Inside the Plan To Save Denver’s Central Business District

As the A-line from Denver International Airport pulls into Union Station, the train’s cars screech and shudder to a stop. The brakes’ sharp hiss echoes off the glass-and-concrete buildings overlooking the platform. Train doors open simultaneously, and a phalanx of passengers step into the sunlight.

It’s 7:04 a.m. on Thursday, June 13, and Union Station is one of downtown Denver’s liveliest spots. Morning travelers and office workers line up at Pigtrain Coffee Co. to order cappuccinos and vanilla lattes. The concierge at the $500-a-night Crawford Hotel waits expectantly at the front desk inside the station’s Great Hall. A security guard holds the door for an elderly couple heading to the trains.

Bethani Wells walks across the station’s concrete platform with her roller bag. A former Denverite, the 29-year-old left with her now husband for West Palm Beach, Florida, during the pandemic and hadn’t been back for a couple of years. During her time away, she’d heard about the post-COVID-19 troubles in Denver that had also taken hold in so many American cities: rising crime, homelessness, closed businesses, and opioid misuse. Despite then Mayor Michael Hancock’s optimistic outlook for the Mile High City (“Denver’s reputation is one of never giving up,” he wrote in the Denver Post in 2022), almost no one would deny that a malaise had overtaken the Mile High City’s downtown.

Wells planned to see friends and visit her old haunts: restaurants and apartments and familiar streets in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. For Wells, like many twentysomethings who settled in Denver after college, this was far more than a place to live—it represented a dream, a lifestyle, a city that would make visiting friends jealous. “It’s impossible not to love Denver,” she says.

I agree with Wells. I was raised in suburban Denver, went to high school here, got married here, and returned to my hometown, Parker, after college and a few jobs in different parts of the country. I’ve raised my children here and, since late 2000, have held jobs at the Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News, and this magazine. I’ve seen the best and worst the city has to offer.

These days, it’s difficult to put a neat label on Denver. It’s true Denver will never be New York City or Los Angeles, both coastal, 24-hour cities; Denver is a so-called 18-hour city, a lively, midsize town with cultural amenities that rival larger urban centers and that typically runs from sunup until around midnight. Like many post-pandemic American cities today, it has tent encampments, late-night violence, and empty storefronts. On the other hand, the city has Michelin-starred restaurants, a jewel of a ballpark in Coors Field, hip bars, and an inviting anchor in Union Station, all nestled into LoDo, which has fared better than greater downtown since the end of the pandemic.

LoDo wasn’t always a booming part of downtown. The area started to flourish in the late 1990s and early aughts, but it was the redevelopment of Union Station in 2014 that spurred the full blossoming of the neighborhood. That is, in large part, why Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, in May, harked back to the successful overhaul of Union Station and laid out how a revamped Downtown Development Authority (DDA)—which was used to fund the Union Station renovation—could help bring all of downtown Denver out of its post-pandemic doldrums.

The mayor’s plan was met with cautious optimism, but I had a question. Could Union Station and LoDo really be a road map for the rest of the city center? To find out, I wanted to spend 18 hours—from 7 a.m. until 1 a.m.—wandering between Wynkoop and Grant streets to better understand the current state of downtown.

On that June morning, people with backpacks and leather satchels are carrying paper coffee cups as they walk past the fountain in front of the station. As Wells and I chat, she says her visit is a chance to collect some of her past, an opportunity to reacquaint herself with a place that might not be exactly as she remembered it. “This city was a great chapter in my life,” she tells me. She’d met her husband in Capitol Hill during the pandemic’s peak. She paused for a moment. “I hope there’s still something magical about it.”

A century and a half ago, Denver was also looking for a revamp. A frontier city built during Colorado’s gold rush, Denver’s post–Civil War population stagnated at about 4,500 residents as the lack of goldfield success led to hundreds of “gobacks,” as Rocky Mountain News publisher William Byers called those who returned home.

Denver was a dusty, inhospitable place. Homes and businesses periodically washed away in floods. Shanties popped up along streets, creating the city’s first slums. “[T]oo dead to bury,”  Thomas Durant, the Union Pacific Railroad vice president, declared of Denver in the 1860s.

When Cheyenne, Wyoming, was made a primary stop on the east-west rail line nearly a decade before Colorado’s statehood in 1876, Denver’s fate appeared sealed. Fearing financial ruin—and a further exodus that would decimate what remained of the community—residents banded together to fund a rail spur from Wyoming. The spur became a link for Denver and helped turn the city into a viable commercial epicenter at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

In time, hotels, mills, lumberyards, a brass foundry, and a cracker factory opened in what is now LoDo. Four railroad companies had offices in the city, and each had its own station, forcing travelers to traverse dusty or muddy roads to catch different trains. That began to change in 1880, when the city created plans to consolidate the stations into a single building at the corner of 17th and Wynkoop streets.

