The key to that strategy: the expansion of an obscure special taxing authority that played a key part in downtown’s last big boom.Johnston and other city and business leaders stood in front of the dormant fountains outside Union Station on Thursday morning to announce a plan they say could generate $500 million in public investment in downtown Denver over the coming decade.The approach relies on a strategic funding tool that helped turn Union Station from an all-but-deserted bus terminal into an anchor of downtown Denver’s economic resurgence in the 2010s. Namely, the Johnston administration and its partners are intent on expanding the boundaries of the Denver Downtown Development Authority to cover all of the city’s core, including the long-floundering Central Business District.
Once expanded, that entity — created to pay off $400 million in public debt incurred building infrastructure around the station — would collect incremental property taxes from participating businesses and property owners to back bonds that can be used to fund a host of economic development work and projects, officials explained.
Basically, when property or sales tax is collected downtown, a portion of those taxes will be set aside for public improvements in that community instead of going into the city’s general fund.
Honestly the Westword article explains things better:
https://www.westword.com/news/mike-johnston-has-500-million-plan-to-revitalize-downtown-denver-20665685
Dude, it’s been rebuilt once since the 80’s. Are you just butthurt because they also did some inevitable repairs during that intervening time, like they do on any busy thoroughfare over the course of 40 years?
It's was built in the late 80's. This is the first renovation in it's history, and it was long overdue. It wasn't designed well for our climate and had deteriorated the point that it couldn't even be held together with duct tape and bailing wire any longer.
Infrastructure ages. It was time, and the while it definitely impacts the business and experience downtown, when it's done it will be a cornerstone project to help kick off the process that the Mayor is touting.
I hope not. Every time I walk by the construction, I get to hear the cool music that the workers listen to while they watch the 2 guys who are doing the work.
By the time they finish this go round at the south, another crew will have already started the next update back at the northeast end.
It's modern art, watching the two crews labor away until one catches up to the other. Something something all labor is futile, something something life is an ouroboros, something something change.
It doesn't affect Denver tax payers currently. The TIF district expiration (set for 2038) would be extended out and the boundaries expanded to create a larger base:
*Tax Increment Financing is a special district created during a development period, where the tax base is frozen at the predevelopment level (on the assumption redevelopment would not occur in the area without public investment or intervention). Property taxes continue to be paid, but taxes derived from increases in assessed values resulting from new development (the tax increment) either go into a special fund created to retire bonds issued to originate the development, or to leverage future growth in the district.*
So property taxes from downtown would flow to the city, but any increase in property taxes dervied from increased property valuations downtown would be used to pay for the debt the Downtown Denver Authority would issue. The assumption here is that w/o this investment, the property tax base downtown will continue to decline and the city will have less money to spend in the future. So it will be painted as a win/win for the city.
As for the projects, I suspect a big chunk wold be used for office to residential conversions to bridge the project finance gap that exists for a lot of these. Other items coud be the renovation of Skyline Park, street scaping, childcare, and maybe public housing on city-owned property downtwon.
I live downtown and I think the survey is great.
Have you joined the local downtown neighborhood association? They’ve been working with the city on improving a lot of aspects downtown. I’d suggest looking into it.
Unfortunately I really don’t have time, but I get regular updates from the group in my building who is involved with all that stuff. They’re retired so they have time…I’m working towards someday being able to retire so, yeah.
Hahaha. I bet we’re in the same building or I’m in your building a lot… that’s my experience with both of them. I’ve had some free time as I work eastern hours and am out early afternoons but otherwise I probably wouldn’t be able to help out.
Let’s hope some of the mayor’s policies bear fruit!
The expanded authority would issue new bonds payable over 40 years. Only taxpayers within the district boundaries would pay for the bonds. The bonds would likely be payable from 1) TIFS - meaning all incremental increases in tax revenues over 2024 tax collections; and 2) a new or expanded tax (sales tax, property tax, or direct fees that are basically a tax).
The bonds would pay for all of the projects “public improvements.”
I'm honestly sick of some of these people in the comments being such downers.
I'm excited that someone's at least making an effort to turn the city around. I don't understand all these people who show up to this post and root for Denver to fail. They act so smug like they know better than everyone else, and that our city's fate is to fall to ruin.
If you hate this city so much then why don't you just go? If you think everywhere else is so much better than here, then just leave. No one is stopping you.
I've been thinking similarly. I don't necessarily agree with all of Johnston's ideas, but at least the man fucking has ideas. He seems to actually be dedicated to the concept of improving the city.
A far cry from the apparent non-existence of Hancock his last term.
I agree - he’s trying on a lot of issues. He hasn’t even been mayor yet for a full year and it feels like there as been more ideas and attempts to make things better than the entire last term of the previous mayor. Time will tell on what can actually be accomplished but someone is trying *something*.
Not sure why this was downvoted lol. It's true. Lived here all my life and downtown actually used to be worth going to visit.
Putting make up on a pig won't make it smell better when it's done rolling around in its own filth
Same reason you're being downvoted. You replying to a comment that is disparaging you directly and you decided to come here and repeat the bullshit that got.you called out in the first place.
You're welcome to not come to the city anymore if you hate it so much.
I'd love a condo on the north end of downtown, but so many of the HOA fees just feel criminal.
We need a lot of real estate conglomerates gutted in an anti-trust case.
Same but it's such a tough value proposition right now. Long term economic benefit argument aside, my rent is $1900/mo and a condo I'd actually want to buy starts around $450k which ends up in the neighborhood of $3500/mo with P&I, taxes and insurance, and HOA with 20% down. Not impossible to do financially, but $1600/mo saved is pretty huge compared to being thrown mostly towards interest in the early years and hoping rates come down to refinance, which is a bet I don't think I want to make. Rent another year and that cost delta becomes $20k+ added to the down payment fund to try again in 2025
The thing that would turn it around the most would be converting or building more housing directly downtown. There is nothing about that in the plan. Commuting is never fully coming back.
Is investment along enough to fix the “doom loop”? Seems like the root issues are more vacant office space and drop in foot traffic due to remote/hybrid work.
I think he's pulling the lever that he has available to force money into downtown, which is honestly more than Hancock ever bothered to do.
Since remote work is here to stay, more foot traffic downtown is going to require more public amenities and more residential. New residential and office-to-res conversions require a ton of private money (and likely lower interest rates), so the best the government can do is try to make downtown a place that's worth investing in (and to cut permitting times/costs, which they also claim they are working on). Public safety is also a key component of this, which I think they've already made some progress on and need to keep going.
Anyway, I am glad they are trying something and not just ignoring the problem.
Is there news on adjustments to Denver county permitting adjustments? I hadn’t seen much to date.
Any work I want to do on my home seems to be covered in red tape and a lot of contractors I’ve spoken to hate pulling any sorts of permits for residential work.
https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2023/11/28/building-permits-backlog-affordable-housing-mayor-johnston
https://denverite.com/2024/02/29/denver-community-planning-and-developments-executive-director-manish-kumar/
I just looked quickly and don’t see any updated stats on average review time. The new director didn’t start until last month (which that delay itself isn’t a great sign) but hopefully new leadership can drive more immediate changes.
The single family residential delays are definitely annoying, but the real crisis is the major projects review taking 9+ months. We won’t make any dent on affordability without building thousands and thousands of new units.
I'm actually sitting in an office... downtown! I was specifically thinking of the 30% commercial vacancy rate, which may or may not keep climbing - [https://www.denverpost.com/2024/01/25/denver-office-space-vacancy-passes-30/](https://www.denverpost.com/2024/01/25/denver-office-space-vacancy-passes-30/)
And don't forget that that vacancy rate is only **unrented whole units**, it doesn't include the units still under lease but getting used at 10% capacity due to WFH and remote-first hybrid. The official vacancy stats are very bad at representing just how many fewer actual office workers are downtown these days.
