Brighton hopes good trumps bad and ugly: with wind in its sails from Vestas, the city aims to attract more development.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: WHO OWNS COLORADO

Brighton either is half-empty or half-full, or both.

The half-empty part is so obvious even the city's public relations counsel Ken Parks brings the subject up right off the bat.

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Brighton home inventories "never have gotten really out of control," says Parks, who also serves on the Brighton Economic Development Corp. board of directors. "So the slowdown happened and the foreclosures with that, but we have jobs coming in, so I just think one of the main things you look at is to stimulate home-building."

True, a look at Adams County and Brighton, its county seat, produces some unsavory credit- and mortgage-related statistics.

Adams County has a 90-day mortgage delinquency rate of 5.11 percent, compared with Denver County, 3.79 percent; Arapahoe County, 3.4 percent; Jefferson County, 2.04 percent; Douglas County, 1.81 percent; Boulder County, 1.18 percent; and Eagle County, 0.89 percent.

But on the principle that things can always get worse, even catastrophe is all relative, isn't it?

Brighton as of this writing had 552 sales of foreclosed homes under way; 367 bank-owned properties and seven defaults.

Sounds terrible, and it is.

But compare Brighton's numbers to a nearby Denver neighborhood with roughly the same population, Montbello--with 1,260 trustee sales, 2,160 banked-owned homes and 22 defaults--and Brighton doesn't seem so awfully bad, does it?

And it also remains true that Brighton in the past year or so has been the beneficiary of the kind of good news most economic development teams live for.

On the fluffier front, a year ago the Little Rock, Ark.-based Gadberry Group picked Brighton as No. 2 on its list of the "7 from 2007," the seven most notable high-growth places in the U.S., according to its analysis.

The real-world reward in 2008 for Brighton was even cheerier. It came in July, when Danish wind energy company Vestas said it would buy more than 100 acres in Brighton and build a factory that could mean 650 new jobs.

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Vestas since has adjusted its plans for Brighton: Now the Copenhagen company plans to build two factories--one for windmill blades and one to build nacelles, the windmill's gearbox, both the company's new model--and hire 1,500 workers, up from 650.

Meantime, while other giga-normous retail centers encountered sliding retail sales and canceled leases, Brighton's THF Prairie Center appears to be chugging ahead on schedule.

"The fact that J.C. Penney is only opening 17 stores...