Union Depot, as it was called, would cost $525,000 (about $17 million today) and would house trains under a massive structure “of brick, with stone trimmings,” the Rocky Mountain News reported at the time. It would be a grand edifice: 180 feet tall, 500 feet long, and 60 feet wide, constructed in the High Victorian Eclectic style popularized in New York City in the mid- to late 1800s. Leading the development was William E. Taylor, a Kansas City architect. By June 1881, construction was complete: Denver now had the tallest building west of the Mississippi River and a hallmark development that helped legitimize the city.

On a gray morning this past May outside that building—renamed Union Station following a massive remodel in 1914 that created its celebrated central facade—Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a Democrat, described the aftermath of post-pandemic American cities as a way to explain what had happened to one of the West’s great economic centers. “The COVID-19 pandemic left our downtowns deserted,” said Johnston, a former educator and state representative who’d won the mayoral election in summer 2023. Work-from-home and hybrid work schedules reduced demands for commercial office space in downtown Denver. A domino effect ensued. Without foot traffic, many businesses struggled, and some closed permanently. Crime increased: Aggravated assaults in the Central Business District jumped 52 percent from 2018 to 2021. Burglaries nearly doubled during the same time period (but saw a substantial decrease in 2022). A “doom loop,” Johnston called it.

Although the city center is home to 40 percent of Denver’s jobs, post-pandemic visitor recovery rates in the urban core are among the lowest of the 26 largest downtowns in the country, according to a study from Philadelphia’s Center City District. Year-to-date sales of commercial properties in Denver are also below that of most major cities across the West. City subleases were up 53.7 percent, year over year, in December 2020—a sign that office tenants were already re-examining the need for physical space for workers.

Early this year, the Denver Post reported commercial vacancies downtown were at 31.5 percent—the highest level since the early 1990s oil bust. Avison Young, a global commercial real estate services firm with an office downtown, reported this summer that vacancy rates in the city continued to climb from previous months, most notably downtown. “I have six or seven tenants downtown, and all of them have given me a mandate that basically says, ‘We want out of here,’ ” says Howard Schmidt, an Avison Young vice president who expected a post-pandemic real estate rebound that has yet to materialize. “Everyone loves Denver,” he adds. “I figured people would be flocking back downtown. But that’s not been the case at all.”

These are strange times for a downtown that had been the envy of so many American cities for the previous decade. Cutting-edge companies such as Ibotta and Palantir Technologies located their headquarters in the city center as technology businesses challenged the oil and gas industry that had dominated downtown Denver development for generations. Construction cranes became fixtures on the skyline. There was arts and culture, locally made craft beer and spirits, banking and finance, professional sports, and outdoor recreation.

Nowhere was the city’s transformation more noticeable than at Union Station, whose $500 million renovation turned a nearly deserted building into a catalyst for development across LoDo. Much of the project’s funding came from the DDA, part of a Colorado statute that authorizes municipalities to collect a portion of incremental taxes within a designated development zone and reinvest that money into economic expansion within the same area.

The DDA that funded Union Station’s renewal began in 2008, becoming one of more than 20 DDAs across the state. In Denver, the DDA financed bonds that paid for part of the Union Station redevelopment, a project that included upgraded rail tracks and platforms, a new Regional Transportation District (RTD) bus depot, and preservation and renovations inside the existing historical building.

This was done through something known as Tax Increment Financing (TIF). A TIF doesn’t raise taxes but rather reallocates tax-revenue increases; in this case, the DDA allowed the city to borrow money to help fund the redevelopment based on the increase in future property and sales taxes the project was expected to generate. In other words, as the revamped Union Station increased economic activity, it generated more tax revenue. That money then was used to pay off the bonds.

The DDA encompassed the station and several blocks surrounding it and was a massive success. Tax revenue ended up being so much higher than projections that the TIF will pay off the $400 million in bonds this year, 14 years earlier than expected.

And so, as Johnston stood outside Union Station on that spring day, he unveiled a new plan for the city—an ambitious project called Vibrant Denver that would expand the original, now expiring DDA to the rest of downtown. From LoDo, through the city’s core, and all the way to the state Capitol, $500 million would be spent over the next 15 years as part of a massive, more-than-85-block transformation.