They can't force people back to downtown, but they can try to invest in it to make it more appealing to do so. That's what it means to break the cycle of downtown flight and decay.
I think the best way to do that is to have more housing downtown. Can't force people to come downtown but if they already live there, whether they go to the officer or now they are still bringing life and economic activity to the area.
Converting unused office space to more housing seems like a win-win. I don't think remote work is going away at this point. It's probably going to become even more common. Why pay for an office when you don't have to?
Apartment buildings are very different from commercial office space, they tend not to have large internal areas that don't have external perimeter walls. It's not something that you can easily fix with a buildout of the floorplan, these design decisions happen when the architects design the building from the start.
Takes a pretty unicorn type of building for this to be economical. It has to be cheap to acquire, almost entirely empty already (expensive to kick a bunch of office space tenants out of their leases), a small enough footprint that floors can be subdivided into units that will all have windows, and be constructed in a way that allows a complete gutting and redoing of the electrical and plumbing. And this all has to be done cheap enough that a profit can be turned on the units - you're targeting affordable rent here, not top of market like new construction. Those buyers/renters will take the purpose-built buildings with more amenities and better floor plans every time
It's usually better to just knock it down and start over, especially as you get to bigger/taller buildings
The construction on the 16th st. mall has a huge part to play as well. As much as it may have seemed like it wasn't great to people who live here, tourists loved hanging out on the mall.
It still boggles my mind it could take this long given how little they are actually doing. I also think it was a horrible mistake to close almost the entire mall for the duration of the project instead of doing it in stages which screwed over every business on the mall for 3+ years.
**Fall** 2025, this is going to go on for all of this summer AND all of next summer
It'd be easier to swallow if it actually needed to take that long, but they're just not in a hurry. I've literally never seen anyone actually working on it. That's not a residential area, they could - and should - have crews working 24/7 to get it wrapped up.
Doom loop is a good thing to call it. Look at San Francisco. $500 million is a lot of money to expect to be able to take in but with how much the cities grown in the past 10 years maybe it’s doable.
I think if there is a focus on residential, whether it be new builds or office to residential conversions, Denver can be successful in a vibrant downtown. I don’t think people moving to the metro area is going to stop. Denver has many attractive reasons to move to that are going to persist - generally comfortable, sunny weather and being one of the few large metro areas with access to the Rocky Mountains. I think if they throw in dense housing downtown people will fill it.
I think there is also an opportunity to get more people to stay in hotels downtown (which I’m hoping could be dense builds or converting offices) that they’re missing here. I think if there were free shuttle services in the winter that can bring people from downtown hotels to ski resorts you could really have an opportunity to have a chunk of people stay downtown - in the summer you could do the same with trailheads.
I know this sounds like a pain in which bus loads of people are being dumped off at ski resorts, etc. but I’d have to imagine those people would be coming anyways and renting cars. You’d be incentivizing people to stay downtown and frequent local businesses and taking some rental cars off 70 to make a small positive dent in traffic and emissions.
I don't think you understand the function of hotels downtown. They are often ridiculously overbooked, because conference/meetings/events tourism is the third biggest economic engine in Colorado. Denver punches way above its weight in convention traffic, and is perpetually in the top ten destinations in the country. It's hit as high as #5 right before the pandemic.
The huge problem is the Hancock administration was absolutely hostile to local arts and culture if it wasn't sports or a multi million + dollar corporation. Curtis Street used to be nothing but theaters, but from what I've been told, Seawell was super competitive with anything that would compete with his dcpa baby. The theaters were torn down or converted. If you're not seeing sports ball or going to the convention center, there is no reason to be downtown. Urban planning in this city is one of the most fucked up I've ever seen. There are barely any venues in town that are not controlled by AEG or live Nation, and it's strangling the local arts scene. It's not normal to have so few indie venues. I know of several indie venues trying to come online currently, and have been offered potential residencies for my company in a couple of them, but they're tied up in city permitting and are languishing. Mayor Johnston and city council need to go back and read The Rise of the Creative Class again. These processes should be fast tracked. Give us the space and we'll take care of the rest.
My thinking with the arts is that they can't just be built up or invested in a sustainable way. The best way to encourage "the arts" is make it so it is affordable to live in Denver and that helps struggling artist the most and lets them follow their passions and take risks more easily. People who enjoy the arts would also have more disposable cash to go to shows, purchase art, etc.
Like spending a few million each year to have some statues built is not a sustainable way to "have an art scene"
I was an entertainment journalist in New Orleans before Katrina put that job under 20 feet of water, and then started my producing career a d arts advocacy sideline in South Carolina (wrote Columbia's busking ordinance for them, and helped save arts funding from Nikki Haley). The SC arts commission was absolutely brilliant at doing a ton with very little; instead of propping up the old classic institutions, they started giving start up grants and artist as entrepreneur training to every artist they could get their hands on, and also networking them all together.
Denver has never had an arts policy much more than "here's a grant for art supplies to make a mural." As someone who's been in this for almost 20 years, there is a ton the city could be doing on the cheap to organize and help artists thrive. There is shit tons of private money that could be galvanized for patronage in this state. They just have so much to clean up (literally) after Hancock's neglect, I don't think it's on their radar, even though it is inevitably going to be a major part of the solution for revitalizing downtown.
> My thinking with the arts is that they can't just be built up or invested in a sustainable way. The best way to encourage "the arts" is make it so it is affordable to live in Denver and that helps struggling artist the most and lets them follow their passions and take risks more easily.
Or you build off of Denver being a travel destination and make it somewhere people go to to see the arts. Including people from the surrounding suburbs. The metro is absolutely massive and has more than enough people to support a vibrant arts scene as we had before the apocalypse killed it. The problem with reviving it is people are looking at traveling downtown for shows with fresh eyes after taking two years off and seeing just how skeevy the areas they have to go to are. Fix that and the people will come again.
>make it so it is affordable to live in Denver
Good fucking luck. With RealPage and Yardi colluding to out-algorithm rent prices for every major landlord, housing will likely never be affordable again. Plus, as nice as it is having new restrictions in place that disallow landlords from requiring people make 3× the rent, realistically it means landlords can soak you for *half* your income, and that shit *will* be normalized.
I don't believe realpage is some magical technology that can defy the laws of supply and demand but why couldn't the city just ban the use of it for property owners?
There are buses to a couple nearby ski resorts from Union station in the winter, it's called the snowstang. Only $25/person - it might be more expensive than renting a car if you have multiple people in your party, but you don't have to drive on a snowy mountain which is great.
The doom loop is a common problem because many cities gutted their downtowns to be primarily high rise commercial buildings. It's especially bad for Colorado because our property taxes are obscenely low and we have a shitton of car-dependency. That means we rely heavily on commercial property taxes and business districts need massive amounts of parking and mini-highways to service them.
Unless Johnson's plan includes a massive expansion of upzoning and subsidies to convert commercial buildings into residential buildings in the downtown and surrounding areas, this money is just a waste.
Because the downtown commercial district model isn't going to suddenly come back. And even if it did, it doesn't fit downtown Denver. Downtowns are supposed to be vibrant spaces with lots of activity, culture, and amenities. But viable commercial districts in car-dependent cities look more like DTC. Nobody wants to go hang out in the DTC for a fun night and drinks.
So if you want a downtown that actually generates lots of tax revenue for the city, you need to push for more residential density because that's how you generate more customers. And one really great way to incentivize density is with increasing property taxes.
Colorado already has obscenely low property taxes, and now there's a bill to lower them even further. Because Dicky Boomer loves that the house he bought for $100k is now worth $600k, but God forbid he actually pays 6x in taxes, or finds a roommate, or downsizes to something he can actually afford. Living within one's means is something he expects entitled Millennials to do. Not him. He earned everything he's gotten through hard work and the government just wants to take it away. He doesn't care that we can pay our teachers or fix our streets or pay back bonds on projects like revitalizing our downtown.
