Quietly Dispossessed: When the Rules Meant to Protect Neighborhoods End Up Erasing the People Who Built Them

It is unfortunate that I have to use my Saturday post to the bearer of bad news for any of my readers that may drop by my blog from time to time for banter about vintage slot car racing or die-cast collecting. It is, however, far worse news for me. Unexpected events over the last 36 hours serve as a frightening reminder of how quickly our lives can change and how precarious middle class life has become in the 21st century, and are going to have significant repercussions for me and for Drag City Raceway…so much so that you may now be reading one of my last posts.

Since the fall of 2007, I have been renting a large 3-car garage in an old neighborhood in Denver not far from the section of the city I once lived in. The location was ideal at the time because it was in walking distance of my swanky urban bachelor pad. Garage rentals in the city even in those easier days were notoriously difficult to find, so I lucked out finding an exceptionally large place for a reasonable price. I’m convinced that I got it simply because the owner/landlord and I hit it off and he just took a liking to me, and told me when he inked the deal that he wasn’t in the habit of raising rent on people unless “they gave him a reason.”

The garage was an old detached unit of cinder blocks and heavy beams whose exact age was difficult to determine, facing an alley behind a pair of very small Victorian-era houses. The place was not in great condition: the floor was unevenly poured asphalt over a dirt floor and it had no running water and no windows. But it did have electricity, the roof didn’t leak, and it seemed pretty secure despite being in a neighborhood which, at the time, was reputed to be dangerously gang-infested. The repute was right! As it turned out, the man who lived in the house right next door to my garage was an O.G. Crip, and he often had groups of pretty rough looking guys hanging out in the alley right outside my garage door. Thing is, I eventually made friends with them too; they had cars of their own – one had a boat-tail Riviera, another a mid ‘80s Coupe deVille, and by loaning a few tools and helping them troubleshoot some mechanical problems, I got into their good graces, and before long they went from harassing me to protecting me! And so it went: the gangbangers were my neighbors, and I was just another kid in the neighborhood.

I spent 2008 and 2009 working long hours in that garage on the body of my ’56 Chevy, all of which I did on my own; after losing my wrenching partner Ken to an early and unexpected heart attack several years earlier, I re-dedicated myself to finishing the car I had do so much work on with him, and by the fall of 2009 I took my first cruise down Colfax Ave in my finished car. Well, you know…they’re never really “finished”…but it was finished enough! It all happened in that ramshackle garage.

The Collapse That Wrecked A Generation

It wasn’t more than a couple of years later that everything went to hell. Unless you were born yesterday, you were there: the 2008 crash, Occupy Wall Street, the Obama presidency, the bank bailouts. Your HB was one of those people who lost it all, and by early 2012 I was out of my downtown condo and back to renting. Thing is, I kept the garage, and I kept my car in that garage.

In the years that followed, a lot of things changed. The landlord who owned the garage and the houses and had rented to me passed away sometime in 2020 or 2021 and his son, who I had never met, inherited the properties. And your humble blogger? I went through two more house moves and 3 more jobs. My marriage deteriorated and eventually came to an end. My family sold their house and left the state. My father was diagnosed with brain cancer and later passed away. And through it all, my garage remained a sanctuary that was always available to me; a place I could always go to tinker with my car. Many cars passed through my hands throughout those years; a couple more Chevrolets, a pair of Buicks, a duo of Mercedes-Benzes and a Jaguar, to name just a few, all of which spent at least some time in that garage. The place wasn’t always pleasant – it was burning hot in the summer and brutally cold in the winter, and I had to piss into a jug when necessary – but I could play the radio and turn my wrenches in peace without anyone telling me otherwise. To a gearhead like yours truly, that was the best deal going!

But then came Gentrification…

The neighborhood began to change…FAST. From 2012 on, within the space of only a few years, houses began to flip on every block and renovations were everywhere! The neighborhood went from being roughly 60% Black to at least 70% White faster than I would have thought possible, and houses that were selling for under $100,000 when I arrived in the area were going for over half a million. Now, there’s a lesson to be learned there, and I don’t have to tell you what it is, but it was one that I didn’t learn, because at the time I was happy with things just the way they were…and somehow I forgot one of life’s most important lessons: that nothing lasts forever.

Yesterday, it all came to an end.

