After years of redevelopment, displaced Sun Valley residents are returning to public housing.

The $450 million redevelopment of Denver’s poorest neighborhood was, in many cases, painful. Longtime residents were displaced from their brick homes as the city set about building a mixed-income community. The city also razed old parks to make room for the developments. 

Numan Mahamed was among those residents and was relocated out of the neighborhood about a decade ago, when he was 9. Now, he’s 19 years old and living in one of the newly opened housing developments. But he’s not returning to the same Sun Valley. 

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“There was probably about four or five parks in Sun Valley back then, and that’s where most of my fondest memories growing up happened,” Mahamed said. “There’s probably one or two new parks in the new apartments, but it’s just not the same as before.”

Longtime and returning residents say a new, proper park is badly needed to enhance livability in Sun Valley. However, while towering public housing has been opened, development on a planned riverfront park has slowed. But significant money from the upcoming bond package could boost the project again. 

There aren’t a lot of proper outdoor places Sun Valley residents can go. 

Within Sun Valley’s borders, Denver Parks and Recreation lists Rude Park and Weir Gulch Marina Park as city-managed parks. But many say they don’t count those as amenity-heavy city parks, like Cheesman Park or Barnum Park.  

“There’s like a picnic table,” said Jeanne Granville, president of the Sun Valley Community Coalition. “There’s really nothing there.”

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Residents found some relief in Fairview Elementary School for a bit. But shortly after people started moving back, Denver Public Schools shuttered the campus and fences went up, making it harder to access its grass field and playground. 

Some of the new developments have small playgrounds, but Granville doesn’t consider those a “real park area.”

In 2019, Parks and Rec identified Sun Valley — and much of southwest Denver — as a neighborhood with a high need for a park. 

There are plans for an 11-acre regional park next to the Platte. 

In the near future, Sun Valley residents hope to see the vision of a riverfront park stretching from 6th Avenue to 20th Avenue come to fruition. 

Plans for the park — which is going by Sun Valley Riverfront Park for now — go back as far as 2017. That’s when the Elevate Denver bond package included $2 million to design the park. Documents from the time projected a 2024 project completion date. 

However, it’s now 2025, and the park is still just a dirt lot. The pathway towards building the park has hit numerous speed bumps. Namely, the area had to be cleaned up from decades of use as Xcel’s Zuni Generating Station, which processed coal, natural gas and steam energy. 

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Granville also said the design went through several iterations before the larger community signed off on it. 

In a Denver Housing Authority presentation to Denver City Council last month, designs for Phase I of the park showed a playground, a splash pad, an event plaza and gardens featuring plants native to Colorado. Only about half of the final park will be constructed during this phase. 

Riverfront Park may get more money to kick off the final leg of construction. 

The project has been identified as a high-priority development in the upcoming 2025 Vibrant Denver bond package. Granville said the neighborhood has requested $20 million of the $800 million package to be devoted to completing the park’s Phase II construction — which will focus on “play fields” for the remaining six acres of land, according to the DHA presentation.  

While the final list of projects hasn’t been announced by the city, locals are hopeful it will be included. 

“What we’re just hoping is we have been planning and in development for so long that it would just be great if we could really start to have a sense of completion,” Granville said. 

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Melanie Thibodeau, the Director of Development for the Sun Valley Youth Center, is itching to get green space in the neighborhood. She said the kids who go to the youth center would greatly benefit from having a large playground or a field for youth leagues to play on. 

While she’s hopeful the park will be funded by the bond, Thibodeau said she’s not going to let up on drumming up support until she sees it on her November ballot. 

“I think with all things that are [receiving] public-based funding, if you look away for a second, you just need to stay with it,” she said. 

The Denver Housing Authority’s presentation said Phase I construction will be completed by the end of 2026. 

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