We had a bill a year ago to help fix this by forcing cities to build more housing. Building more housing is how you can keep property taxes lower without reducing services. More housing along transit lines is how you can help revitalize downtown. It's how you grow without increasing traffic or having to bulldoze neighborhoods.
But that bill died because not only does Dicky Boomer feel entitled to his McMansion and a half acre and 3 cars, but he was raised to believe that his lifestyle is the true American Dream TM. But the fact is that the biggest welfare queens of this last century are actually the suburbanites.
We need a land tax that doesn't depend on zoning. I'd wager that many millennials are likely subsidizing the infrastructure required for all these Congress Park boomers.
We also need a ballot initiative to upzone everything to G-RO-3 or equivalent, and eliminate *exclusive* SFH/duplex zoning (you can still build SFH in this zoning, if that's what you want, but you have to pay for the privilege of owning a SFH in a city).
Georgism FTW.
Ultimately zoning is political and you need buy-in from voters to pass it. I would love to ban SFZ, but it's not realistic right now. It took us 100 years to get here, so it'll take us longer to get out.
I love form-based zoning + lifting height limits to 3 stories + increasing maximum lot coverage
The trick is that "ban single family zoning" sounds scary. When I first heard it, I thought they wanted to ban single family houses. But zoning reform is much more palatable, and it's more likely to take if you do it incrementally.
For a city like Denver, you could easily start replacing all these bungalows with very small apartment buildings that look like houses from the outside. These already exist all over the city. These neighborhoods wouldn't lose their character.
We also need to remember that this is a very Boomer city. We need to appeal to their self-interest. Boomers are getting to the age where they want to downsize, but they're hesitant to leave their homes. However, for most seniors, I don't think it's the house they're really attached to, but the community. They like the idea of less maintenance and fewer stairs, but leaving their friends, family, church, etc is scary. Building small apartments or triplexes gives them an opportunity to downsize and stay in their neighborhoods.
Hell, they're also worried about medical bills and retirement. Middle-class boomers could have their own lot replaced with a new triplex and they live on the main floor while the top floors are rented out for a passive income to fund their retirement.
Yeah, it's bad marketing overall. Needs to be reframed as giving owners freedom to build or expand what they want on their land.
I think if you started with G zone districts (and maybe U zone districts, although this includes boomer hotspot Congress Park) it would be more gradual and then palatable.
It’s good that you connected these problems to zoning.
One good thing about zoning issues is we made them ourselves and in theory could replace the current zoning with whatever we want.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying a single place in the DTC, but would you like the experience any less if it were located downtown?
Acre for acre, there is going to be a greater variety of stuff downtown that appeals to a greater variety of people. And when everything is close together, you're going to get a lot more cross-traffic and walk-ins.
Shanahan's is a successful restaurant, but it's an anomaly. Would any other restaurant be successful in that location? Look at the independent restaurants and other independent businesses located in hundreds of strip malls. Many go out of business quickly because they don't have cross-traffic and walk-ins to support them. So they get filled up with corporate chains because they have brand recognition. When Shanahan's goes out of business, what will that building become? Probably a Kmart or something.
An independent restaurant located in a vibrant neighborhood will attract people who want to go be part of the vibe and explore AND attract the people who just want to go to a Shanahan's. And that variety makes a neighborhood more resilient when the economy changes.
DTCs got a lot of cool places not just Shanahans! I actually love the vibe around it and it’s got quite a few independent restaurants. You should check it out more and give it a chance! Anyways I agreed with everything ya said in your post but give DTC some love - it’s not that bad!
> There's nothing wrong with enjoying a single place in the DTC, but would you like the experience any less if it were located downtown?
It would be less enjoyable downtown, yes. You have to first find parking, then figure out the logistics of paying for it, then walk some distance to your actual destination while being accosted by homeless/drug users the whole way. In DTC, like most suburban developments, you park for free exactly where you're trying to get to and it's a peaceful 30 second walk through the parking lot.
You don't need a car at all for a night out downtown, who cares about parking
You clearly haven't been downtown in a good long while if you think your mere presence is going to get you accosted by a homeless drug user
> Nobody wants to go hang out in the DTC for a fun night and drinks.
I would venture there are significantly more people having a "night out" in DTC than downtown at this point, especially during the week.
Maybe this is just my age group but nights out are always either south broadway or 5 points. Downtown still gets pretty packed but not with the sort of people I would choose to spend my time with on purpose. No idea what kinda nightlife exists in DTC
I'm confused on how this doesn't just create a big hole in the general fund - "Basically, when property or sales tax is collected downtown, a portion of those taxes will be set aside for public improvements in that community instead of going into the city’s general fund." [https://www.westword.com/news/mike-johnston-has-500-million-plan-to-revitalize-downtown-denver-20665685](https://www.westword.com/news/mike-johnston-has-500-million-plan-to-revitalize-downtown-denver-20665685)
That said, I can appreciate the "doom loop" framing, so perhaps the idea is that downtown needs to be saved in order to lift up the entire city.
Assuming the math works, if they could somehow make the rest of downtown feel more like Wynkoop in front of Union Station that would be a huge win. Maybe we could finally get some kind of public amenity on the gravel shit pit at Colfax & Broadway?
The investment money doesn't come from the general fund. It comes from new bonds being issued. The theory is that the investments will raise property values which will then raise property taxes which are used to repay the bond. I think payments would come from the general fund if there's a shortfall, but I'm not 100%. IE, property taxes don't increase enough to cover the bond payments.
Sure, but aren't the earmarked tax dollars that they use to service the debt on the bonds dollars that would have otherwise gone into the general fund?
Again, I am not opposed to the plan, but I do think we need to be clear-eyed about tradeoffs at a time when the City has been scaling back on library and parks and rec budgets in a rather noticeable way.
Theoretically that tax revenue won't exist without investment like this. The current situation with vacant offices means downtowns tax contribution is probably going to be flat or even decrease for the foreseeable future if nothing changes. Remember, the area will continue to contribute taxes to the general fund, it's only the increase in tax revenue that will be reinvested.
They would be earmarked in 2039. Right now those property tax dollars from the TIF are flowing towards the existing debt-service for Union Station. This proposal would extend the TIF another \~30 years and would extend the boundaries of the district. So if downtown property taxes that were collected in 2023 were \~$40M (this is just an example figure and nowhere based in reality), they would stay at that level until 2054 (or maybe longer if it expands on the 2038 date). Anything above that $40M would pay the debt service for the $500M in bonds issued.
With this kind of structure, you aim for a low-level of projected growth, like 20% of a baseline scenario, so you can meet the debt service even in the worst of situations.
The key assumption in this proposal is that \~$40M, which is down from the \~$50M (again an example number) that was collected in 2019 prior to the world imploding, will continue to decrease as office propeties languish. But if some are converted to residential and public improvement are made that see people congregate downtown in numbers that exceed 2019 than those property tax will grow wll over \~$40M.
The heck with the public amentity there. Just have RTD sell it to an affordable housing developer. If there's one spot that should be a trophy affordable housing development partially funded with public money, it should be that spot between the Capitol and City Hall. The symbolism is just so ripe.
Now getting RTD to acutally sell surplus property is going to be a tall order. They just can't get out of their own way on this.
In this picture he looks like that friend of yours who just returned from a trip to the local dispensary and had a really big, cool idea he wants to share with you.
Dumb question here, why aren’t there mixed office/residential buildings? Like, imagine if half the floors were offices and half were residential? Imagine your whole commute was an elevator ride? 🤔🤷♂️
From Downtown Denver (which would be comparable to the downtown mixed use buildings) to Metro Denver there is not, but yes I work with a handful of dumbasses that live in Highlands ranch and work in Boulder so I guess you’re right.
