Mayor Mike Coffman wants to make northwest Aurora the heart of the city.

Here's how it's going.

Northwest Aurora, for a few decades now, has been very depressed economically.

Not a lot of investment going into this particular community.

And so it's faced many challenges and setbacks over these last few decades.

The Colfax corridor was once a thoroughfare for the city, acting as a business hub.

Since the 1970s, travelers have relied more on the highways to go from Aurora to downtown Denver.

Many businesses on Colfax couldn't survive the change.

Recent attention on a national scale has painted part of the city in a different light.

Entire towns like Aurora, Colorado, and Springfield, Ohio, buckled under the weight of the migrant occupation and corruption like nobody's ever seen before.

Beautiful towns destroyed.

This hasn't aligned with the residents living there.

Northwest Aurora has gotten a lot of media coverage over the last year or so, but a lot of it was exaggerated or inaccurate.

Information about crime and gang, and especially the Venezuelan gang.

Without a doubt, there were some some real issues and some real problems there.

But the way that it was covered, that has really done us a disservice.

The city has been working on developing the arts and cultural district in northwest Aurora, but other than that, residents haven't seen that much change.

I havent it just seem like everything is still the same.

To me.

You know, the only change about it is There's a lot of businesses on this block has closed.

But as far as that everything else, It haven't changed.

Community members have been meeting for years trying to figure out how to address issues within the community.

We're trying really hard to build trust in this process of building the new development plan, because that's been something that's happened a lot in this neighborhood, is that the city has come in and ask people what they want, and they're not really done anything with it.

And so they're kind of tired of being asked questions and not having anything happen.

As of September 2024, the city of Aurora contracted Progressive Urban Management Associates, also known as Puma, to research the neighborhood and create a development plan to revitalize the area.

Economic revitalization is what the city is after.

How it's approached, though, is important to the residents.

Residents and community members are worried about gentrification and the displacement of long term residents.

On the evening of March 18th, Puma held a community meeting at North Middle School.

Community members spoke about many things they'd like to see change in the neighborhood, but also had questions about Puma's role in all of this.

Residents are hoping that this time change will actually come.

Yes, we want economic revitalization, but not at the cost of gentrifying or pushing people out, because we think the diversity that exists here and the people who are here are very important to the fabric of this community.