Focus Area Issues

The City Plan has identified five locations, or focus areas, within Wheat Ridge that can illustrate how the tools described in the City Plan could be applied to address various issues in real settings. These five focus areas are prototypes for other places within the city facing similar challenges. These areas were selected to illustrate this plan in action for several reasons:

They address several hard-to-fix issues that are directly related to community priorities.
The solutions developed in the focus area illustrations are exportable to other locations in Wheat Ridge.
They are important locations within the community.

Map of Wheat Ridge showing the five focus area locations within yellow circles.

1. Wadsworth Shopping Center
2. 44th Avenue from Clear Creek to Independence Street
3. 38th Avenue from Upham Street to Harlan Street
4. 29th Avenue from Fenton Street to Chase Street
5. Ward Station

Issue	Focus Areas Areas where tools to address these issues are illustrated	Other Locations Facing Similar Issues
Underutilized Land Land not being used to its full potential, often used for large, surface parking lots	Wadsworth Shopping Center 44th Ave 38th Ave 29th Ave Ward Station	Main corridors (Wadsworth, Kipling, Youngfield, 38th, 44th)
Superblock Large area of the city without an internal street network and lacking connections to adjacent locations	Wadsworth Shopping Center	Wadsworth, Youngfield
Placemaking Street frontages needing enhancements, sometimes the result of front yard parking	Wadsworth Shopping Center 44th Ave 38th Ave 29th Ave Ward Station	Main corridors (Wadsworth, Kipling, Youngfield, 38th, 44th)
Inadequate Bike/Pedestrian Facilities Infrastructure to support bicycling and walking, like bike lanes and sidewalks, are inadequate or missing	44th Ave	Citywide
Speeding and Traffic Vehicle speeds and/or traffic volumes impacting visitor experience	44th Ave 29th Ave	East-west community and district corridors (26th, 29th, 32nd, 38th, 44th)
Emerging Neighborhood Expanding residential area lacking amenities such as walkable retail, parks, etc.	Ward Station	Lutheran Legacy Campus, Clear Creek Crossing, and other future locations TBD
Underleveraged Trail/Creek Access Key locations along the Clear Creek Trail do not interface with or provide community access to the trail	44th Ave	Entirety of Greenbelt

To learn more about these focus areas and the tools the city can use to address these issues, please take our phase four survey.