Surrounded by posters, records, and other memorabilia, we were taken aback by how connected and engaged this man really is with the Denver Community. Little did I know just how wide the topics of conversation would be, and to what eloquence and depth Kayvan was prepared to talk about these issues.
AC: So, you started out with architectural engineering technology degree. What got you interested in this at an early age?
KK: I took a lot of computer-aided, drafting classes in high school, and I had a couple of great mentors at that age. I always loved things that have a right and a wrong answer — at least I did so more back then.
AC: After moving to Denver, you arguably had the security and middle class comforts of owning your own home with a steady job at a design firm in the city. Where did the change of heart come from the led you to the path you’re on today?
KK: Part of it was seeing the world was dealing with a lot of problems, and that the profession I was in wasn’t necessarily solving those problems. Ultimately, I was in grey cubicle, in a grey office, with people who were a bit grey inside, and I didn’t feel myself improving or getting challenged. At this firm they wouldn’t let me go further because I only had an associate degree — I didn’t like being held back simply because of a piece of paper. I knew my value, and I couldn’t do it anymore.
AC: Was there a singular moment of realization for you when you made the choice to leave the firm? What was the thing that pushed you over the edge?
KK: I think I was being worn down over time, but I think the moment of realization was when I was going up the elevator after walking to work. I always had my earbuds in wherever I went, and it was the third day in a row when “Into the Mystic” came on. I just thought to myself, “I’m turning into a fucking robot,” and couldn’t do it anymore. Not knowing I was going to do it that morning, I sat down at my desk, and put in my two weeks notice.
AC: Wow.
KK: That was that as far as that job goes. My friends, who I originally bought the pizzeria with, always wanted to open a spot at the time. They’re from Long Island, and they were at a bar one night with one of the employees from this pizzeria who had mentioned that it wasn’t going well for them and that the owners were thinking of selling. It was really just impeccable timing with my leaving the job and having the assets that I had saved up from my retirement plan, some savings and the credit I borrowed from.
AC: So, you bought this place and you poured everything into it, so much so that you ended up renting out your house and living in a tent in the backyard?
KK: Because of the comforts of that engineering job I had, I did buy a house back when it was still feasible to buy in Denver. Ultimately, I got three payments behind on my mortgage because of the loss of income and spending all my savings to start the pizzeria. So, I moved into a tent in the backyard for three months and then slept on a friends floor in Capitol Hill for another six — that was basically the first nine months of buying this pizzeria, renovating it, changing the menu — we basically made all of the mistakes under the old name of the business, and when we felt comfortable enough to transition, we changed the name to Sexy Pizza. During those nine months I earned enough money doing some side jobs to throw into a pot to start Denver Relief in 2009. Shortly after that, I was making enough money for me to move back into my house, thankfully.
AC: I mean, that’s an incredible story of giving up comforts and everything to fulfill a vision of something that is bigger than yourself.
KK: I mean, it was the best. I gave away or sold all my stuff — losing everything was like hitting the reset button. It was a fresh canvas I could work from again.
AC: It seems that you have started to pivot towards politics. Have you always been involved from an early age, or is this more of a recent switch?
KK: I can say that I was entirely devoid of an interest in politics when I was younger, never occurred to me to get involved. I don’t think the first year I could vote that I did. None of it interested me. It was only after getting involved with SAFER in 2005, with their Initiative 100 to decriminalize cannabis in Denver, that it really opened my eyes to not just how broken things are, but that you need folks to collectively work together on the outside of government to make things happen and change this city and world for the better.
AC: Springboarding off some of the initiatives you have worked on, tell me more about Initiative 300 now that we are approaching year two in the four-year pilot program
KK: I-300 was something voters passed in 2016, but it was pretty watered down by the city before it was implemented. There were distance buffers that we initially added to keep these social cannabis businesses away from schools, which was 1000 feet in the ordinance, twice as much as what is required for alcohol establishments at 500 feet. We also went a step further, requiring one of the neighborhood organizations that you overlap with, having to pen a letter of support saying, “We want you there in that location,” which goes above and beyond what alcohol establishments have to do. The city in rulemaking — because of the some supposed fears instigated by prohibitionist groups that had not yet come to fruition — tried to get ahead of themselves and tried to find solutions to problems that didn’t even exist. They extended the 1,000-foot distance requirements beyond just schools and added parks, daycare centers, rec centers, pools, drug treatment facilities, childcare facilities. So, when you draw a 1,000 foot radius around all of them, there is almost nowhere in Denver that you could open up these establishments except in industrial and lower income communities that are already so very saturated with cannabis grows, manufacturing, retail. Right now, here we sit, two years after this initiative passed, and we have one licensed entity open for cannabis social consumption.