Using the station’s redevelopment as a road map, Johnston said, the revamped DDA would act as a multiplier of sorts to attract and aid privately funded projects, potentially delivering billions of dollars in additional investment. “Denver refuses to walk away from our downtown as the vibrant center of financial, cultural, social, athletic, and artistic activities,” the mayor said. Downtown Denver has been an economic driver for the rest of the city, which propelled the state’s fortunes and, by extension, helped determine the fate of the Rocky Mountain West. Said Johnston: “The economic recovery of 10 states starts in this neighborhood.”

On this June Thursday, the sidewalks around Union Station are lively and crowded. People in dress pants and button-down shirts brush past each other with their takeout lunches. A group of friends chat on concrete steps in front of the Wynkoop Brewery. The fountain splashes giggling children whose parents record the moment on their phones. Ubers and Lyfts line up along Wynkoop Street. A small party of travelers with suitcases walks up 17th Street to the Oxford Hotel.

As a whole, the city of Denver has relatively low rates of violent crime and one of the lower homicide rates, when compared with similarly sized cities. But since the pandemic, downtown has become notorious for crimes such as car break-ins, assaults, and public drug use. Data prove the reputation is earned. In June and July, there were at least five burglaries with forced entry in LoDo. Eight serious assaults were reported in an eight-day period throughout downtown in late June. There was an armed carjacking during the day on June 30, and two people were shot two blocks from Union Station in early July.

The idea that such a vibrant neighborhood can feel so unmoored at times is a contradiction that’s difficult for even longtime residents to comprehend. “You get a beautiful summer evening when there’s a game at Coors Field and people are on restaurant patios with friends and you can’t think of a better place,” says Lynda “Elle” Baker, 57, a former salon owner who lives in the Ice House Lofts next to Union Station and serves on the homeowners’ association board. “A few nights later, you’re dodging open-air drug users and wondering if anyone’s going to help if you’re attacked. Denver can be amazing and frustrating, sometimes in the same hour.”

Just before noon that day, I meet Andrew Mueller, an assistant professor at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business, for lunch at a restaurant near Track 7, behind Union Station. The area is teeming with activity. Downtown workers wander about. A group of women hug hello outside a newly arrived train, near a man experiencing homelessness who’s shading himself from the heat.

Mueller studies urban environments and development and how people interact within those things. Denver, like most cities, is a complicated place, he says. What’s unique to the Mile High City, however, is that its current predicament can be traced to development decisions that date back nearly 60 years.

In 1967, Denver voters overwhelmingly approved the Skyline Urban Renewal Project, a plan that demolished 120 acres of prime downtown real estate in favor of office towers and vast parking lots that accommodated workers who’d taken part in the flight to the suburbs over the previous decade. “The en vogue planning at the time was all about building skyscrapers and creating a city of the future,” Mueller says. More than 1,500 mostly poor downtown residents were displaced during the teardown, and many of those people ultimately found homes in public housing outside the city center. “Denver had these beautiful, old, five-story buildings everywhere, high density and good mixed-use,” Mueller says. “And then the city turned that into parking lots.”

Despite Union Station’s much-heralded 2014 renovation, other, more recent redevelopment projects haven’t gone particularly well. The 16th Street Mall—now undergoing a $170 million overhaul that has faced multiple delays—has been reimagined twice in the past two decades, but neither project has proved successful. Downtown’s Skyline Park, a modernist icon built in the early 1970s, fell into neglect and was remodeled in 2004 but continues to be a hub for drug use and people without housing. Part of the park today is cordoned off.

The idea behind the mayor’s DDA expansion proposal follows an emerging consensus around the United States that major cities can reinvent themselves by taking a page out of the old playbook—essentially, turning the city center back into a neighborhood where people want to spend time, regardless of where they might work. Case in point is LoDo. The neighborhood encapsulates the concept of the “work, live, play” ethos Johnston wants to expand to the rest of downtown, a sentiment repeated by nearly every politician, developer, and resident I spoke with for this story. “If you create a cool, safe, welcoming place people want to visit, then you’re creating a place where people are going to want to work, and then they’re going to start looking for a home,” says Susan Chong, a real estate agent who sells properties downtown and lives three blocks from Union Station. “It’s a pretty obvious solution.”

As the theory goes, a city center should have affordable residences filled with families, which then attract businesses like restaurants, daycare centers, and grocers. “If that can be the norm again in a place like Denver, then that’s a really exciting road map for the rest of the country,” Mueller says. In essence, the concept is a throwback to a time when store owners could live above their businesses, shop for daily staples, and go out to dinner all within a few blocks of home.