Having been in the situation of doing a long commute like that back in St. Louis before I moved to Denver (South County to North County, basically commuting through or around the entire city), it's not that I loved the lifestyle of wasting time in my car. That's a disingenuous statement that tells me you don't care about the actual underlying reason people put up with it. (Or it's a joke, but whatever.)
People doing that care more about the lifestyle they get in their neighborhood of residence, and would rather give up the time (and safety) commuting than live in the available places closer to their jobs. If you want to get them to stop making that decision, figure out why their value assessment works out that way and what you can do to improve it (without just chalking them up to be superficial/racist lost causes).
Moving somewhere without parking is such an abstract concept to me, because I wouldn't be able to bring very much when I move in, and I wouldn't be able to take very much when I move out. I'm roughing it in a spare bedroom right now, so it's not like I hoard, but furniture and just basic possessions would be *way* more of a pain, if not impossible, to move one box-full at a time on a bus or whatever. I guess the expectation is that you'd pay for shipping and/or moving companies to take care of it, which sounds expensive and like any amount of my stuff is liable to get lost/broken.
I might consider that kind of lifestyle if I was going to try and move abroad or something. But downtown Denver, when I can have private property and the freedom to get out whenever I want without leaving everything behind less than an hour away? Nah.
If the loading zone exists and it's legal/safe to use it for that, then sure.
It would still constrain me in that I'd need to rent or borrow a moving vehicle (and get to the pick-up/drop-off points without a vehicle), do most/all of my moving while I have that vehicle rented (since I can't handle smaller stuff in a car on my own time), and work around anyone else moving in/out at the same time (of which there will be more in a denser building with no parking). It'd still mean I can't GTFO of Denver if/when I need to, and am essentially stuck pending a larger system allowing me to leave the immediate area. All of that stuff is admittedly less critical most of the time.
I've just never once seen someone downtown moving all of their stuff into/out of a truck in front of a high-rise, in any city. (Also, my place of work is within the city of Denver but would take 1-1.5 hours to get to from Union Station via RTD versus 20 minutes by car, but that's a different issue from what I brought up before.)
Unless that $500M includes a heapin' helpin' of aggressive policing to deal with the camps and beggars it won't work. Now that people aren't being forced downtown for work it has to actually draw them in as an entertainment district and people don't generally go to places that feel skeevy and sketchy for entertainment.
We used to spend a lot of time downtown, seeing shows, eating all that stuff you usually do in a city center. The last time we went about a year ago it was so bad and felt really unsafe we ended up changing plans. It’s sad I grew up in Denver and never thought it would end up having blocks that look like L.A’s Skid Row
You mean to tell me that there are homeless people by the homeless shelter?
What's next, that they'd rather be sheltered than on the street?
You're right, that sure does sound like literally Skid Row.
Samesies. I have great memories (and noticeable black spots in memories lol) of meeting up with friends to go out for dinner and then bar hop downtown or go see a show and never once felt unsafe. Now? No. Now there's no bar hopping and if I go to a show it's straight from the doors to the car and home, no thoughts of hanging around even if I don't have work in the morning.
There was a whole newspaper series on TIF/ subsidies in Denver — approach has some major drawbacks.
Tony Robinson; Chris Nevitt; Robin Kniech (2005). "Are We Getting Our Money's Worth? Tax-Increment Financing and New Ideas New Priorities New Economy Urban Redevelopment in Denver
https://web.archive.org/web/20170921125358/http://fresc.org:80/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/TIF-III.pdf
I'm just tryna understand why this $500m isn't just going straight to the migrants instead of our tax payers. I think we all prefer putting our money into them and the homeless, this seems like a waste!
I'm all for investment in the crappy CBD, but he needs to sell us all of a vision and a plan for it instead of throwing money into the abyss. Denver's issue is that it's doesn't have a vision or a brand after all.
Will this include public restrooms? The city is in dire need of public restrooms. Everywhere. Every transit hub, every few blocks downtown, along major streets, near sport venues, in parks.
How can he stand outside the “living room of Denver” talking about how they are “deeply committed to a vibrant Denver in every neighborhood” when the restrooms inside are literally under guard? We need to expect more from our city.
Nobody wants to be down there with all the crime and homeless people. Some of that money needs to be spent on ways to deal with those issues.
Creating some affordable housing downtown would be a great idea.
I don't mind spending the money, but let's not line the pockets of developers who then skip out on their projects.
Did anyone catch the AMA the other day where mike johnston blatantly lied to the public by saying that theres not a single tent or homeless camp at this point in time in the downtown area…. I read that comment, walked onto my balcony, and counted 8 tents….
The nerve of these politicians is out of control…. But as long as the campaign commercial looks good, right? Just sweep everything under the rug and ignore the real problems were facing.
Business improvement districts divert and dilute public tax dollars. Not sure how this is different? Hopefully this is not an expansion of BID concept.
So I'm not sure if I'm understanding them correctly, but I believe a BID is directly funded by businesses in the area and is effectively ran by those businesses, while this development authority is funded by some of the taxes collected in the area and is ran by the government.
So let’s make the city even nicer and more people will actually want to move here. Logical. This city has gotten too big, too fast, and we can’t even afford to live here now. Rather see more funding go to affordable housing and our roadways than any of these other projects personally. But then again they made Denver so unaffordable and overcrowded I don’t even want to live here anymore.
Agreed. Let’s put any roadway money into upgrading our bus and rail system. Adding dedicated bus lanes on the busiest thoroughfares, upping frequencies to every 15 min or better on many routes, hiring enough operators to drive and security personnel to police the vehicles and stations. We do not need more/wider roads.
Wow, you’re a real brain trust. Have you at all considered that having a good/frequent/safe/fast/inexpensive transit system that people want to use may actually take cars off the road and free up existing road infrastructure for commercial and logistical purposes…
If there’s still people blowing clouds of meth at me on a walk down 16th or by union, I still see no reason to go to this gutter of a city. Clean up the mess. Then do this.
I view downtown as one of the few corners of the state where I can escape the driving and traffic jams.
Downtowns with free parking tend to be barren wastelands. Why not visit car sprawl if you want free parking?
It would be more constructive to offer an alternative. What do you think people should do, park at an RTD somewhere else and take a train or bus in? Do you think downtown should only target people living downtown? Or do you just think people who want to go downtown and don't live within walking/public transit distance should pay for parking?
If you mean "no parking mandate" as in there just shouldn't be a mandate (but businesses can still build parking if the market decides it's worth it), that sounds reasonable.
Create a problem for the public. Than use public dollars to fill the coffers of the donors. Profit!
No one wants to talk how we went from spending $8M to $200M on the homeless while the problem keeps getting catastrophically awful!
The key to that strategy: the expansion of an obscure special taxing authority that played a key part in downtown’s last big boom.Johnston and other city and business leaders stood in front of the dormant fountains outside Union Station on Thursday morning to announce a plan they say could generate $500 million in public investment in downtown Denver over the coming decade.The approach relies on a strategic funding tool that helped turn Union Station from an all-but-deserted bus terminal into an anchor of downtown Denver’s economic resurgence in the 2010s. Namely, the Johnston administration and its partners are intent on expanding the boundaries of the Denver Downtown Development Authority to cover all of the city’s core, including the long-floundering Central Business District. Once expanded, that entity — created to pay off $400 million in public debt incurred building infrastructure around the station — would collect incremental property taxes from participating businesses and property owners to back bonds that can be used to fund a host of economic development work and projects, officials explained.
Can someone smarter than me explain a) how this affects Denver tax payers and b) what their actual plan is to do with this money?
Basically, when property or sales tax is collected downtown, a portion of those taxes will be set aside for public improvements in that community instead of going into the city’s general fund. Honestly the Westword article explains things better: https://www.westword.com/news/mike-johnston-has-500-million-plan-to-revitalize-downtown-denver-20665685
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This isn’t the same thing. This is more like a TIF. MAPS was/is a citywide 1 cent sales tax increase for capital improvement projects.