The city likes to say, “Oh, well nobody wants it,” and they blame it on the market not wanting it, but then, why do we have two-dozen, unregulated, private cannabis consumption clubs that have no oversight in the city, are not regulated, that are not licensed, and are not paying taxes? Because there is a need, but what they did with Initiative 300 is just make it so burdensome that nobody wants to apply for it … It looks like we have pretty unanimous consent that we are going to see some recommendations to city council from a independent taskforce to fix it, but whether city council votes on that and whether they get enough votes to undo a mayor veto, we’ll see, but that should happen here in the next month or two.
AC: We will be keeping an eye on that for sure. Do you have any new initiatives you are working on with this upcoming election cycle?
KK: I helped out with the green roof initiative last year, which is going through a similar watering down process in rule making. Fortunately, it’s standing up a little better that I think social use did, but it’s very much not what Denver residents voted on. I think that’s a constant that we need to deal with; we need to quit deteriorating the will of the voters in these rulemaking processes.
AC: So, for your mayoral campaign, what else can you can you talk about, and what are your priorities going to be once elected?
KK: The overarching thing that I get asked, “What’s you going to be my first thing?” and it’s not going to be one of the issues above because we have to change how we do business as a city first to accomplish those things. It’s going to be cleaning house of folks who aren’t appropriate for the positions they are in, those who are currently there because of a relationship with the mayor or somebody else in our elected government — people who are not the best for those positions, these are the folks currently running the city. There has to be a change in culture in the city if we are going to open up the doors and be transparent again within government, if we are going to quit making decisions behind doors, if we are going to include community in decision making and have them be apart of this process. That last part is so essential. There is a severe lack of organization in the city right now: we are talking about 12% of the city’s assets being missing per a recent audit report … You take a look at what happened with Leslie Banch-Wise and the sexual misconduct message from the mayor — there was no investigation into that, and I have to wonder how anyone else who’s been a victim of sexual harassment or misconduct in this city now feels about their ability to come forward when things like that happen. We need to earn back people’s trust in our local government and our ability to do the right thing and to solve problems collaboratively.
AC: There was nothing? It was just touched on by the press and that was it?
KK: Yeah, and part of that came from the fact that the same legal council that advises the mayor, is also the one that advised city council in that decision. If we are going to have a true checks and balances system in the city, and that’s supposed to be between the mayor and city council. They cannot have the same legal advisement.
AC: Jesus.
KK: Yeah, there is a lot of those changes that need to happen structurally within, some culturally, before we even really start digging into solving some of the pressing issues like housing and transportation, environment. I mean, we have 50% of all renters in Denver rent-burdened, which means they spend more than a third of their income on housing; 25% spend more than 50% of their income on housing and are theoretically on the verge of homelessness, pending a single moment in time around their health, the loss of a job, the loss of a spouse.
On transportation, we are one of the worst in the country, when it comes to the public transportation investment, and that’s why we have these clogged roads, for as much money as we have. The biggest transportation project that Colorado’s Department of Transportation has ever engaged in is with this current I-70 expansion, which is just widening roads with toll lanes through one of Denver’s poorest communities. It’s so 1950s. We are the 11th most polluted city in America, we are the third worst for heat island effect. Environmentally, we are not doing anything to push the needle. We must understand that we are continuing to lose federal support on all these issues. We’re continuing to lose funding for housing, for mental health and to tackle substance abuse. As this continues, our city has to start taking control of the issues ourselves, and we aren’t seeing that shift happen.
