1. We Worked From Home

It’s no secret that, taken as a whole, Centennial Staters tend to subscribe to the work-to-live, don’t-live-to-work ethos. Belief in that maxim has long resulted in a robust gig economy, one in which “alternative work arrangements,” the official moniker used by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, often meant professionals across a variety of industries flexed their hours and worked from home—a scenario that made hiking a fourteener or skiing on a Wednesday possible. In fact, before the pandemic, Colorado had the highest remote work population in the country at roughly nine percent.

So, it stands to reason that the state would remain a stronghold for the I-work-from-my-couch set even after much of the rest of the country headed back to its cubes.

Like the nation at large, Colorado’s work-from-home revolution has stayed particularly strong in urban areas. But WFH populations are notably high across the state. Roughly 28 percent of Boulder’s workforce and slightly more than 22 percent of Denver’s declined to return to the office in 2023, while the national average hovered around 13 percent. Although that may be a win for those who like to run a half-marathon before lunch on Tuesday, the fact that by November 2024 only about 60 percent of downtown Denver’s weekday employees had returned is cause for concern. “We lost 100,000 people from downtown in essentially one day in 2020,” says Kourtny Garrett, president and CEO of the Downtown Denver Partnership. “It’s never going to be nine-to-five every day like it was, but we need to re-instill office culture to reactivate the city center.”

Doing so has been challenging so far. “The current state of the office market in Denver is not good,” says Charley Will, a senior vice president at CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm. “That’s a culmination of several factors, including the pandemic, rising interest rates, and the climbing cost of labor in Denver.” Will says employers locally have been reluctant to throw off the delicate balance they’ve struck with employees about WFH policies (though that could change as notable companies such as Amazon and the federal government push for a return to the office).

“It’s really about labor,” Will says. “It’s about recruiting and retaining the workforces they want. They could tell everyone it’s mandatory to come back immediately, but they feel that might incite mutiny.”

By the Numbers

27%: Percentage of downtown Denver offices that were unoccupied in the fourth quarter of 2024, according to the Downtown Denver Partnership. In the first quarter of 2020, only 11 percent were vacant.

$570 million: Amount that will be infused into downtown’s revitalization through 2038, thanks to the recent expansion of Denver’s Downtown Development Authority, a tax-increment financing tool. “The inventory of office space should decrease due to repurposing of some buildings, so the supply and demand will change,” CBRE’s Charley Will says. “I think we’ve seen the bottom, and my forecast for downtown is that Union Station and LoDo will do really well. In fact, those areas already are doing well. It’s when you move east up 16th and 17th that the office vacancy rates go up.”