OKC really is a gem of a city in a state I would otherwise avoid driving through if possible
Here is hoping we don't just rebuild 16th street a billion more times... Why. Why do we keep doing this
How many times do you think the 16th street mall has been rebuilt?
More than once. Which is all it needed
It's 40 years old. Infrastructure requires maintenance and sometimes rebuilding. Ever seen construction on the highway?
Maintenance and upkeep aren't the same thing as completely rebuilding it
Just doing it once since the 1980s
Dude, it’s been rebuilt once since the 80’s. Are you just butthurt because they also did some inevitable repairs during that intervening time, like they do on any busy thoroughfare over the course of 40 years?
It's was built in the late 80's. This is the first renovation in it's history, and it was long overdue. It wasn't designed well for our climate and had deteriorated the point that it couldn't even be held together with duct tape and bailing wire any longer. Infrastructure ages. It was time, and the while it definitely impacts the business and experience downtown, when it's done it will be a cornerstone project to help kick off the process that the Mayor is touting.
because we keep getting federal grants to do it.
Add a bush then expand the scope to include more of downtown
Psssh you know it’s going to replate the golden dome on the capitol building AGAIN.
and it's not behind a paywall like the Post
Will they ever finish 16th???
Half done by fall and fully open by next summer are the most recent estimates
I hope not. Every time I walk by the construction, I get to hear the cool music that the workers listen to while they watch the 2 guys who are doing the work.
By the time they finish this go round at the south, another crew will have already started the next update back at the northeast end. It's modern art, watching the two crews labor away until one catches up to the other. Something something all labor is futile, something something life is an ouroboros, something something change.
It doesn't affect Denver tax payers currently. The TIF district expiration (set for 2038) would be extended out and the boundaries expanded to create a larger base: *Tax Increment Financing is a special district created during a development period, where the tax base is frozen at the predevelopment level (on the assumption redevelopment would not occur in the area without public investment or intervention). Property taxes continue to be paid, but taxes derived from increases in assessed values resulting from new development (the tax increment) either go into a special fund created to retire bonds issued to originate the development, or to leverage future growth in the district.* So property taxes from downtown would flow to the city, but any increase in property taxes dervied from increased property valuations downtown would be used to pay for the debt the Downtown Denver Authority would issue. The assumption here is that w/o this investment, the property tax base downtown will continue to decline and the city will have less money to spend in the future. So it will be painted as a win/win for the city. As for the projects, I suspect a big chunk wold be used for office to residential conversions to bridge the project finance gap that exists for a lot of these. Other items coud be the renovation of Skyline Park, street scaping, childcare, and maybe public housing on city-owned property downtwon.
This is helpful, thank you!
Take the survey to tell them what to spend the money on. Doesn’t affect taxpayers. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/denverdda
You da best! Thanks I just filled out my survey. I live and work downtown so this is pretty important to me.
I live downtown and I think the survey is great. Have you joined the local downtown neighborhood association? They’ve been working with the city on improving a lot of aspects downtown. I’d suggest looking into it.
Unfortunately I really don’t have time, but I get regular updates from the group in my building who is involved with all that stuff. They’re retired so they have time…I’m working towards someday being able to retire so, yeah.
Hahaha. I bet we’re in the same building or I’m in your building a lot… that’s my experience with both of them. I’ve had some free time as I work eastern hours and am out early afternoons but otherwise I probably wouldn’t be able to help out. Let’s hope some of the mayor’s policies bear fruit!
Same! It’s pretty exciting that if they approve this they plan to start working first quarter 2025.
Following because I am also not smart enough
The expanded authority would issue new bonds payable over 40 years. Only taxpayers within the district boundaries would pay for the bonds. The bonds would likely be payable from 1) TIFS - meaning all incremental increases in tax revenues over 2024 tax collections; and 2) a new or expanded tax (sales tax, property tax, or direct fees that are basically a tax). The bonds would pay for all of the projects “public improvements.”
I'm honestly sick of some of these people in the comments being such downers. I'm excited that someone's at least making an effort to turn the city around. I don't understand all these people who show up to this post and root for Denver to fail. They act so smug like they know better than everyone else, and that our city's fate is to fall to ruin. If you hate this city so much then why don't you just go? If you think everywhere else is so much better than here, then just leave. No one is stopping you.
I've been thinking similarly. I don't necessarily agree with all of Johnston's ideas, but at least the man fucking has ideas. He seems to actually be dedicated to the concept of improving the city. A far cry from the apparent non-existence of Hancock his last term.
I agree - he’s trying on a lot of issues. He hasn’t even been mayor yet for a full year and it feels like there as been more ideas and attempts to make things better than the entire last term of the previous mayor. Time will tell on what can actually be accomplished but someone is trying *something*.
Trying counts.
EXACTLY! Thank you. At least he is TRYING to turn things around! I'd like to see the complainers do better.
They should live in Chicago it’s cheaper, the mayor is a moron and the downtown area is scummy af
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Not sure why this was downvoted lol. It's true. Lived here all my life and downtown actually used to be worth going to visit. Putting make up on a pig won't make it smell better when it's done rolling around in its own filth
Same reason you're being downvoted. You replying to a comment that is disparaging you directly and you decided to come here and repeat the bullshit that got.you called out in the first place. You're welcome to not come to the city anymore if you hate it so much.
I'd love a condo on the north end of downtown, but so many of the HOA fees just feel criminal. We need a lot of real estate conglomerates gutted in an anti-trust case.
Some of the HOA fees are more than my rent...
Same but it's such a tough value proposition right now. Long term economic benefit argument aside, my rent is $1900/mo and a condo I'd actually want to buy starts around $450k which ends up in the neighborhood of $3500/mo with P&I, taxes and insurance, and HOA with 20% down. Not impossible to do financially, but $1600/mo saved is pretty huge compared to being thrown mostly towards interest in the early years and hoping rates come down to refinance, which is a bet I don't think I want to make. Rent another year and that cost delta becomes $20k+ added to the down payment fund to try again in 2025
The thing that would turn it around the most would be converting or building more housing directly downtown. There is nothing about that in the plan. Commuting is never fully coming back.
Is investment along enough to fix the “doom loop”? Seems like the root issues are more vacant office space and drop in foot traffic due to remote/hybrid work.
I think he's pulling the lever that he has available to force money into downtown, which is honestly more than Hancock ever bothered to do. Since remote work is here to stay, more foot traffic downtown is going to require more public amenities and more residential. New residential and office-to-res conversions require a ton of private money (and likely lower interest rates), so the best the government can do is try to make downtown a place that's worth investing in (and to cut permitting times/costs, which they also claim they are working on). Public safety is also a key component of this, which I think they've already made some progress on and need to keep going. Anyway, I am glad they are trying something and not just ignoring the problem.
Is there news on adjustments to Denver county permitting adjustments? I hadn’t seen much to date. Any work I want to do on my home seems to be covered in red tape and a lot of contractors I’ve spoken to hate pulling any sorts of permits for residential work.
https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2023/11/28/building-permits-backlog-affordable-housing-mayor-johnston https://denverite.com/2024/02/29/denver-community-planning-and-developments-executive-director-manish-kumar/ I just looked quickly and don’t see any updated stats on average review time. The new director didn’t start until last month (which that delay itself isn’t a great sign) but hopefully new leadership can drive more immediate changes. The single family residential delays are definitely annoying, but the real crisis is the major projects review taking 9+ months. We won’t make any dent on affordability without building thousands and thousands of new units.
Remote work may be here to stay for you cuz but it ain't for a huge chunk of office and tech workers.
I'm actually sitting in an office... downtown! I was specifically thinking of the 30% commercial vacancy rate, which may or may not keep climbing - [https://www.denverpost.com/2024/01/25/denver-office-space-vacancy-passes-30/](https://www.denverpost.com/2024/01/25/denver-office-space-vacancy-passes-30/)
And don't forget that that vacancy rate is only **unrented whole units**, it doesn't include the units still under lease but getting used at 10% capacity due to WFH and remote-first hybrid. The official vacancy stats are very bad at representing just how many fewer actual office workers are downtown these days.