The Door Slams

On Friday afternoon, while I was at work in the middle of trying to solve a complex technical problem, my cell phone rang with an unidentified number I assumed was one of my customers. Not so. It was a woman who explained that she worked for the “new” property management company that had just taken over from the one I had been working with for almost 18 years because they had “gone out of business.” That was news to me, but ok….and here comes the notice of rent increase, I thought.

Not so. It was far worse than that. What she told me was that the City of Denver Zoning Commission had visited the property and done reconnaissance on the house and the grounds, including talking to the renters in the two houses the garage was behind, and had informed them that my renting the garage was a “zoning violation.” Nearly 3 years after I signed my lease, a new zoning law was passed (in 2010, the benchmark year when Denver began its precipitous decline) that made it illegal for a property owner to rent a building that was “an accessory to a home” to someone who was not a resident of that home: that only the resident of the house to which the garage belonged was legally able to utilize it. So no, it wasn’t a rent increase: I was no longer eligible to be in the garage at any price! I was told to vacate completely and soon as possible: no negotiations to be had.

I spent Saturday with my nose buried in research and was stunned to discover that, yes, that was absolutely correct; never mind that countless thousands of property owners all over city – countless millions all over the country – rent out garages and other out-buildings on their properties to people who don’t live in the houses they go with to get some extra income on space they may not be using. Well, that is now a “ZONING VIOLATION.” And since that was a matter between the city government and the property owner, I, as the tenant, had absolutely nothing to say about it! I was just S.O.L.! Have a nice day!

I am now in the position of losing my work space and having to migrate 18 years worth of tools, parts, memorabilia, and supplies to my house roughly 7 miles away north of Denver, and the old Chevy, too, has to come back to my house. My garage at home is adequate, but has nowhere near the space of the one I’m being forced to abandon, and this means one my vehicles is about to be relegated to outdoor parking again just in time for winter! The only fight I can win here is the date: they tried to tell me to get out before the city levied a fine against the owner. I told them to fuck themselves: it’s going to cost me thousands of dollars to move everything out of there because I will have to hire a lot of it done, and boohoo that the owner might get fined a few hundred dollars by the city: they’re going to do this “by the book,” giving me an official letter of termination of the lease and the full 30 day term to vacate. Any attempt on their part to strong-arm me out sooner results in my pushing the “lawyer-up” button!

But I’ll be lucky if I can manage all the reorganization this is going to require even then, especially at the busiest time of the year when my work schedule is pegged! In order to orchestrate all the moving parts this unwinding will entail, I will be forced to take numerous days off work at a time when I can least afford to do so, ramping up an already stressful situation to its maximum! I’m already working over 50 hours a week and managing on 5-6 hours of sleep a night, and now, there’s this.

The Garage and the System

What’s happening to me right now—being told that a garage I’ve occupied for nearly two decades can no longer be rented, not because of safety or wrongdoing but because of a bureaucratic technicality—is a small story, but it’s also the story of the time we unfortunately find ourselves in.

For most of the 20th century, a garage was a working person’s space. It was where you kept your tools, your car, your independence. It was a little slice of freedom: four walls where no boss or landlord could tell you how to live. Now, even that has been fenced in by paperwork and property values.

The zoning board doesn’t care that my use is legitimate and harmless; what matters is that I don’t live on the same parcel of land. That’s the logic of a society that has forgotten what property was for. It’s no longer about use, it’s about control. This isn’t just one tenant’s headache. It’s what happens when the middle class gets hollowed out—when regular people lose the ability to own a bit of land, and the rules start serving those who already do. It’s the same frustration that drives ordinary Americans to rage against elites and dream of systems that might level the field again, no matter how wrong-headed they may seem.

The city thinks it’s enforcing “order.” What it’s really enforcing is alienation: the slow erosion of self-determination, one small eviction at a time.

My garage isn’t just a shed with a car in it. It’s the last visible symbol of a kind of life that’s disappearing—the modest, self-made life where a person’s labor and love could shape their surroundings without permission.

You can say I screwed up by not making the landlord an offer; by not buying in that very neighborhood when I saw what was happening and had a chance. You can say that, and you’d be right. But is that the real moral of this story? Or is it something else: is it that, if the system can’t make room for a man and his car, maybe it’s the system—not the man or the car—that needs rebuilding.