The question today is whether Denver can accomplish that vision. “We have to be optimistic about the possibilities,” Walter Isenberg, the president and CEO of the Sage Hospitality Group, told me later on that warm June day at the Oxford Hotel. Isenberg operates more than 90 hotels across the country, including four in LoDo. The Oxford—his crown jewel—has returned to its pre-pandemic numbers, he says, as have Sage’s three other hotels nearby. That Sage properties have lagged elsewhere is proof, Isenberg says, that the DDA that funded Union Station’s revitalization worked and can succeed as an expanded entity to drive other development in the city center. “People want to be in LoDo because there’s a high quality of life, there’s always something going on,” says Isenberg, who also helped create projects for both McGregor Square and the Dairy Block—two developments that are examples of modern, dense, mixed-use gathering spots in LoDo.

As part of a downtown revamp, he says, there needs to be an expansion and yet another remodel of Skyline Park. Abandoned ground-floor retail spaces throughout the city center need to be reoccupied. “And that’s going to take time, but it’s absolutely important. Energize the ground floors downtown, and you’re going to get residents and office tenants and visitors,” Isenberg says. “We need to look at this downturn as an opportunity to dig in and roll up our sleeves and say, ‘What should downtown be?’  ”

From his third-floor office at the City and County Building, the mayor can see the terminus of the future DDA, across East Colfax Avenue from Civic Center Park. Right now, it’s the yin to Union Station’s yang, an imperfect bookend. “Some cities are looking at these issues and saying the idea of downtowns is dead; it’s a 20th-century notion, and don’t try to revive it,” Johnston tells me. “We feel the opposite. We’re doubling down on the idea that downtowns can be vibrant and are a must for cities to survive.”

Along a wall near the mayor’s desk is an eight-foot-long map of the renovations along the 16th Street Mall. Before Union Station’s rebirth, the mall had been the centerpiece of a downtown that didn’t have much to offer residents, office workers, or visitors. It was, in many ways, downtown’s most distressed—and disappointing—asset. With the mall now scheduled to reopen next summer, Johnston believes it can be a lively spine that will link LoDo to the rest of downtown, a renewed commercial district where boutiques and big-box retailers and restaurants co-exist within a walkable 15-block stretch.

This is all critical to Johnston, who took office more than a year ago on a platform that emphasized safe streets and a promise to pull Denver out of its post-pandemic listlessness. In the first 10 months of his administration, more than 1,000 people previously experiencing homelessness in the city were moved to residences away from LoDo and the city center. “It’s like someone flipped the ‘on’ switch and gave us back part of the city,” says Chong, the real estate agent.

Johnston has now turned his attention to the DDA. Under Colorado statute, each of the state’s cities is allowed only one authority. “Downtown needs to be the economic priority for the city,” the mayor says. As Johnston tells it, Gretchen Hollrah, the city’s former deputy chief operating officer, brought the DDA expansion idea up in a meeting shortly after he took office. “I said, ‘This is brilliant,’ ” Johnston says. “Exactly what we’ve done for Union Station, we can do for all of downtown. This is our chance.”

The City Council could approve the DDA expansion as early as this fall. After that, the Denver Economic Development & Opportunity office will create guidelines for projects. The first funding tranche would follow, perhaps as early as next summer, though there are no concrete plans for spending the $500 million over the next 15 years. Johnston and others have mentioned the need to restructure Skyline Park and have visited Boston to study the ways it uses Boston Common to activate the neighborhoods surrounding the 50-acre public park.

Denver Councilman Chris Hinds, whose district encompasses the entirety of the proposed DDA, says there’s been zero opposition to the plan so far. “There’s a lot of excitement for this,” he says, adding that the biggest debates will center on which projects get funding. Hinds has already advocated for a 5.280-mile walking and biking path—dubbed the 5280 Trail—that connects Union Station, the Auraria Campus, the Golden Triangle, Capitol Hill, and other neighborhoods. The city has also extensively researched commercial-to-residential conversions on multiple buildings, paying for a study last year that singled out 16 structures downtown that have potential for residential conversions, most of them mid-rises that can offer enough interior natural light to make the projects viable.

This spring, members from the nonprofit Downtown Denver Partnership traveled to Calgary, which used a $200 million startup fund to offer developers sped-up approvals and square-footage incentives to convert empty offices into residential apartments. Thirteen conversion projects are active, and four others are in the pipeline—a project that will convert roughly 2.3 million square feet of space. Ultimately, the Canadian city wants its fund to spur another $1 billion in private investment.

Johnston believes an even larger multiplier could happen in Denver. “I think it’s very reasonable to say we can get two times, five times what the city’s going to put in it if we do this the right way,” he says. “We can help make the math work” for private investors. Johnston adds: “In a lot of these projects, we can be the placemaker. We can help create a public space that attracts commerce and business and residents. We can be a co-investor in a residential unit or in a new development. We can be a partner and make public dollars go further to give a broader sense of ownership.”

