Brad Buchanan spends his summer weekends, and some predawn mornings, atop an ATV checking on his cattle along Kiowa Creek. And with his 15-year-old son, Will, he bales hay, alfalfa and a sweet sorghum-sudangrass hybrid to store up feed for winter.
“They’re all a little different,” he said one recent Saturday in a field as he rubbed the back of No. 908, a 1,500-pound cow he called gentler than most.
But each weekday, Buchanan shifts gears. He slips into a suit, wrangles his Honda Civic and drives an hour to downtown Denver, where he spends his days helping to map out the growth — increasingly vertical — of the burgeoning city.
The weekend farmer who’s also a longtime architect well-regarded in development circles is five months into his job as Denver’s head city planner.
That juxtaposition — an Eastern Plains rancher responsible for making key decisions about Denver’s increasingly dense urban footprint — has some critics of the city’s building bonanza grumbling.
In part, it’s because Buchanan is an enthusiastic apostle for urbanism. He talks about the richness of vibrant, walkable neighborhoods that are developing in Denver — from old West Highland to new Stapleton — and about dense redevelopment clustered around some transit stations.
He told a crowd during a spring community meeting in Lowry: “It’s an incredible time in our city.”
The job gives him the ultimate pulpit in a city that, for the most part, has embraced redevelopment. But some frustrated residents have banded together in frequent, sometimes litigious backlashes. Buchanan has been involved in projects that have spurred a lawsuit or another challenge, including the in-the-works St. Anthony Hospital redevelopment and a scuttled church redevelopment in West Highland.
For some, Denver’s drive for density has gone too far, and Buchanan brings reason for skepticism.
“It’s very easy for Brad to come into the city and shove this density down our throats and then drive back home to his ranch,” said Larry Ambrose, president of Inter-Neighborhood Cooperation, an alliance of neighborhood groups.
Buchanan, though, is used to explaining why he’s just as comfortable in a ball cap and blue jeans, walking among his cattle, as he is in a suit on a B-cycle bike, pedaling between meetings downtown.
Five years ago, he moved his family from a Park Hill mansion to their modest farmhouse north of Strasburg, on a ranch that had started out as a weekend retreat.
Back in Denver, he also had been a beekeeper. On the ranch, his family fell in love with the livestock, he said, and the rural life. Along with his wife, Margaret, son Will and daughter Grace, 16, Buchanan says he raises grass-fed beef humanely, for sale mostly to individuals.
The Flying B Bar Ranch now has 135 head of cattle and stretches 1,500 acres.
Buchanan says his city and farm roles, each with a focus on sustainability, complement each other.
“To me, there are two big jobs we have as human beings trying to figure out how we’re going to keep the planet alive,” Buchanan said. “We need to protect nature … and we need to perfect the urban environment. I get to do both with my lifestyle.”
Dozens of projects
Mayor Michael Hancock considered Buchanan, 53, his dream pick as executive director of Denver’s Department of Community Planning and Development.
He played roles in dozens of Denver building projects, ranging from downtown’s 32-story, curved-roof One Lincoln Park condo tower to smaller ones, including affordable-housing projects. Industry colleagues call them groundbreaking for their use of quality materials and good design. He also served in public positions that included a stint as chairman of the Denver Planning Board, and he helped rewrite the city’s zoning code, which sets limits on land use and height.
Buchanan, the first planning director in recent memory to come directly from the private sector, will “bring perspective from the other side of the counter” to improve the way the department handles development issues, Hancock predicted.
The mayor appointed Buchanan to replace Rocky Piro, who in February left abruptly and with little explanation after barely more than a year on the job.
Hancock revealed during a recent interview that Buchanan had been his first choice for planning director when he was elected in 2011. But the timing was bad for Buchanan, who had just joined RNL, a national and international architectural firm, with his longtime partner John Yonushewski.
The mayor suggested that Piro, with a regional planning background, wasn’t the right fit. So he turned again to Buchanan earlier this year.
After Buchanan accepted, the mayor persuaded the City Council to up the salary by $36,438, to $170,000, to make it more competitive.
