Lack of sufficient green space has become a common complaint among Denverites
By Bruce Finley | bfinley@denverpost.com | The Denver Post
PUBLISHED: January 14, 2019 at 6:00 am | UPDATED: January 15, 2019 at 9:06 am
Denver’s intensifying green-space crunch is hurting residents, creating stay-or-go quandaries and raising environmental-justice concerns as people search for nature near where they live.
Parents, in particular, say they struggle to raise healthy children as natural space increasingly is built over or paved.
“If they just stay inside, they grow up to be fat people on phones, all the technology things,” said Gabriela Azevedo, 27, a mother of two boys in north Denver.
One of her children, Sabian, 7, has asthma so severe that Azevedo and her husband recently moved him to a different school — away from Denver’s Interstate 70 redevelopment construction near their home, an area where asthma and blood lead levels are elevated. There’s a small park nearby.