Confluence Denver: Colorado’s ambitious Space to Create experiment stakes its claim in Trinidad

20 Jun Confluence Denver: Colorado’s ambitious Space to Create experiment stakes its claim in Trinidad

By Ray Mark Rinaldi
Confluence Denver

Colorado’s Space to Create program is a bet on the power of creatives, not just a gamble on the hard-to-define way that painters, poets, chefs, and brewers can make a community more interesting, but an investment in the quantifiable idea that having artists and makers on the ground can spark development, bring jobs, lure tourists, and help educate children.

From New York’s SoHo to Denver’s RiNo, artists have proven themselves dependable gentrifiers, moving into urban neighborhoods that need a lift, upping the amenities, and acting as a magnet for development. Space to Create hopes to harness that economic might and apply it to rural and mountain areas of the state. Plans call to back nine live/work projects that will draw creatives to less populated cities and towns and, at the same time, make it possible for those already there to stay as the surroundings evolve.