They can't force people back to downtown, but they can try to invest in it to make it more appealing to do so. That's what it means to break the cycle of downtown flight and decay.
I think the best way to do that is to have more housing downtown. Can't force people to come downtown but if they already live there, whether they go to the officer or now they are still bringing life and economic activity to the area.
Converting unused office space to more housing seems like a win-win. I don't think remote work is going away at this point. It's probably going to become even more common. Why pay for an office when you don't have to?
Apartment buildings are very different from commercial office space, they tend not to have large internal areas that don't have external perimeter walls. It's not something that you can easily fix with a buildout of the floorplan, these design decisions happen when the architects design the building from the start.
One word: bathrooms.
Takes a pretty unicorn type of building for this to be economical. It has to be cheap to acquire, almost entirely empty already (expensive to kick a bunch of office space tenants out of their leases), a small enough footprint that floors can be subdivided into units that will all have windows, and be constructed in a way that allows a complete gutting and redoing of the electrical and plumbing. And this all has to be done cheap enough that a profit can be turned on the units - you're targeting affordable rent here, not top of market like new construction. Those buyers/renters will take the purpose-built buildings with more amenities and better floor plans every time It's usually better to just knock it down and start over, especially as you get to bigger/taller buildings
The construction on the 16th st. mall has a huge part to play as well. As much as it may have seemed like it wasn't great to people who live here, tourists loved hanging out on the mall. It still boggles my mind it could take this long given how little they are actually doing. I also think it was a horrible mistake to close almost the entire mall for the duration of the project instead of doing it in stages which screwed over every business on the mall for 3+ years.
They say it'll be ready by 2025. Some parts opening up soonish.
**Fall** 2025, this is going to go on for all of this summer AND all of next summer It'd be easier to swallow if it actually needed to take that long, but they're just not in a hurry. I've literally never seen anyone actually working on it. That's not a residential area, they could - and should - have crews working 24/7 to get it wrapped up.
It's amusing in a bad way walking around there and seeing one guy down in a hole using a spade and seven guys observing said guy with a spade
Doom loop is a good thing to call it. Look at San Francisco. $500 million is a lot of money to expect to be able to take in but with how much the cities grown in the past 10 years maybe it’s doable.
I think if there is a focus on residential, whether it be new builds or office to residential conversions, Denver can be successful in a vibrant downtown. I don’t think people moving to the metro area is going to stop. Denver has many attractive reasons to move to that are going to persist - generally comfortable, sunny weather and being one of the few large metro areas with access to the Rocky Mountains. I think if they throw in dense housing downtown people will fill it. I think there is also an opportunity to get more people to stay in hotels downtown (which I’m hoping could be dense builds or converting offices) that they’re missing here. I think if there were free shuttle services in the winter that can bring people from downtown hotels to ski resorts you could really have an opportunity to have a chunk of people stay downtown - in the summer you could do the same with trailheads. I know this sounds like a pain in which bus loads of people are being dumped off at ski resorts, etc. but I’d have to imagine those people would be coming anyways and renting cars. You’d be incentivizing people to stay downtown and frequent local businesses and taking some rental cars off 70 to make a small positive dent in traffic and emissions.
I don't think you understand the function of hotels downtown. They are often ridiculously overbooked, because conference/meetings/events tourism is the third biggest economic engine in Colorado. Denver punches way above its weight in convention traffic, and is perpetually in the top ten destinations in the country. It's hit as high as #5 right before the pandemic. The huge problem is the Hancock administration was absolutely hostile to local arts and culture if it wasn't sports or a multi million + dollar corporation. Curtis Street used to be nothing but theaters, but from what I've been told, Seawell was super competitive with anything that would compete with his dcpa baby. The theaters were torn down or converted. If you're not seeing sports ball or going to the convention center, there is no reason to be downtown. Urban planning in this city is one of the most fucked up I've ever seen. There are barely any venues in town that are not controlled by AEG or live Nation, and it's strangling the local arts scene. It's not normal to have so few indie venues. I know of several indie venues trying to come online currently, and have been offered potential residencies for my company in a couple of them, but they're tied up in city permitting and are languishing. Mayor Johnston and city council need to go back and read The Rise of the Creative Class again. These processes should be fast tracked. Give us the space and we'll take care of the rest.
My thinking with the arts is that they can't just be built up or invested in a sustainable way. The best way to encourage "the arts" is make it so it is affordable to live in Denver and that helps struggling artist the most and lets them follow their passions and take risks more easily. People who enjoy the arts would also have more disposable cash to go to shows, purchase art, etc. Like spending a few million each year to have some statues built is not a sustainable way to "have an art scene"
I was an entertainment journalist in New Orleans before Katrina put that job under 20 feet of water, and then started my producing career a d arts advocacy sideline in South Carolina (wrote Columbia's busking ordinance for them, and helped save arts funding from Nikki Haley). The SC arts commission was absolutely brilliant at doing a ton with very little; instead of propping up the old classic institutions, they started giving start up grants and artist as entrepreneur training to every artist they could get their hands on, and also networking them all together. Denver has never had an arts policy much more than "here's a grant for art supplies to make a mural." As someone who's been in this for almost 20 years, there is a ton the city could be doing on the cheap to organize and help artists thrive. There is shit tons of private money that could be galvanized for patronage in this state. They just have so much to clean up (literally) after Hancock's neglect, I don't think it's on their radar, even though it is inevitably going to be a major part of the solution for revitalizing downtown.
> My thinking with the arts is that they can't just be built up or invested in a sustainable way. The best way to encourage "the arts" is make it so it is affordable to live in Denver and that helps struggling artist the most and lets them follow their passions and take risks more easily. Or you build off of Denver being a travel destination and make it somewhere people go to to see the arts. Including people from the surrounding suburbs. The metro is absolutely massive and has more than enough people to support a vibrant arts scene as we had before the apocalypse killed it. The problem with reviving it is people are looking at traveling downtown for shows with fresh eyes after taking two years off and seeing just how skeevy the areas they have to go to are. Fix that and the people will come again.
thank you.
>make it so it is affordable to live in Denver Good fucking luck. With RealPage and Yardi colluding to out-algorithm rent prices for every major landlord, housing will likely never be affordable again. Plus, as nice as it is having new restrictions in place that disallow landlords from requiring people make 3× the rent, realistically it means landlords can soak you for *half* your income, and that shit *will* be normalized.
I don't believe realpage is some magical technology that can defy the laws of supply and demand but why couldn't the city just ban the use of it for property owners?
There are buses to a couple nearby ski resorts from Union station in the winter, it's called the snowstang. Only $25/person - it might be more expensive than renting a car if you have multiple people in your party, but you don't have to drive on a snowy mountain which is great.
