Tony and Robin Kohake spent months on the plans. They bought the house at 800 S. Franklin Street in Wash Park for $2.6 million in February 2025, one of the largest corner lots left in a neighborhood where buildable land barely exists anymore. The house was falling apart. Mold levels tested at fifteen times what the Kohakes call livable, and squatters had torn through the interior walls. By May, their architect had finished drawings for a new family home and their builder submitted the paperwork Denver requires before any teardown: a demolition permit.
That single form is what pulled them into a fight they never saw coming.
Within weeks, city staff had flagged the house as having potential for landmark designation. A public notice went up. Two groups of neighbors, 24 people between them, sent letters saying they intended to seek historic status. That triggered mandatory mediation. No deal came out of it. By late August, three residents, including a woman named Jane Debs who lives a mile from the property, filed a formal application asking the city to name 800 S. Franklin a landmark, a move that would have blocked demolition permanently. The Kohakes' plans sat frozen until a September 16 hearing, when Denver's Landmark Preservation Commission split 3-3 and the designation failed to advance.
"We'd never heard of this process, and unfortunately, there was nothing disclosed on the sale about it," Tony told CBS Colorado. What the Kohakes later learned is that the house had already survived one version of this exact fight. In 2021, its previous owner, Aaron Grant of Grant Real Estate Co., had applied for the same demolition permit, drawn the same neighbor response, and settled it through the same mediation process, an agreement in which he withdrew his application and neighbors agreed not to file for designation. Nobody carried that history forward to the Kohakes when Grant sold the house four years later.
The clock only starts when you ask to build
This is the part that catches buyers off guard: Denver's demolition review process is not triggered by a house being old, being pretty, or sitting in a historic district. It is triggered by someone filing for a permit to tear it down. The mechanism runs on a fixed statutory timeline, and it applies to any structure city staff determine has potential for designation, whether or not that structure has ever been formally landmarked.
The sequence, under Denver's landmark ordinance, works like this:
- City staff has 10 business days after a demolition application to decide whether the structure has potential for landmark designation, based on criteria tied to history, architecture, geography, or culture.
- If staff finds potential, the city posts a public notice at the property and notifies the closest registered neighborhood association. A 21-day clock starts.
- If at least one neighbor files a notice of intent to seek designation before that 21st day, the posting period extends to 60 days, and the city assigns a mediator to sit down with the owner and the group.
- If a formal designation application is filed after that, the city has up to 90 days to complete review, including a Landmark Preservation Commission hearing and a City Council vote, before the demolition permit is issued by default.
None of this requires the house to be inside one of Denver's designated historic districts. It requires only that the building be old enough and distinctive enough that staff can't rule out its eligibility in ten days. A house can sit outside every historic boundary on the city's map and still end up exactly where the Kohakes did.
A second Denver house ran the identical clock this year
Across town in LoHi, the same sequence played out on a smaller lot with a different couple. Parker Gordon and Amy Heilig paid $831,300 in April 2025 for a Queen Anne Victorian at 1805 W. 34th Ave., roughly 2,000 square feet on a 6,300-square-foot corner lot. Their plan was to replace it with a new home of about 5,900 square feet plus a garage, the kind of scrape-and-rebuild that has become routine on that block.
When they applied for a demolition permit, city staff produced a report noting that the home's original owners, Theophilus and Mary N. Chase, were influential in the early civic and social development of northwest Denver, and that the structure was an increasingly rare surviving example of architect Joseph Wilson's early residential work. A group that included two attorneys from the Thomas Law Group, an attorney at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck named Julia Rhine, and a Highlands charcuterie business owner filed a notice of intent to pursue landmark status. That triggered the same mediation requirement, with a meeting held by mid-May 2026 and a June 8, 2026 deadline for the group to file a full designation application or let the demolition permit proceed by default.
Public reporting on the case ends at that filing deadline, so whatever the Landmark Preservation Commission ultimately decided, the pattern is the point. Two houses, two neighborhoods, two ordinary closings that turned into months of mediation the moment the new owners tried to act on their own plans.
What's actually at stake in dollars
The Kohakes' fight wasn't abstract. Wash Park's perimeter streets, the ones closest to the park like East Virginia Avenue, South Franklin Street, and South Humboldt Street, were trading in the $1.6 million to $2.5 million range as of early 2026, with fully custom rebuilds on the best lots pushing past $3 million. At one point during their mediation, the Kohakes listed the old house for $3.1 million, nearly half a million more than they'd paid, a step that's become something of a script in these disputes: list the property at a price no preservation buyer will pay, and use the lack of interest as evidence that saving the house isn't realistic.
What makes the mechanism strange is how lopsided the leverage is. Filing a landmark designation application in Denver costs $875. Tony Kohake put it plainly: anyone can put a stranger's multi-million-dollar renovation on hold for the price of a nice dinner out, with almost no financial exposure of their own if the bid fails. On a LoHi teardown lot, where land alone can run $400,000 to $600,000 or more before a shovel goes in the ground, that same asymmetry applies at a smaller scale but with the same effect: months of carrying costs on a stalled project, against an $875 filing fee on the other side.
The tool that buys certainty before you write the offer
Denver does offer a way to get ahead of this, and it's underused. A property owner who is not already facing a designation fight can apply for a Certificate of Demolition Eligibility, a $250 filing that puts the property through the same 10-day staff review and 21-day posting window on the owner's own schedule, before any purchase, before any architectural fees, before any non-refundable earnest money. If the certificate is granted, it locks in demolition eligibility for five years and prevents a landmark application from moving forward without the owner's consent during that window.
For a buyer looking at a pre-1930s home in Wash Park, LoHi, Park Hill, or any of Denver's other close-in neighborhoods with rebuild intent, that certificate is worth asking about before writing an offer, not after. A seller who already holds one can market that certainty as part of the listing. A buyer who doesn't see one on file should treat the demolition-review clock as a live risk on the timeline, not a formality.
What this means for disclosure
Colorado's Seller's Property Disclosure form asks about known unpermitted work and material defects, judged by what the seller currently, actually knows. It was not built with a paused 2021 landmark fight in mind. That's exactly the gap the Kohakes fell into: the previous owner's history with the demolition review process never showed up in the paperwork they signed. Whether that kind of history should be disclosed under Colorado's broader common-law duty to flag known conditions that affect a home's value is a question for a real estate attorney, not a blog post, but the Kohake case is a clear signal that the standard checkbox form isn't built to catch it on its own.
Frequently asked questions
Does my house need to be in a historic district for this to apply? No. Both 800 S. Franklin and 1805 W. 34th Ave. sat outside any designated historic district. The demolition review process applies whenever city staff determine a structure has potential for designation, based on age, architecture, and history, independent of district boundaries.
How often do these owner-opposed landmark bids actually succeed? Recent history favors the property owner. The two most recent owner-opposed landmark applications for single-family homes in Denver, covering Wash Park and a case in South Park Hill, were both voted down by the Landmark Preservation Commission. That doesn't make the process painless. It still costs the owner months and, often, tens of thousands of dollars in carrying costs regardless of the outcome.
Is there any way to know in advance if a house has been through this before? Ask directly, and consider requesting a Certificate of Demolition Eligibility before you close, especially on any pre-1930s home in a neighborhood where teardowns are common. The certificate forces the same city review the Kohakes went through, but on your timeline instead of after you've already committed architectural and legal fees.
If you're evaluating a character home in Denver with rebuild potential, or you're the one selling a house with this kind of history behind it, this is exactly the sort of friction worth working through before you're under contract, not after. Hanh Chung works these transactions across Denver and the south metro and can help you price the risk correctly on either side of the table.
