Interview with Selena

The Sun Valley neighborhood in Denver, Colorado has been undergoing major redevelopment led by the Denver Housing Authority. The redevelopment aims to transform the low-income community into a mixed-income community focused on health, economic opportunity, green space, and quality education. Selena Ramirez, a resident, shares her experience growing up in Sun Valley and her involvement in the community. She talks about the cultural diversity, community programs, and the sense of family she found in the neighborhood. However, she also highlights the challenges and frustrations with the redevelopment process, including promises that weren't fulfilled and the displacement of residents. Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, testing. Hi Dennis, this is Lindsey, I'm the contributing correspondent. I'm doing an interview with a resident from the Sun Valley neighborhood on a series on equitable development. So we're going to begin. Hello and welcome to another episode of Develop This. I'm your Develop This correspondent, Lindsey Miller, and I'm here with Selena Ramirez, a resident from the Sun Valley neighborhood in Denver, Colorado. Thanks for being with us, Selena. Thank you for having me. We're here to talk about the redevelopment of the Sun Valley neighborhood in Denver, Colorado. For some background, Sun Valley is a geographically central neighborhood in the metro Denver region. Though it's central, it's often described as hidden due to its natural and man-made boundaries. For the past four years, Sun Valley has been undergoing a major redevelopment led by the Denver Housing Authority. Before the redevelopment, Sun Valley's housing was 94% subsidized and 80% of the population was living below the poverty line. 25% of Sun Valley's residents identified as first-generation immigrants, 20% identified as refugees, and Sun Valley residents represented over 33 different cultural backgrounds and over 28 languages. The redevelopment has been funded by two Federal Choice Neighborhoods Initiative grants, and according to the Denver Housing Authority, the $240 million redevelopment plan aims to transform the low-income community made up of primarily public housing to a mixed-income community focused on health, economic opportunity, green space, and quality education. We're here with Selena to hear a resident's perspective on the redevelopment and how it has evolved since planning began in 2013. So, Selena, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what it was like growing up in Sun Valley? So, my name is Selena. I'm 24 years old, and I moved into Sun Valley when I was 9 years old. So, 2009 is when I moved into Sun Valley. The way that we got there was my mom was a victim of domestic abuse, and so when we were originally living in the Park Hill neighborhood, and he ended up getting arrested and going to prison, and he paid all the bills. He wouldn't let my mom work. So, she ended up getting evicted, and we were living with family members for a little bit before, and thank God, she finally had applied for housing, I guess, a couple of years before he even got arrested. So, while we were living with family members, we ended up getting into housing, and so we moved into housing in 2009. In the Sun Valley homes? Yes, in the Sun Valley homes. How would you describe the Sun Valley homes? I would say that they were very culturally diverse. When we first moved in there, my mom was a little hesitant to let us outside because, you know, it was a different neighborhood, and she was just very scared of, you know, there was some crime and stuff going on, and she didn't really want us outside, but eventually she started going to, like, community meetings and, you know, being a community member, and things started changing, and we started being part of the community ourselves, and we just realized how beautiful and diverse and just amazing the neighborhood was. We were very close with everybody who lived there. We learned about different cultures. I learned a couple words in different languages, and I just really blossomed there. I feel like it made me who I am today, and I learned a lot about just community and what it means to be part of a community like that. Yeah. Can you tell me a little more about your involvement in the neighborhood just throughout the course of your life? I started doing community, just like, well, I would go with my mom to some of the community meetings just because I just like to tag along with her, so I went to a lot of meetings with her. I also started going and doing programming with the Sun Valley Youth Center when I was young, so they took us to, like, eulogies, bike rides. They'd take us to the Bronco Stadium, Bronco Games. We went out in nature a lot, which is a lot of things that I probably wouldn't have been able to experience, you know, because that's just things you can't afford, so we went, like, rafting. We went rock climbing. We went fishing. We went camping. Just a lot of experiences I don't think I would have been available to do without their help, so they did a lot for me in the community. I also was a part of the, well, now it's called the Sun Valley Kitchen, but back then it was just kind of a community space, and they did cooking classes, and I did cooking classes with Chef Ruben, and they just always had things going on in the neighborhood for us kids to do. Yeah. What was your favorite thing about growing up in Sun Valley? I think my favorite part was just really growing to become, like, just growing your own family, basically. You just become family with everybody who was around you. You just knew everybody. You just walk down the street, and you strike up a conversation with someone, and you learn to just kind of rely on the people around you and just, you know, build your own family because a lot of people