It’s easy to pigeonhole the city on Denver’s eastern flank as just another sprawling suburb full of subdivisions, chain restaurants and low-rise office parks, but in the last two decades Aurora has developed a rich complexity.
Colorado’s third-largest city has a population fast approaching 375,000, and nearly 20% of those residents were born on foreign soil. The city’s older urban blocks — and its aging strip malls — are full of ethnic eateries, thwarting common characterizations of most suburban areas.
The view from Aurora, though, is that it’s taking a while for the rest of metro Denver to grasp the change.
“I think we represent a city that’s overlooked, particularly by the media,” said Tom Tobiassen, a former director for the Regional Transportation District. “… We don’t seem to have a voice in the greater Denver-Aurora area. I think we need to make a statement.”
Not that the city hasn’t already made a name for itself as home to crucial Colorado institutions. Buckley Air Force Base is one of the most tech-savvy military bases in the country, on the front lines in detecting and thwarting enemy missile attacks. The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus is a 25,000-employee health care juggernaut that boasts a medical school, Children’s Hospital and the UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital. The 1,501-room Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center, near the airport, is Colorado’s largest hotel.
Then there’s Aurora’s unique diversity. According to census estimates, the city is a “majority minority” community where less than 50% of the population is white, nearly 30% is Latino, about 16% is black and 5% is of Asian descent. Aurora’s residents include large immigrant communities, speaking dozens of languages.
Three Denver Post reporters and a photographer recently spent time talking with residents and local leaders about the issues that matter to them. It was the final stop on The Post’s 2019 listening tour, an undertaking that began in June in Yuma and also included visits to Greeley, Leadville, Pueblo, Alamosa and Grand Junction.
In Aurora, a common refrain is the city embraces its diversity but hasn’t fully harnessed it. The issue came up repeatedly during discussions with an array of community leaders at the Central Recreation Center on East Vassar Place.
“The city has done a reasonably good job of sort of accommodating diversity – and even I think we’ve gotten to the point where we celebrate diversity a little bit,” said the Rev. Reid Hettich, a pastor at a church off Colfax Avenue in west Aurora. “But I think we are a ways away from leveraging the diversity to make our community better.”
Looking outward, participants expressed frustration over how Aurora often gets lumped into Arapahoe County and the rest of the east suburban milieu — whether events actually played out inside city lines or not. That includes crime, said Mayor Bob LeGare, which can give the city a black eye when it doesn’t deserve one.
“Are you getting the sense that we don’t get no respect?” the mayor half-jokingly asked.
These Aurora residents are concerned their city is coming up short in carving out a distinct identity, one that effectively weaves together the strength of its institutions and the power of its people.
“I am getting to the point where I am ashamed, with a city the size of Aurora, that we don’t have a downtown,” said Papa Dia, an immigrant from Senegal who founded the African Leadership Group. “There’s no vision, there’s no talk about it. So we are growing in population, we are growing in size, and still we drive all the way into Denver’s downtown to spend our money there.”
Aurora’s giant employers
Aurora’s aspirations are not lost on Don Elliman, chancellor of CU’s Anschutz Medical Campus. The veteran magazine publisher and former state official said he recognizes that Aurora for years “bristled at being Denver’s poor neighbor.”
“And it’s still got plenty of issues,” he said. “We happen to be situated smack in the middle of three of the poorest zip codes in the state of Colorado, and we’re very mindful of that fact. We don’t want to be a house on the hill.”
Elliman said CU-Anschutz has a $2.4 billion annual budget and 2.1 million outpatient visits on campus each year, and it’s still growing on its 578-acre campus. It also has programs that hire people from surrounding neighborhoods and a community clinic provides free care.
“We are going to open up something called a FQHC – a federally qualified health center, to provide as many as 80,000 residents of Aurora with health care, at the corner of Airport (Boulevard) and Colfax,” he said.
Seven miles southeast of Anschutz sits another significant asset to the city, Buckley Air Force Base, which Col. Devin Pepper, commander of the 460th Space Wing, says had a nearly $1 billion economic impact on Aurora in 2018.
Unfortunately for Pepper and the 14,000 service members who work at Buckley, much of what goes on behind the secure perimeter — between east Sixth and Jewell avenues — is classified. But the mission is critical to the safety and security of the country.
“We provide 24/7 coverage of the entire globe,” the colonel said, sitting at the head of a long gleaming table in a conference room on base. “There’s no one else in the Air Force that does this mission.”
Buckley’s job, in part, is being the eyes and ears for the United States to guard against missile strikes by enemy countries. The base’s collection of radomes — weatherproof enclosures around radar antenna that communicate with military satellites, and which resemble oversized golf balls — are a visual hallmark.
“The first indication of a launch will come from our sensors we operate here at Buckley,” Pepper said. “We have some of the best operators on the watch.”
As home to the Colorado Air National Guard, Buckley also trains pilots for its F-16 fighter jets and its fleet of Chinook, Lakota and Blackhawk helicopters.
The base has “a very close partnership with the Aurora community,” Pepper said. The majority of people who work on base live in the surrounding community.
And Buckley recently signed an agreement to allow the Aurora Police Department to use the base’s new indoor shooting range, he said.
“Denver is a suburb of Aurora”
Despite having big economic anchors, Aurora still must grapple with the reality that life brings challenges for many residents.
Sean Taylor, deputy executive director of the Second Chance Center in Aurora, said he’d like to see the city “pay more attention to people who are struggling.”
The Second Chance Center helps formerly incarcerated people re-enter society after having served their time.
“We need more affordable housing, we need more stories to enthuse people to get out there and make a difference,” he said.
Satya Wimbish, an artist and staffer for the Aurora Cultural Arts District, said the city should do more to empower those in its immigrant community. Affordable housing is at the heart of their needs, too, she said.
“How are we making sure our people can stay here — that we’re not just running them around as flags and advertisements saying, ‘Hey, we love our immigrants and refugees but we can’t help you because we’re bringing in these big developers to make our cities look great,'” Wimbish said.
She said gentrification is on the march in Aurora, pricing out people on the economic margins.
“We need to learn from Denver’s mistakes,” she said. “With developing an arts district, we have a duty to make sure we don’t displace our community. We don’t want another Five Points/RiNo issue happening.”
Amid Aurorans’ issues — others included transportation challenges and concerns about education, gun violence, youth and mental health — there is the sense that the city has begun to come into its own.
Carolyn Boller, a longtime Aurora resident who chairs the city’s election commission, responded defiantly when asked to size up her city vis-à-vis Denver.
“People say to me, ‘Where do you live in Colorado?’ and I say, “I live in Aurora,’ ” Boller said. “Their first response is, ‘Where is that in relation to Denver?’ I say, ‘Denver is a suburb of Aurora.'”
Staff writer Saja Hindi and photographer Helen H. Richardson contributed to this story.