Schmidt, the Avison Young vice president who worries about the future of commercial space in the Central Business District, says he favors the DDA expansion, as do developers in the area. But, Schmidt adds, “I would like to know the details behind it, time frames, who’s accountable, who’s paying, and the benefits of doing it. So far, little has been shared.”

For the mayor’s part, he says the city’s urban core can’t survive with a bunch of one-bedroom apartments that cost $2,000 or more a month. Johnston envisions a downtown replete with living spaces for working-class families, not just dual-income couples without kids and wealthy retirees looking to downsize.

With a diverse crop of residents, the mayor says, demand for grocery stores and daycares will become inevitable. Denver “can’t just be the place where you work from 9 to 5 and then go home,” he says. “We need people living there, walking their dogs there, taking their kids to school there. And all that is predicated on saying everyone should have a stake in the future of downtown, because it will always be the heart of this city.”

It’s nearing midnight, Denver’s final wind-down. Cars make their way up East Colfax Avenue, along the far edge of the proposed DDA, near the state Capitol. Lightning flashes to the west. Storm clouds pull a gray canopy over downtown.

Two men are stretched out in a bus shelter near the Capitol. A man sleeps on the sidewalk. Two blocks up, near Grant Street, a couple of men are slumped against each other on a concrete stoop. Another man is screaming into a cell phone. Make a left and there’s a pile of feces on the sidewalk. A light rain begins to fall.

Seventeen blocks away, the Union Station fountain shuts off for the night. The building is illuminated in blue light and casts dark shadows across the sidewalks. Groups of men and women in T-shirts and shorts head for a bar across the street. A security guard aggressively follows a man who hustles along the walkway between the station and the Ice House Lofts.

Inside the station, empty glasses clink at the Terminal Bar near the Wynkoop Street entrance to the Great Hall. A server sits on a bench and wraps newly cleaned silverware in black cloth napkins. A guard pulls back trash cans and checks hideaway corners for overnight sleepers. Outside, on the train platform, the 12:27 a.m. A-Line rolls into the station. The passengers getting off the train ignore a man dancing on the concrete. “Jesus Christ is in my bloodline!” he sings repeatedly.

Above the underground bus terminal, three RTD police officers pass through the glass-encased entrance and take the escalator downstairs. Men and women are scattered about, resting upright in chairs or staring out darkened windows toward the empty docks where buses load. Signs on flat-screen monitors affixed to the walls flash warnings: “No Trespassing, No Loitering, No Lying Down.”

During the pandemic, the underground passage was a microcosm of the city’s ills. Three years ago, the RTD union president called Union Station a “lawless hellhole.” In 2022, RTD hired Joel Fitzgerald Sr., a former suburban police chief in Texas, as the district’s chief and head of emergency management. More security was brought to Union Station, and people began getting arrested.

Tonight, at least, things are quiet. “Two years ago, there was no control,” says Ian Galgano, 32, who’s been on the RTD force since the beginning of this year. “These days, I feel like this is a real policing win.” He walks with his partners tonight—sergeant Kris Stevenson and a trainee, officer Rebecca Sinclair. It’s the trio’s second time down here in the past half hour, a small show of force, they say, that results in less aggression, fewer drug-related crimes, and an overall safer environment.

“Presence is 90 percent of the job, and we’re showing, night after night, that we’re here,” deputy chief Glyn Horn Jr., who helps oversee the bus terminal patrol, told me later. The terminal, he says, needed to become a bunker to protect. “We took back the hub, and then we deploy outward from that,” Horn says. “We’ve taken back our base.”

In the underground terminal, officers are both police and social workers. “It’s rewarding, because you’re a problem-solver in this job,” says Galgano, who’s originally from Long Island. “Maybe I get to direct someone to a place that’s going to help them with an addiction issue. Maybe I’m going to be able to offer them a safe place to sleep.”

Galgano points to a man in a seat near one of the windows. The last bus pulled out of the station about 15 minutes ago. “The station’s closed,” the officer says, and the man gets up and leaves.

No one puts up a fight tonight. As LoDo nears the end of this 18-hour day, there are no conflicts inside the RTD terminal, no calls for backup, no arrests. The officers head topside. At the glass doors that lead outside, a security guard stops a man with some bags who tries to enter. “Closed,” the guard says in a firm voice.

The guard locks the glass doors while the man watches. The RTD police officers know the man, who sets his bags on the ground and smiles at the trio from behind the glass. Officer Galgano gives a smile and a little wave. The man waves back and nods his head. He turns away from Union Station and disappears into the night.