By: Ernest Gurulé
If you want to know about wood, the old saying goes, talk to a carpenter. By the same token, if you want to know about the city of Aurora, its latest headline news, the minutiae or the most arcane little detail, there is one man who you need to know about. Ken Hougen has been intricately, intimately involved with Denver’s neighbor to the east for nearly twenty years.
Hougen is President/CEO of the Aurora Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber is to a city what the mechanical rabbit is to a greyhound. In this case, it chases business, big, small and everything in between. And in Hougen’s and Aurora’s case, it’s hit the motherlode on more than a few occasions. It is a city on a skyward trajectory.
While it might be hyperbole to suggest that Aurora has owned the 21st Century, it would be more than accurate to say that ‘it’s done just fine.’ The town that once might have been called Denver’s kid brother, has carved out its own niche as a city—perhaps the state’s most diverse city—on the move.
It’s a city of 163 square miles that extends into three counties—Arapahoe, Adams and Douglas. It’s also an ethnic salad bowl. If you look at the businesses that dot its vibrant Colfax Avenue, you see signs reflecting a diversity unlike anywhere else in the state. The street has an international flair with Latino, Korean, Ethiopian, Russian, Vietnamese, Middle Eastern, Somalian and Nigerian businesses, along with so many other immigrant-owned shops and stores lining the street. Same with its two busiest north-south corridors, Havana and Peoria. If you want diversity, Aurora’s your first stop.
“We have over 160 languages in our public schools,” said Hougen. “One in five people working in Aurora are immigrants.” While the diversity is a selling point, it has also presented a challenge. The city does what it can, what it must, to let its newest residents that they are as welcome as those who’ve lived here for years include holding periodic public meetings to reassure residents that it’s their home, too.
But immigrants, say Hougen, are a lifeblood for its growth. Not only do they start new businesses, but they also fill job vacancies at DIA, in the booming medical complexes that have moved away from Denver and settled here for the long haul. Immigrants are essential help for staffing growing industries from education to hospitality. Everywhere that Aurora has grown, immigrants have played a role.
“I’ve described it as we’ve moved from a bedroom to boardroom community,” said Hougen. “We now have a very diverse economy with the Fitzsimons Campus” along with the Anschutz Medical Campus where there’s an estimated 20,000 workers employed. The city, he said, has also redeveloped the long ago and decommissioned Lowry Air Force Base. Lowry is now one of the city’s newest resident communities. The talkative Hougen, like the television announcer, pauses before parenthetically adding, ‘But wait! There’s more!’
The city is also nurturing a growing educational component with schools including Metro State University of Denver, Colorado Christian University, Community College of Aurora, Regis University planting roots along with a few technical schools, as well. Amazon, yes, that Amazon, is also a contributor to Aurora’s economy with a million-square-foot distribution center with a workforce that fluctuates between a thousand and fourteen hundred workers.
Many of the city’s workers come are immigrant and, like all other immigrants before them, have English as a second language. Hougen says the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon Church, conducts English language classes each Saturday morning. Because so many LDS have gone on missions to other countries, they’re proficient in a variety of languages making language classes relatable to new arrivals.
Aurora has now established its own identity, said Hougen, who periodically drops a nugget that is almost too hard to believe. “We’re actually larger than Cincinnati,” he said. (No professional teams, so far.) In fact, the last census has Aurora’s population at around 395,000, making it America’s 50st largest city. According to the website worldpopulationreview.com, Cincinnati checks in at number 65 with a population estimated at 308,000.
Like any city in a positive growth mode, there are struggles with solutions that so far have eluded them. When companies come calling, said Hougen, one of the first questions he gets is, ‘Do you have daycare?’ Answering honestly, the President/CEO admits that Aurora is a “daycare desert.’ That reality is a challenge for new families as well as immigrant families who he said have higher birth rates.
Because of Aurora’s location—the eastern most metro city—DIA has been a godsend and Aurora’s been key to making it one of the best and busiest airports in the world. Hougen is counting on DIA’s continued vitality—it’s already the world’s third busiest transportation hub. “I think you’re going to see another concourse…and they’re looking at more international flights, too,” he said. If and when that happens, Aurora’s ready.
Also with a vast area of open land and enough water to nourish any new growth, there is no telling who it might call, extending an invitation to drop in for a visit, whether you speak English or practically any other language. It’s open for business.