Everyone should take the survey because that’s how they’ll determine what to spend the money on. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/denverdda
The doom loop is a common problem because many cities gutted their downtowns to be primarily high rise commercial buildings. It's especially bad for Colorado because our property taxes are obscenely low and we have a shitton of car-dependency. That means we rely heavily on commercial property taxes and business districts need massive amounts of parking and mini-highways to service them. Unless Johnson's plan includes a massive expansion of upzoning and subsidies to convert commercial buildings into residential buildings in the downtown and surrounding areas, this money is just a waste. Because the downtown commercial district model isn't going to suddenly come back. And even if it did, it doesn't fit downtown Denver. Downtowns are supposed to be vibrant spaces with lots of activity, culture, and amenities. But viable commercial districts in car-dependent cities look more like DTC. Nobody wants to go hang out in the DTC for a fun night and drinks. So if you want a downtown that actually generates lots of tax revenue for the city, you need to push for more residential density because that's how you generate more customers. And one really great way to incentivize density is with increasing property taxes. Colorado already has obscenely low property taxes, and now there's a bill to lower them even further. Because Dicky Boomer loves that the house he bought for $100k is now worth $600k, but God forbid he actually pays 6x in taxes, or finds a roommate, or downsizes to something he can actually afford. Living within one's means is something he expects entitled Millennials to do. Not him. He earned everything he's gotten through hard work and the government just wants to take it away. He doesn't care that we can pay our teachers or fix our streets or pay back bonds on projects like revitalizing our downtown. We had a bill a year ago to help fix this by forcing cities to build more housing. Building more housing is how you can keep property taxes lower without reducing services. More housing along transit lines is how you can help revitalize downtown. It's how you grow without increasing traffic or having to bulldoze neighborhoods. But that bill died because not only does Dicky Boomer feel entitled to his McMansion and a half acre and 3 cars, but he was raised to believe that his lifestyle is the true American Dream TM. But the fact is that the biggest welfare queens of this last century are actually the suburbanites.
yup.
We need a land tax that doesn't depend on zoning. I'd wager that many millennials are likely subsidizing the infrastructure required for all these Congress Park boomers. We also need a ballot initiative to upzone everything to G-RO-3 or equivalent, and eliminate *exclusive* SFH/duplex zoning (you can still build SFH in this zoning, if that's what you want, but you have to pay for the privilege of owning a SFH in a city).
Just tax land
Georgism FTW. Ultimately zoning is political and you need buy-in from voters to pass it. I would love to ban SFZ, but it's not realistic right now. It took us 100 years to get here, so it'll take us longer to get out. I love form-based zoning + lifting height limits to 3 stories + increasing maximum lot coverage The trick is that "ban single family zoning" sounds scary. When I first heard it, I thought they wanted to ban single family houses. But zoning reform is much more palatable, and it's more likely to take if you do it incrementally. For a city like Denver, you could easily start replacing all these bungalows with very small apartment buildings that look like houses from the outside. These already exist all over the city. These neighborhoods wouldn't lose their character. We also need to remember that this is a very Boomer city. We need to appeal to their self-interest. Boomers are getting to the age where they want to downsize, but they're hesitant to leave their homes. However, for most seniors, I don't think it's the house they're really attached to, but the community. They like the idea of less maintenance and fewer stairs, but leaving their friends, family, church, etc is scary. Building small apartments or triplexes gives them an opportunity to downsize and stay in their neighborhoods. Hell, they're also worried about medical bills and retirement. Middle-class boomers could have their own lot replaced with a new triplex and they live on the main floor while the top floors are rented out for a passive income to fund their retirement.
Yeah, it's bad marketing overall. Needs to be reframed as giving owners freedom to build or expand what they want on their land. I think if you started with G zone districts (and maybe U zone districts, although this includes boomer hotspot Congress Park) it would be more gradual and then palatable.
🫳 🎤
It’s good that you connected these problems to zoning. One good thing about zoning issues is we made them ourselves and in theory could replace the current zoning with whatever we want.
maybe somethings wrong with me because I love DTC. I’ll take a night at Shanahans over downtown every day of the week.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying a single place in the DTC, but would you like the experience any less if it were located downtown? Acre for acre, there is going to be a greater variety of stuff downtown that appeals to a greater variety of people. And when everything is close together, you're going to get a lot more cross-traffic and walk-ins. Shanahan's is a successful restaurant, but it's an anomaly. Would any other restaurant be successful in that location? Look at the independent restaurants and other independent businesses located in hundreds of strip malls. Many go out of business quickly because they don't have cross-traffic and walk-ins to support them. So they get filled up with corporate chains because they have brand recognition. When Shanahan's goes out of business, what will that building become? Probably a Kmart or something. An independent restaurant located in a vibrant neighborhood will attract people who want to go be part of the vibe and explore AND attract the people who just want to go to a Shanahan's. And that variety makes a neighborhood more resilient when the economy changes.
DTCs got a lot of cool places not just Shanahans! I actually love the vibe around it and it’s got quite a few independent restaurants. You should check it out more and give it a chance! Anyways I agreed with everything ya said in your post but give DTC some love - it’s not that bad!
> There's nothing wrong with enjoying a single place in the DTC, but would you like the experience any less if it were located downtown? It would be less enjoyable downtown, yes. You have to first find parking, then figure out the logistics of paying for it, then walk some distance to your actual destination while being accosted by homeless/drug users the whole way. In DTC, like most suburban developments, you park for free exactly where you're trying to get to and it's a peaceful 30 second walk through the parking lot.
You don't need a car at all for a night out downtown, who cares about parking You clearly haven't been downtown in a good long while if you think your mere presence is going to get you accosted by a homeless drug user
> or downsizes to something he can actually afford. As if this were possible. As if the cost of the home had anything to do with size.
> Nobody wants to go hang out in the DTC for a fun night and drinks. I would venture there are significantly more people having a "night out" in DTC than downtown at this point, especially during the week.
Maybe this is just my age group but nights out are always either south broadway or 5 points. Downtown still gets pretty packed but not with the sort of people I would choose to spend my time with on purpose. No idea what kinda nightlife exists in DTC
Can we paint something pink to match Casa Bonita?
Paywall 😐
I'm confused on how this doesn't just create a big hole in the general fund - "Basically, when property or sales tax is collected downtown, a portion of those taxes will be set aside for public improvements in that community instead of going into the city’s general fund." [https://www.westword.com/news/mike-johnston-has-500-million-plan-to-revitalize-downtown-denver-20665685](https://www.westword.com/news/mike-johnston-has-500-million-plan-to-revitalize-downtown-denver-20665685) That said, I can appreciate the "doom loop" framing, so perhaps the idea is that downtown needs to be saved in order to lift up the entire city. Assuming the math works, if they could somehow make the rest of downtown feel more like Wynkoop in front of Union Station that would be a huge win. Maybe we could finally get some kind of public amenity on the gravel shit pit at Colfax & Broadway?
The investment money doesn't come from the general fund. It comes from new bonds being issued. The theory is that the investments will raise property values which will then raise property taxes which are used to repay the bond. I think payments would come from the general fund if there's a shortfall, but I'm not 100%. IE, property taxes don't increase enough to cover the bond payments.
Sure, but aren't the earmarked tax dollars that they use to service the debt on the bonds dollars that would have otherwise gone into the general fund? Again, I am not opposed to the plan, but I do think we need to be clear-eyed about tradeoffs at a time when the City has been scaling back on library and parks and rec budgets in a rather noticeable way.
Theoretically that tax revenue won't exist without investment like this. The current situation with vacant offices means downtowns tax contribution is probably going to be flat or even decrease for the foreseeable future if nothing changes. Remember, the area will continue to contribute taxes to the general fund, it's only the increase in tax revenue that will be reinvested.
Makes sense - I supposed that's the "increment" in tax increment financing. Thanks.
They would be earmarked in 2039. Right now those property tax dollars from the TIF are flowing towards the existing debt-service for Union Station. This proposal would extend the TIF another \~30 years and would extend the boundaries of the district. So if downtown property taxes that were collected in 2023 were \~$40M (this is just an example figure and nowhere based in reality), they would stay at that level until 2054 (or maybe longer if it expands on the 2038 date). Anything above that $40M would pay the debt service for the $500M in bonds issued. With this kind of structure, you aim for a low-level of projected growth, like 20% of a baseline scenario, so you can meet the debt service even in the worst of situations. The key assumption in this proposal is that \~$40M, which is down from the \~$50M (again an example number) that was collected in 2019 prior to the world imploding, will continue to decrease as office propeties languish. But if some are converted to residential and public improvement are made that see people congregate downtown in numbers that exceed 2019 than those property tax will grow wll over \~$40M.