who live there didn't have their own families either, so you just built one from your neighbors. So tell me about the redevelopment, kind of what you know about it or your experience with it because I know it started a long time ago, right? So the way that we heard about the development, I was really young, I think, when we first started hearing, like, little tricklings as kids. Like, you guys here, they're going to knock them down, and they're going to build them up again, and, you know, you're young, so you weren't really, like, paying that much attention, but then as the years go by, they started doing, like, these community meetings and just inviting residents to go to these meetings and, you know, giving in your input. So, you know, we're young. We're excited. We're like, ooh, they're going to build parks, and they're going to build all this nice stuff for us. So, you know, we went to these meetings. We gave input, and eventually they started knocking them down. Knocking what down? The buildings. So the buildings were little. They were a little old. They weren't, they didn't have any AC, so in the summer it was brutal, and then winter it got kind of cold. It had heaters, but it just, you know, the windows were kind of drafty. They weren't the best, you know. You didn't have a washer or dryer. We had a laundry mat, but then people would steal your clothes from the laundry mat. So, you know, it was needed. I think it was needed definitely to be rebuilt, but I just think that the way that it all happened probably could have been handled a little bit better, and, you know, they promised us that we'd all be able to come back, and we'd be able to experience all these amenities and have all this input, and then when things went down, a lot of people weren't allowed to come back, my mom and me included, and a lot of our neighbors still don't live in Sun Valley. I think that the way that things kind of changed behind the scenes should have been explained a little bit more in depth to the residents, because I know there was a lot of things happening like government-wise where they changed like income levels and things like that, which I still don't even understand now when I'm older, and I probably should know that, but I still don't understand how it happened and why we suddenly were over income when before we weren't, so I still don't understand why that happened, and a lot of people still are in the dark about that, and I think that it should have probably been handled just a little bit better. When you say when everything went down, can you just describe for the listeners just more specifically what you mean? So we, this was in 20, I'm not sure on the years, but the first year that we started hearing like, okay, you're going to have about this much time to get your stuff put together, and we're going to give you, I think they said there was three options, so like you three different sites, and you only had the opportunity to decline two sites, and the third one you were just stuck with wherever you got put. So before this had happened, they told us that we would be able to just, they would build up one part of Sun Valley, and then once the new part was built, they would just move you into the new part, and that's, you would just stay in Sun Valley, but obviously things changed, and we weren't allowed to stay on the same property, so we're over here freaking out because we don't know where we're going to go, and we really don't want to leave our neighborhood and get put into this random neighborhood where we just don't know anybody, and we have all these families that we've built here, and we just don't want to leave, but we don't really have an option. That's just what we're dealt with. So the first option we had didn't work out for us. The second option, we didn't like it, and then eventually we ended up having to move to North Lincoln, which was another site, which was honestly like a five, ten-minute drive away from Sun Valley, so it wasn't too far, but it wasn't Sun Valley, so it was different, and before they moved us to North Lincoln, they moved us to another side of Sun Valley, so we went from one side of Sun Valley to the other side of Sun Valley, and then from that Sun Valley, we left to North Lincoln, so we moved twice, and we were in North Lincoln, and I continued to work in Sun Valley, so I still have that connection, but I don't live there, so it's different than living there, so it's been kind of rough moving, having to move, and I know it really bothered my mom that she wasn't, because my mom did a lot for the community. She really, really put her heart and soul into the community, and she did a lot for DHA, and the way that it went down, and she was promised all of these things because of what she did for DHA, and she wasn't allowed to come back, and now she doesn't live in housing at all. She completely left housing. She was having issues with them, and now she doesn't live in housing. She lives in the north side, but I know that it still bothers her to this day that she built up this community, put her soul into the community, and now she kind of just had to let it go and move on, and I feel like it's bothered us all a lot. Yeah, tell me what it was like for you to have to move so many times. Well, the first time, it wasn't too hard, because it was still in the same neighborhood, so we just kind of just drove ourselves to the other house, so it wasn't too bad, and we just moved to another side of it, so we just knew the people that were on the other side, like, oh, we're closer to you guys now, because we still knew everybody in the neighborhood. The second time moving was kind of rough. They had to give you, like, a check, and I think something happened with the check, so we didn't even get that full money until, like, after we had already moved, and the