Some of these positions are going to be coming out from my campaign over the next couple of months starting with housing in July, since that is the number one, most pressing issue that we are dealing with in the city and not investing enough money and ideas into. We are not spending money creatively enough to make the most of it, and we are not engaging in ways to help people find ownership in housing in the many ways I believe it is possible. Hopefully, in August, our next issue position will come out. This will focus on our local economy, which will lead us to chartering a public bank and encouraging more cooperative and small business development first, over investing in national and international companies coming to Denver.
AC: What system are we building in Denver and on the Front Range, and is it one that self-sustains and can perpetuate growth from within? Or one that is driving outside investments into Colorado to be able to sustain growth?
KK: First of all, we are not going to lose people coming to Denver, people investing in Denver, and economic development that brings new people, business, ideas, to Denver. I don’t think that’s going to slow down any time soon. We have established ourselves as kind of a place where those ideas are coming to, but what I’m offering to change is that currently we are incentivizing people moving here, and I don’t think that we need to incentivize that right now. I think it’s going to happen naturally. We need to focus on empowering Denver residents.
I think we need to invest in our residents, their businesses, and creative pursuits, and right now the gentrification and displacement in this city is out of control, because we have given the tax breaks and incentives to people who have no stake in the future of this city. Most of these developers and big businesses are taking money out of the city. The people who are going to be running the privatization of I-70, western stock show and DIA. We are pouring $10 billion into these things over the next 10 years — those contracts are owned by people who don’t have a stake in the city. We are going to have elected officials, who are funded and put into office by those international interests; they are going to continue to be detached from the needs of the city and its residents. So, the more we can be intentional about investing is our people here, and relying on ourselves by building a truly local economy, I think the better of everyone’s going to be, the more equity we are going to see, the more we will see Denverites thrive. So, as far as investing in all of these things that I want to do, I think we have a lot of those resources here already. For example, we have I believe almost 10 times the money in our general budget that we could and should be spending on affordable housing solutions by moving large amounts of money away from criminalizing public health matters such as homelessness.
When talking about the GO Bond, last year we as a city voted to borrow $937 million from bankers on Wall Street to fund all of these public infrastructure investments and maintenance. We have that much invested in derivative and other risky investments right now that are very risky. That money, if we didn’t hold it in these risky investments could have been used to fund these projects, reducing our risk as a city and keeping our money here working for us.
The city could have loaned itself the funds thought the public bank I mentioned earlier. That money then would be borrowed at a very meager interest rate around 1 to 2%, and keep all of that money here in our Denver economy. Instead, we ended up paying $1.7 billion instead of a billion — what could we do with that extra $700 million? A lot. When you consider that we’re spending such meager amounts on bike lanes, public transportation, housing, and all of these issues that are really kind of boiling over here in Denver, that was a missed opportunity that we’re now going to be paying for in a big way over the next decade. We have over $6 billion in assets in the city, that we could and should be using instead of just locking it away. Let’s invest in this city and keep that money in this city knowing that when we spend at a local business 43% of that money stays in the local economy. Conversely, when we go shop at Walmart, Target, or some other national or international company, only 13% of that money stays in the local economy. So, the more we can empower small businesses and the local economy to thrive, the better off we are all going to be in the long run.
AC: In your office, I noticed an old Zenith console radio with some record. What have you been digging into media-wise to keep yourself sane during this busy busy period of your career?
KK: I finally started reading books again. It’s something that I had to re-train myself to do, because I have been sitting at a computer for so long, and I get in the habit of being so dead tired at the end of the day that I started to just watch a ton of movies to wind down. So, to get back in the mindset of reading is great because it’s active but meditative, it’s relaxing and it takes your mind away from this digital pull that we have constantly these days, but also definitely listening to music a lot. I love vinyl because it’s a more intimate way to listen to music. Obviously the sound is warm and all of those things people love to talk about with vinyl, but this habit of being intentional about the music you’re going to play in 20 to 30 minute spurts. It makes you get up more and move around. I’ve got to tell you though, there is little better than a good horror movie for me to end the day.
AC: Give me your most recent read, your most recent record, and your most recent horror movie watched.
KK: The book that I’m reading now is The New Urban Crisis by Richard Florida, which is about dealing with a lot of the issues that Denver is facing right now. The last horror movie I watched was Hereditary, that new one that just came out, which was pretty solid. I think the last record I listened to was probably … I think it was Patsy Cline?