Welcome to beautiful Bow Mar. Less a town and more of an HOA that figured out if they get into local politics they can abuse people that aren’t even in their covenant. Well I should rewind that a bit, Bow Mar appears to have started as a private planned residential community with covenants in 1947. That original covenant had language in it that prevented non-whites from buying land and living there. The town of Bow Mar incorporated in 1958, giving these racist property owners even more power over the area. Somehow the language in that original covenant lasted until 1991, where they removed it and calling it void, illegal, unenforceable, discriminatory, noxious, and offensive.
Which is funny to me, I mean you kept racist language in legally binding documents around owning a home in the area until 1991,
1948 — Shelley v. Kraemer: Supreme Court says racially restrictive covenants cannot be enforced by courts.
They must not have gotten the memo though. And even if it could be fought in court, a family seeing that language in a legal document would likely chill them to the bone and make them reconsider even attempting. And I don’t blame them, who wants to deal with open racists?
1990: Colorado enacts a state-law mechanism specifically about removing void racist/religious restrictive covenants from conveyance instruments.
I didn’t dig through too many documents from the town from the time period, but if I was forced to guess I would say they likely updated the language in their covenant using this mechanism. The state-law allowed for covenants to have racially binding language removed easily.
2021 – False Sign incident. This news article says they had put up signs saying they had a private road to keep people out.
“The gate project is not Bow Mar’s first attempt to discourage outside traffic. In 2021, the town posted a sign near one entrance falsely claiming the road does not cut through to Sheridan Boulevard, when it clearly does.”
2024 – Bow Mar had a traffic study done and didn’t even execute all the recommendations.
“Flynn also said Bow Mar has not implemented all of the traffic calming measures recommended in a 2024 study, including additional speed-calming designs such as chicanes.”
2026- Now we are talking about gates on a public road to keep out the low class.
They can frame it however they want, since this blog is for my opinions (unlike www.discoverbowmar.com ) I can say whatever I want.
They say its for traffic calming, but there are other measures they could do if that was the main goal. Everyone who has driven through there can tell you that there’s enough speed bumps and stop signs that you aren’t flying through there. I’ve only ever been through there on foot and I thought it was the perfect place for a walk even without sidewalks because there were ALMOST NO CARS.
I mean stunningly low volumes of traffic. Perhaps during rush hour there are people driving through there, but holy hell it wasn’t bad at all. It has to be about keeping out people not in their community.
Look at their HOA, they have gates around everything, their lake, the pool. There are gates to get to the gates.
Now they want to treat the entire town like its their HOA.
They get their FIre and EMS services from South Metro
Police come from Columbine Valley
They get the same Xcel energy we all overpay for.
Their wastewater ties into South Platte
They get taxpayer funding to maintain their roads.
So why in the hell do they get all these public funded services, and get to decide they aren’t part of the community?
I think we should allow Littleton or Denver to absorb their town since they can’t support themselves as is and depend on outside services. That seems like a more reasonable solution.
Anyway, this country is in a class war at every front. I am sick of people thinking because they have a little bit more than the working class they are better than them and they can insulate themselves away from day to day issues that we have to face under the crushing boot of end stage capitalism. I am not even a very left leaning person. I used to consider myself a classic conservative. But the issue is nobody I talked to who said they were a conservative wanted to actually conserve a damn thing. Can we not conserve our clean air, clean water, outdoor spaces, public funds, public education services, public roads?
Anyway I am getting way off topic. Go to discoverbowmar.com for the rest of what I found out about the issue.