April 1, 2026 Forum

Bill got better. He moved into a duplex close to his primary care clinic and is walking in the park four days per week. Bill moved out of his apartment. Jane moved in. Jane has diabetes, depression, and has only found a part-time job two bus stops away. Nearby these is a healthcare office, grocery stores, and churches. There’s a poorly maintained park a few blocks away. A couple of nearby churches have shelters for homeless men and families. There’s a medical clinic a couple bus stops away.

Bill lives in a part of town that has been called blighted. From the periphery of Denver’s urban core through outlying historic residential neighborhoods, the 10-block Welton Street corridor once thrived as a vibrant and high-profile urban tapestry of jazz, entertainment, and vital services within the greater Five Points area. 60 years later, a third of this corridor is blighted, developed primarily as surface parking, and the rest sees comparatively sparse pedestrian activity nightlife.

The official definition of blight from statute 66-1333 is any area in which there is a predominance of buildings which by reason of dilapidation, deterioration, age, or obsolescence, inadequate provision of light, air, sanitation, or open space, population overcrowding, or any combination of these factors is conducive to ill health, transmission of disease, infant mortality, juvenile delinquency, and is therefore detrimental to the public health, safety, morals, or welfare of the community. The urban dictionary puts it in common language and brings into context more of the social determinants of health. Blight is aligned with that feeling when walking through a part of town that this neighborhood has seen better days.

As property values plunge, the neighborhood becomes populated by the very poor, plagued by crime, disease, and above all, crushing, inescapable poverty.

But urban blight is not the only place where health care has disintegrated. There are suburbs and gated communities where people live in isolation, lacking integrated primary care and behavioral health, poor collaboration between public health and medical providers, schools, and community organizations. Location can matter, but money is not the only predictor. In Washington, D.C., two subway stops are the difference in life expectancy of seven years. Two miles in New Orleans means a 25-year difference in life expectancy. Money, race, education are all statistically associated with these differences. But not all the people next to each of these train stops is a super-utilizer.

A community of solution is an idea, a 50-year-old term that brings the solution to our cold spots out of the individual and even geopolitical terms. A community of solution identifies the problem shed, where and what the problems are, and then pulls together the asset shed, those who can provide a local solution, a community of solution. What are the communities of solution efforts in Denver? We see images of individual organizations and funded initiatives to address the broader community needs, to address housing, food deserts, park revitalization, walking trails. There are many of the usual suspects, the health care community, public health, social services, and there are some of the unusual suspects, individuals with passion and time, behavioral health groups, the collaborative family health care association, and groups such as SALIS.

The problem sheds are being defined with locally relevant actionable data. The asset sheds are being built through collaborative relationships, tearing down silos, checking our egos at the door, engaging communities in equitable and equal partnerships. In short, we can build communities of solution that link primary care, behavioral health, public health, community organizations to eliminate our cold spots.