whole process of moving was just hard, because they kept telling us, like, oh, you're going to be out in a week, and then the week went up. They're like, oh, it's delayed again, and we just were living out of boxes for a minute, because they kept giving us, like, you have a week to move, you have a week to move, and then eventually, I think we ended up living out of boxes for, like, a month before we actually moved, because we wanted to make sure we had everything together, so then we ended up moving after, like, a month of them telling us we were going to move, and then we eventually moved, and just the whole process of moving is just difficult, because we also just, like, like, we didn't have the check at that time. Something happened with the check, so we couldn't go pay for a U-Haul, so we had to rely on, like, family friends to help us move in cars, which isn't the best, because it's a lot of trips, and it wasn't easy. It was very difficult to move, but eventually we moved, and we got settled in, and we just never really felt that connection to the neighborhood we lived in, so we lived there, but we didn't enjoy it. We weren't connected. We just really didn't go outside. Like, we just kind of were just kind of shut in and kept to ourselves, because that wasn't the neighborhood that we knew, and it was just hard to fit in somewhere when you spent, like, multiple years in another neighborhood. You said you still work in Sun Valley. Mm-hmm. How have you seen the neighborhood change? Hmm. It's been really difficult. It's kind of—it's bittersweet, because I do have connections to the people that do live there now, and there's some beautiful people that live there, but it's also—the bittersweet part is you just see remnants of what used to be, because it was just such a beautiful community, like, so many just—so many cultures, so many languages spoken, and it really educated me on a lot of, like, just diversity that I probably wouldn't have known. Like, I grew up with, like, my neighbors making me fresh pho. Like, they'd always cook for us, and be like, come get food, come get food from different cultures. Like, who gets to just have fresh, culturally food just ready for you, because you can just go walk to your neighbors, and they have food ready for you? Or we used to do, like, cultural just, like, festivals all the time. People would just come and just celebrate their culture together, and it just went from that to something just completely different, and it was just very sad. Yeah. How would you describe it now? I think now I see the—I see the disconnect between the people who are low-income and the people who are paying market rate, and it's very sad, because the people who are paying market rate have this assumption of people who live in housing that they're all just, you know, bad people, and they're criminals, and they have loud kids, but on the other side, you're not seeing that, like, these kids are, like—they were displaced from their community, and they come back to this place where they were used to having a yard, they were used to having a park, they used to be able to go outside and play, and now they're kind of just stuck in the hallways of a concrete building and stuck in an asphalt parking lot. Like, there's nowhere for them to play, so if you're hearing them play, like, where else are they going to go play? That's just you hearing somebody's kids, and it's sad, because they're making assumptions off of a few bad people of everybody who lives in housing is just a bad person, and that's not okay. That's not right. And the same goes for, you know, the lower income people, like, I hate this person, you know, they think they're better than us, and it's, you know, they just have this disconnect between them, and I wish it was more connected. There's also not as many community events as there used to be, I've noticed. There's a couple, but the way that it used to be, I just feel like they need to work more on bringing people together, because it's starting to just kind of become this divide between the people, and it shouldn't be like that. And it's hard. Yeah. So, what would you tell DHA or any other housing authority attempting a similar project in the future? Well, I know that they're planning to redevelop the rest of the sites, because, to be fair, they're all very old, and they're just not up to standards of what people should be living in, you know? I think that if they do go about this again, because I know in their hearts they're trying to, you know, do what's best. They want to make sure people are having amenities that they need, and, you know, having AC. I think just keeping in contact with those people and really making sure that your residents are aware of what is happening, even if, you know, you think they're not going to understand, find a way to explain things to them so that they do understand. Because I was in the dark. Even when we tried to reach out for answers, it's like, this percentage of this changed, and this number changed. I'm like, I don't know what's happening, but all of a sudden we can't live here, and it's confusing, and it's hard. And it also makes me really think about the kids, because there was children who were they grew up there their whole life, just like me, but they were younger. So, like, having that displacement, I just wonder how that really affects their mental health, being able to just, you know, go outside and play and have all of these, like, just family members and friends, and then just going from that to either completely leaving your neighborhood or coming back to a community that's just completely different. Then they close the school down, so all of these kids are now leaving that school that they were a safe in. That was their safe place, and now they have to go across Olfax to Cheltenham. And I already know