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Windsor Downtown Master Plan

A downtown plan built on more than 500 survey responses.

Client
The Town of Windsor and the Windsor Downtown Alliance
Place
Windsor, Colorado

  • Acknowledged

    By the Windsor Town Board, 7–0, April 2024

  • $83.6M

    The downtown land value the plan projects, from a $36.9M baseline

  • Winner

    Colorado Choice Award, 2025

A full room of Windsor residents at a downtown planning workshop in a brick hall
A community workshop

Windsor’s downtown sits a short walk from a lake and a boardwalk park, yet even neighbors passed through. They came for a meal or an event, then left.

Over three months, we ran twelve sessions and surveys, from pop-ups at the Harvest Festival and Oktoberfest to focus groups with downtown regulars. The surveys drew more than 500 responses.

A page from the Windsor plan: photos of a walking tour, a focus group and a mapping session over the figures 3 months of engagement, 12 collaborations and 500+ surveys collected
Three months of listening

Patrons

  1. 01Pedestrian Experience
  2. 02Local Resistance to Change
  3. 03Shopping & Dining Options
  4. 04Parking Ease & Accessibility
  5. 05Low Number of Downtown Residents

Businesses

  1. 01Parking Ease & Accessibility
  2. 02Shopping & Dining Options
  3. 03Pedestrian Experience
  4. 03Local Resistance to Change
  5. 05Low Number of Downtown Residents
Two rankings of downtown’s biggest challengesRedrawn from the original

Three workshops each brought in a different group: town leaders, then the public, then the core team that wrote the vision.

The vision runs under one line, Hello Windsor: Love Life, Live Local. Walking became one of four cornerstones, and parking one of 16 outcomes. The whole plan reads like a coffee table book, so anyone in town can follow it.

The Hello Windsor spread from the Windsor Downtown Master Plan, with "Hello Windsor, Love Life, Live Local" over a collage of town life: a parade, hot air balloons, friends at a brewery, families on the lawn, a cheerleader and a painted mural
Hello Windsor

Ten focus areas each get a plan of their own, across ten years of work: calmer streets, new gateways and a plaza that would bring the lake and the park up to Main Street.

A colored sketch of the 5th Street Plaza in downtown Windsor: a paved plaza under string lights, with trees, a play area of logs down the middle, planters and café seating
The 5th Street Plaza

Completed at RVi, with land value support from Urban3 and Arland Land Use Economics.

See it

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