon Johansson’s story on urban renewal and the Regatta Plaza community on Parker Road near Interstate 225 outlines how, once again, retail developments increasingly go sour.

In the mid-1980s, Regatta Plaza was one of Aurora’s trendiest and busiest shopping corridors. All along Parker Road, stores, restaurants and services boomed. Now, as Johansson points out, there are far more closed business than the struggling ones trying to hang on. Suburban decay is like a cancer, once it reaches a certain point, there is no guessing how it will end. In Aurora, that unsavory and expensive demise has come all too often: Buckingham Square Mall, the Aurora Mall, the Havana corridor, downtown Aurora, the Abilene Street big- box corridor and an endless and growing number of strip malls across the city have either been forgotten, saved or lost, all at great taxpayer expense.

Now, city officials are trying to find a way to spend tax dollars on bringing new commercial life to the Regatta Plaza area. In the end, it makes sense for Aurora to use urban renewal dollars and rules to spur new development, which pours new and more net dollars into city coffers. But rather than wait until communities or strip malls are so far gone that only condemnation and bare earth are the only possible solutions, there has got to be a better way.

The Town Center at Aurora mall, formerly the Aurora Mall, is a good example of making a dramatic change to retail before it’s too late. As mall revenues were sliding almost 10 years ago, mall and city officials agreed to pour city and private dollars into a $100 million redevelopment project that pulled the center back from the brink. That didn’t happen at Buckingham Square Mall, which sputtered and then slowly died before the city was essentially forced to spend money on razing it for a new development, Gardens on Havana.

Aurora needs to admit that urban renewal will be a big part of the city’s future over the next two decades and plan for that. It means identifying which strip malls and shopping corridors are at risk, beefing up code enforcement to help slow or prevent inevitable slide toward suburban ghetto, and selling voters a funded urban renewal plan that won’t be free. In many cases, urban renewal plans and money spent before economic cancer takes over will be far cheaper in the long run than waiting for major stores or majorities of shops to go belly up. Residents win here by stabilizing property values in at-risk neighborhoods and across the city, as well as having more and better community shops and amenities.

As for Regatta Plaza, which is uniquely situated at a thriving RTD light rail station that only promises to get better, it would be reckless not to integrate urban renewal designs into a transit-oriented development there. Pedestrian bridges and residential-retail-commercial uses consolidated into single structures are what voters and transit developers dreamed of. To simply try and recreate what worked only in the 1980s would be a grave mistake here, and across the city as these projects become increasingly frequent and pressing.