that school's been having problems with the kids, too. There was a problem with the bus driver. There was a problem with the bus aid, and the kids there have just had a hard time migrating to Cheltenham, and it's been specifically the kids from Sun Valley. So, it's just been I feel like one thing led to another, and it kind of just spirals, and I think just making sure that you're communicating with your residents and keeping them in the loop and not in the dark. Just really, really communicate with people, because it's probably hard for them as an organization. They're so big to really think that small, but I think that's really important and vital to make sure that you're creating better communities. I know that they want to create better communities, but just have more communication with your residents. Just make sure that you're keeping them in the loop and you're communicating with them. That's just all you can do. Okay, great. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Are you involved in any other projects besides your job at the market? So, I've been working with History Colorado on the Museum of Memory project. So, what they're doing is they're going to community members and people who have lived in the Sun Valley neighborhood. I know recently they changed it to just the west side because they realized that there's another community that used to live there along the Colfax side of it. It just got swept away during the flood. So, there's people who are alive and still, you know, were a part of that, too. So, they expanded it to the west side area. So, that's what it is. But that project is very interesting. It's... Sorry, Mia. You did something that I'll never get to. The project has been very eye-opening to me. There's a lot of different people that I wouldn't have realized lived there from so long ago. There's just such a rich history that comes with the neighborhood, and I've really been able to talk to residents that I knew personally and just really get their perspective on how they felt about the redevelopment. And there was people in there who wanted to just explain to themselves that they really wanted... They lived there for over 25, up to 50, 60 years. So, they really just were born and raised in Sun Valley, and they explained that they wanted to die on Sun Valley soil. And I think that that's just very deep, and it cuts kind of deep because you really realize that these people spent their entire lives... It's just a fraction for me. I lived there for 12, 13 years, but these people spent 25, 50, 60 years living on that soil and really just planned to die on that soil. It's just very meaningful to me that something like that can be ripped away from somebody. Do you think there are any positive outcomes from the redevelopment? I think there are positive outcomes. There are people that did live in Sun Valley that I've been able to communicate with and that have came back. And they're very grateful that they have AC now. They have a washer and a dryer. They have all these things that we didn't get to have before. And I think it's just taken some getting used to. They know that it's not what it used to be. And they're slowly building their own community. People are starting to kind of talk to each other. I get to talk to people who come into the store, and they get to tell me about their family and what's going on. And I feel like I'm slowly starting to build those relationships back. And I see them starting to build relationships with each other and rely on each other as neighbors. Even if it's not the same, I can see that it's slowly starting to come back. But I know that it's not going to be like what it was before. But maybe it can be something different. Tell me briefly about the store when you're talking about the store. So I work at Decatur Fresh. So it's a market in the neighborhood. And we just provide service to the community. We don't really charge that much. Our prices are very low. We bring fresh food to the community. You know, a lot of stuff there is locally grown. And I just love working there. I love to be able to give back to my community. Even though I don't work there anymore, I live there anymore, I work there. So it gives me some type of fulfillment and enrichment to be able to give back to the people that live there. That's great. What do you think, if anything, DHA kind of, like, missed? Like, what did they not understand about building community that you think folks in Sun Valley might understand better? Something that I think they missed was just I don't think they really understood how deeply woven that community was. Like, I've been to other, you know, DHA sites, and I can see it, you know, but I just feel like maybe I'm tooting my own horn because I lived there and I grew up there, and I just really feel like our community was just different than the rest. Like, that sense of just togetherness and that sense of community and that sense of just love that we have for each other was just different. Like, I feel like that's something that they didn't really, you know, they work there, they don't spend that much time in the community to really just learn how deeply we just became interwoven with each other. And I feel like if they realized that, they maybe would have handled it a little bit better. But also things go on behind the scenes that we don't know about. So maybe just really pay attention deeply to how much, like, this is a community. This is where people were born and raised. People have kids here. People have grandkids here. People have history here. And it's just making sure that you realize that these are families that you're uprooting, and these are children and grandchildren and aunts and uncles and friends and family, and you really have to make sure that you are going to do what's in their best interest. Thank you.