“When I learned he was going to be the new planning director, I was just thrilled,” said Ken Schroeppel, an urban planning and design instructor at the University of Colorado Denver and founder of the widely read DenverInfill and DenverUrbanism blogs. As someone Schroeppel considers a city-builder, Buchanan “would have been one of my top choices.”
He has worked with Buchanan through the Downtown Denver Partnership, for which Buchanan served a year as chairman.
Buchanan, an Ohio native and the son of a Methodist preacher and a teacher, moved to Colorado in the early 1980s after college. He fulfilled an urge he had had since vacations here as a kid.
Singing his praises
While some neighborhood advocates express surprise that Buchanan has left the city life behind, others who watched him on the zoning task force and the Planning Board sing his praises.
“He’s got a great way of listening and showing that he’s listening,” said Joel Noble, president of Curtis Park Neighbors and a new member of the Planning Board.
When Buchanan was chairman, said Noble, then an observer, he was adept at guiding public hearings on issues that were magnets for testimony about a litany of grievances. He listened to the complaints, Noble said, but voted based on how city policies applied to the specific issues in front of the board at the time, instead of bowing to sentiment.
But as Denver’s planning director, Buchanan is in a trickier spot.
That much was evident last spring when a few dozen people listened to him speak inside Lowry’s historic Eisenhower Chapel, one of several community meetings he has addressed.
He preached the gospel of higher density, in which apartments and condos and row houses attract businesses and create more demand for transit. He spoke of a brighter future promised by several “catalytic” projects, from Union Station to light-rail lines to potential redevelopment of the National Western Stock Show complex.
But he heard few “amens” in the crowd.
“I can guarantee you nobody took transit here tonight,” Denver attorney Greg Kerwin, who lives in nearby Crestmoor, told Buchanan.
He and others pushed Buchanan on traffic, the city’s minimum parking requirements for projects — which have decreased in some cases — and the need for light rail in east Denver.
Buchanan held his ground. He argued that market patterns guide development more than the city can, and that the city’s parking requirements were sufficient.
Kerwin wasn’t convinced.
“It’s fine to build high-density projects downtown or at the old Gates Rubber site, where light-rail lines ferry thousands of new residents,” he told The Denver Post. “But many Denver neighborhoods don’t have the transportation infrastructure to support high density.”
A “bruised” relationship
Buchanan acknowledges that some neighborhood activists’ grievances against the city have led to a “bruised” relationship that has played out in rezoning fights and lawsuits.
“Their concerns are real and authentic, and so they need to be acknowledged and addressed,” he said in an interview.
“Our community is wrestling with what it means to be a growing urban environment,” he said. “And there are growing pains that go along with that.”
He earned praise from some when he recently announced that, in response to neighborhood organizations’ concerns, the planning department would notify registered neighborhood organizations 30 days earlier in the process when a developer applies to rezone land.
Some recent rezoning requests by developers have been met with fierce backlash during City Council hearings, before gaining approval. Others are teed up for later this year, including Boulevard One at Lowry.
But while Buchanan’s career gives him vital experience, it also brings baggage. As he helped weave Denver’s urban fabric beyond downtown, he lent a hand to some developments that ruffled neighbors’ feathers.
“Nobody does what he does for a living or what I do for a living without controversy,” said Susan Powers, a developer and president of Urban Ventures. She worked with Buchanan on the Denver Housing Authority’s Mariposa Project and other buildings.
He cared then about the health of neighborhoods, Powers said, not just about building profitable projects.
Buchanan points to other examples in which he worked with neighbors of his projects to craft plans they embraced. One was an affordable-condo building his firm designed and built on the redeveloped former Mercy Hospital site south of City Park.
Looking forward to role
He says he looks forward to similar conversations in his new role.
On the horizon is an update of a 2002 plan called “Blueprint Denver” that sets the tone for Denver development by designating areas of change and stability.
Buchanan also plans to start a public conversation soon about residents’ favorite places — to spur a discussion about urban design.
“I think it’s going to be very exciting for Denver” under Buchanan, said David Tryba of Tryba Architects, a friend and longtime competitor. “He likes to get things done. A lot of people like to hear themselves talk. I don’t think he’s that kind of guy at all.”
Jon Murray: 303-954-1405, jmurray@denverpost.com or twitter.com/JonMurray