A new wave of urban visionaries wants all Coloradans to live closer together — and is willing to trample long-standing local laws to get us there. They’ve been making inroads.

But last week, the citizens of Colorado’s fifth-largest city said, “No thanks.” Lakewood voters overwhelmingly turned back a controversial policy adopted by their city council in October to scrap zoning rules that long have safeguarded quality of life in generations-old neighborhoods. 

The Lakewood vote followed a similar, popular uprising last November in Littleton. There, voters amended their city charter to ensure current zoning would remain in effect after their city council had taken steps to undermine zoning in the historic town.

And earlier last year, six cities, including Aurora, Colorado’s third-largest, sued the state over the legislature’s efforts to undercut local zoning statewide. A series of laws passed by state lawmakers over the past few years at the behest of Gov. Jared Polis supersedes a host of land-use rules that historically and legally have been the purview of local government. The lawsuit holds the new state laws are unconstitutional.

They’re all fighting back at an agenda that aims to override long-standing local zoning in order to stuff multiple land uses into a single space. Sometimes called “upzoning,” its premise is that creating more modest housing in tighter spaces will, in theory, increase the supply of “affordable housing” — the mantra of the moment in Colorado’s political circles. It’s one of those academic assumptions that probably work better in textbooks than in reality.

The advocates of this density dogma and their water bearers in elected office want to pack more residences onto a lot — perhaps tri- or quadplexes in place of single-family homes — and make them live closer to retail, nightlife and the like. Picture rows of apartments above convenience stores, dry cleaners and liquor vendors. Maybe pot shops and tattoo parlors.

It probably appeals to some demographics more than others — young single professionals, for instance, rather than families. And, if left to Colorado’s traditional housing marketplace, such mixed-use density would continue to be built as it now is, here and there, meeting demand in some of the state’s inner-urban settings as well as along transportation corridors that allow such density. All fine and well.

It’s not for everyone, however, and forcing the agenda on rank-and-file Coloradans was bound to backfire. 

Judging from the fact two-thirds of all Colorado residences are single-family homes — as is the case nationwide — the vast majority of Coloradans prefers less dense neighborhoods. Lakewood’s decisive, 2-to-1 repudiation of its council’s action underscores that fact.

Let’s hope elected policymakers at all levels of government in our state are paying attention to the pushback. 

In part, it’s about local control. The state has no business second-guessing local zoning rules. (You’d think, with back-to-back budget gaps to fill, our legislature would have enough on its plate without meddling in an area of policy reserved to cities and counties.)

More fundamentally, pulling the rug out from under residents — eliminating single-family zoning in established neighborhoods, as did the Lakewood council action rejected by the city’s voters last week — is tone-deaf policymaking at any level of government.

Jefferson’s time-honored adage — that “the government closest to the people serves the people best” — is contingent on a local government listening to its people. Not to utopian daydreamers who haven’t a clue how people actually want to live.