Housing is coming full circle, and in three years it will be possible to buy a new Denver home that looks like it was built in 1902. It's all part of a trend in housing and neighborhood redesign, and Denver is at the center of the movement.

The city is poised, with the redevelopment of Stapleton Airport, Lowry Air Force Base, the old Elitch Gardens and St. Luke's Hospital, to compete with the suburbs for new homebuyers. Within three months, groundbreaking will begin on the first of 15,000 homes.

Denver's strategy, in line with national trends, is to make new neighborhoods urban, with ties to mass transportation. From Charlotte, N.C. to Madison, Wis. and Portland. Ore., the emerging fashion is to build homes, townhomes and apartments as part of an overall community featuring stores and offices, all within a quartermile walk.

Even the stand-alone garage with an upstairs flat is making a comeback. With garages in the backyard, lots can be narrower with houses closer together, and the resulting boost in density makes corner stores more feasible.

"I'm amazed at the number of people interested in this type of mixed-use development," said Robert Steuteville, editor of the New Urban News. The Emmaus, Pa. newsletter tracks neotraditional communities across the United States and Canada.

Steuteville says Denver is emerging as a hotbed of new traditional neighborhoods, second only to central Florida, where the Walt Disney Co. is building a front-porch town called Celebration. The whole movement appears to be a reaction to suburban sterility and sprawl.

"The Denver planners are up to speed," he said. "And Denver has the traditional framework in place for its large projects. As this trend becomes more popular, and once finished models of these traditional neighborhoods are in place so people can see them, Denver will have a head start."

That's an abrupt departure from the last 50 years when city housing reflected an almost suburban dependence on cars.

You can trace that dependence to the attached garage, introduced here in 1940. Soon thereafter, the standard width of Denver's neighborhood streets went from 30 to 36 feet and the rounded "Hollywood curb" connecting the street to a narrow sidewalk came into vogue. This less expensive form of curb-and-gutter meant the elimination of tree lawns between sidewalk and street. It wasn't long before alleys were all but eliminated in new developments and the corner store was relegated to history's Dumpster.

That's why newer areas of Denver, particularly the southernmost neighborhoods, resemble the suburbs.

But if there's a sea change coming, most homebuilders don't see it on the horizon. People still like cul-de-sacs, says Larry Larsen, president of the Homebuilders of Metro Denver. He also warns that back-to-the-future projects are expensive. Maybe too expensive.

"I admit that alleys improve the curb appeal of a neighborhood because they take the garage away from the front of the house," said Larsen, who also has a company that specializes in building suburban houses. "But alleys and detached garages cost extra. You're using extra asphalt for the alleys, and you're building two foundations instead of one."

Larsen sits on an advisory board overseeing the redevelopment of Stapleton Airport, where current blueprints call for bungalows, Tudors, Denver Squares, Classic Revivals and Craftsmen homes, each with a modern floor plan. Some 10,000 homes are planned there over the next 30 years. Projections by the Stapleton Development Corp. call for the first houses to be finished by 1999, although some say that's optimistic.

Larsen fears that the price of a stand-alone, neotraditional home might cost more than the average buyer will pay, forcing the buyer to settle for a townhome or a rental. Researcher Cheri Meyn of The Genesis Group also points out that Colorado home buyers remain wedded to the attached, front-facing garage, no matter how unsightly it may be. People prefer stepping into the house without trekking through snow, she explained. And irrational or not, some folks associate alleys with crime.

"Stapleton is going to be marketdriven. I think it will be a hybrid combining the best of the surrounding old neighborhoods with the best of the suburbs, with trails, some limited-access streets and a pedestrian system leading to parks and schools," Meyn predicts.

The latest plans for Lowry are definitely hybridized. Like Bonnie Brae and other Denver neighborhoods, Lowry will have grid streets, bus stops, a commercial center, homes with front porches and strips of tree-lined lawn between the sidewalks and streets. It will also have an array of schools for children and adults. The first of 3,200 homes is scheduled for a June groundbreaking.

But Lowry's initial phase of development calls for 36-foot-wide neighborhood streets, a suburban width that critics complain will rob the new neighborhoods of intimacy and charm. Also, Lowry's plans veer from the neotraditional principle of mixing housing types on each block. Whole areas of Lowry are reserved for mass-production builders that produce a single style of home.

Major homebuilders "will not build in a hopscotch fashion," explained James Meadows director of the Lowry Redevelopment Authority.

Additionally, one major builder will offer its standard product with front-facing garages. The builder's only concession to neotraditionalism is an agreement to recess the garages five feet from the facade.

"I don't expect the whole construction and development industry to turn around overnight," said Steuteville of New Urban News. He expressed faith that Columbus Realty Trust, developers of the old St Luke's Hospital site, will stick with its neotraditional philosophy.

The Dallas company has announced it will spend more than $70 million constructing an upscale, pedestrian-friendly "urban village" in a now-blighted area east of Downtown. The village will include mid-rise apartments, lofts, townhomes and a few stores.

Also on the drawing table is a new traditional neighborhood of 346 living units on the 30-acre site of the former Elitch Gardens amusement park. Designed by nationally known urban planner Peter Calthorpe of Berkeley, Calif., it awaits a June vote by the Denver City Council.

To gain approval, the developers must overcome objections from neighbors about density. That's a typical complaint about mixed-use developments, which depend on density to make the streets lively, the stores successful and the developer money.

An even stiffer obstacle to getting old-fashioned neighborhoods built is their non-conformity to postWorld War II zoning laws and the enmity of traffic engineers and fire officials who prefer wide roads.

"I've spent three years and suffered a ton of brain damage just getting my ideas across" to officials resistant to change, said John "Kiki" Wallace, who's converting an 80-acre tree farm in Longmont into a neighborhood called Prospect. Because it will be the metro area's first look at pure neotraditional design, Prospect will get a long look from local developers.

Already, six houses are rising on the site, which eventually will have more than 500 housing units including townhomes and garage flats and a two-block town center with small shops facing each other across a narrow street.

Wallace, a recent appointee to the Boulder County Planning Commission, has weathered battles with government inspectors and engineers over issues like alleys, access points, lot sizes, traffic patterns and street widths.

He expects less fighting over neotraditional design once the public sees a few examples of the finished product. But it's true, Wallace says, that such communities are more costly to build.

"For the home buyer, it translates into 10 to 20 percent more per square foot. You're paying a higher price for the public realm," he said, referring to tree lawns, pocket parks and higher standards of design.

Despite the cost, Wallace expects traditional town planning to displace the subdivision as the dominant model in metro Denver and elsewhere.

Steve Wilson, another spokesman for the Homebuilders of Metro Denver, agrees that the traditional movement is growing in influence. But he doesn't expect it to displace the generic home in the suburbs.

"I welcome the debate because we need to do things differently," he said. "But there still needs to be a place for the plain vanilla subdivision. Some people would prefer that to living in a well-designed townhome - and who's to say there's anything wrong with that?"