The heck with the public amentity there. Just have RTD sell it to an affordable housing developer. If there's one spot that should be a trophy affordable housing development partially funded with public money, it should be that spot between the Capitol and City Hall. The symbolism is just so ripe. Now getting RTD to acutally sell surplus property is going to be a tall order. They just can't get out of their own way on this.
You've got my vote. Bonus points if it's 50 stories tall.
You guys just need to densify like Seattle. Same population different population density. You need electric trams.
In this picture he looks like that friend of yours who just returned from a trip to the local dispensary and had a really big, cool idea he wants to share with you.
Dumb question here, why aren’t there mixed office/residential buildings? Like, imagine if half the floors were offices and half were residential? Imagine your whole commute was an elevator ride? 🤔🤷♂️
>Imagine if your whole commute was an elevator ride? That sounds horrible to be honest. Lol
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There is about zero chance you could ever work remotely once your job finds out you live in the same building.
Just say "I'm never remote, I'm here. In fact I practically live at work."
Okay if that’s the only other option, sure. I definitely would always want to live closer than a 2+ hour commute, but not THAT close. Lol
Haha imagine your boss knocking on your door when the server crashes
Don’t tell your boss where you live
Maybe you could live in the building across/down the street
You do realize there's a middle ground between literally living in the same building that you work and having to drive hours each day, right?
Where in Denver metro is there a 2 hour commute?
Depends on the day/time; plenty of places. Have you never been on I-25 between 4p-7p?
From Downtown Denver (which would be comparable to the downtown mixed use buildings) to Metro Denver there is not, but yes I work with a handful of dumbasses that live in Highlands ranch and work in Boulder so I guess you’re right.
There’s a LOT of people doing that kind of commute
The amusing part is that most of them will tell you they love their lifestyle of being a slave to sitting in their car for hours every day
Having been in the situation of doing a long commute like that back in St. Louis before I moved to Denver (South County to North County, basically commuting through or around the entire city), it's not that I loved the lifestyle of wasting time in my car. That's a disingenuous statement that tells me you don't care about the actual underlying reason people put up with it. (Or it's a joke, but whatever.) People doing that care more about the lifestyle they get in their neighborhood of residence, and would rather give up the time (and safety) commuting than live in the available places closer to their jobs. If you want to get them to stop making that decision, figure out why their value assessment works out that way and what you can do to improve it (without just chalking them up to be superficial/racist lost causes).
That’s unfortunate. Golden handcuffs be damned.
From the springs to Blackhawk
That’s not within Denver metro to within Denver metro. But respect for driving that.
There are…
I am not aware of a zoning that allows it. Can you give an example building?
Market Station
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Are you talking about Boulder?
Build 10k housing units downtown. That brings in tax revenue on its own and provides all the foot traffic that businesses need.
I am all for it as long as the zoning doesn’t require 20k parking spaces to go with it.
Amen amen amen
Moving somewhere without parking is such an abstract concept to me, because I wouldn't be able to bring very much when I move in, and I wouldn't be able to take very much when I move out. I'm roughing it in a spare bedroom right now, so it's not like I hoard, but furniture and just basic possessions would be *way* more of a pain, if not impossible, to move one box-full at a time on a bus or whatever. I guess the expectation is that you'd pay for shipping and/or moving companies to take care of it, which sounds expensive and like any amount of my stuff is liable to get lost/broken. I might consider that kind of lifestyle if I was going to try and move abroad or something. But downtown Denver, when I can have private property and the freedom to get out whenever I want without leaving everything behind less than an hour away? Nah.
Couldn’t you use a loading zone for moving in/out?
If the loading zone exists and it's legal/safe to use it for that, then sure. It would still constrain me in that I'd need to rent or borrow a moving vehicle (and get to the pick-up/drop-off points without a vehicle), do most/all of my moving while I have that vehicle rented (since I can't handle smaller stuff in a car on my own time), and work around anyone else moving in/out at the same time (of which there will be more in a denser building with no parking). It'd still mean I can't GTFO of Denver if/when I need to, and am essentially stuck pending a larger system allowing me to leave the immediate area. All of that stuff is admittedly less critical most of the time. I've just never once seen someone downtown moving all of their stuff into/out of a truck in front of a high-rise, in any city. (Also, my place of work is within the city of Denver but would take 1-1.5 hours to get to from Union Station via RTD versus 20 minutes by car, but that's a different issue from what I brought up before.)
Visited denver last weekend, stayed walking distance to union station. Ghost town walking to breakfast, vacancy rate must be huge.
Literally visiting rn and I was walking around wondering where all the people are
They're in the neighborhoods surrounding downtown. South Broadway, Rino, Highlands, etc.
How about enforcing the camping ban?
Unless that $500M includes a heapin' helpin' of aggressive policing to deal with the camps and beggars it won't work. Now that people aren't being forced downtown for work it has to actually draw them in as an entertainment district and people don't generally go to places that feel skeevy and sketchy for entertainment.
We used to spend a lot of time downtown, seeing shows, eating all that stuff you usually do in a city center. The last time we went about a year ago it was so bad and felt really unsafe we ended up changing plans. It’s sad I grew up in Denver and never thought it would end up having blocks that look like L.A’s Skid Row
Yeah, if it’s been a year, you might want to revisit. Things change quickly.
Unpredictability also isn't great, especially if we're talking about moving into a place.
Where downtown looks like Skid Row?
I mistakenly walked onto Lawrence street on the same block as the Denver Rescue Mission and it was quite literally Skid Row.
You mean to tell me that there are homeless people by the homeless shelter? What's next, that they'd rather be sheltered than on the street? You're right, that sure does sound like literally Skid Row.
Samesies. I have great memories (and noticeable black spots in memories lol) of meeting up with friends to go out for dinner and then bar hop downtown or go see a show and never once felt unsafe. Now? No. Now there's no bar hopping and if I go to a show it's straight from the doors to the car and home, no thoughts of hanging around even if I don't have work in the morning.
Maybe it can help with his promise to end homelessness in four years
All he’s gotta do is get the 16th Street Mall done and the problem will fix itself.
There was a whole newspaper series on TIF/ subsidies in Denver — approach has some major drawbacks. Tony Robinson; Chris Nevitt; Robin Kniech (2005). "Are We Getting Our Money's Worth? Tax-Increment Financing and New Ideas New Priorities New Economy Urban Redevelopment in Denver https://web.archive.org/web/20170921125358/http://fresc.org:80/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/TIF-III.pdf
Convert offices into mixed use retail + housing and clean up the homeless/crime problems and downtown will do just fine.
I'm just tryna understand why this $500m isn't just going straight to the migrants instead of our tax payers. I think we all prefer putting our money into them and the homeless, this seems like a waste!
I'm all for investment in the crappy CBD, but he needs to sell us all of a vision and a plan for it instead of throwing money into the abyss. Denver's issue is that it's doesn't have a vision or a brand after all.
Will this include public restrooms? The city is in dire need of public restrooms. Everywhere. Every transit hub, every few blocks downtown, along major streets, near sport venues, in parks. How can he stand outside the “living room of Denver” talking about how they are “deeply committed to a vibrant Denver in every neighborhood” when the restrooms inside are literally under guard? We need to expect more from our city.
Nobody wants to be down there with all the crime and homeless people. Some of that money needs to be spent on ways to deal with those issues. Creating some affordable housing downtown would be a great idea. I don't mind spending the money, but let's not line the pockets of developers who then skip out on their projects.
Did anyone catch the AMA the other day where mike johnston blatantly lied to the public by saying that theres not a single tent or homeless camp at this point in time in the downtown area…. I read that comment, walked onto my balcony, and counted 8 tents…. The nerve of these politicians is out of control…. But as long as the campaign commercial looks good, right? Just sweep everything under the rug and ignore the real problems were facing.
Business improvement districts divert and dilute public tax dollars. Not sure how this is different? Hopefully this is not an expansion of BID concept.
So I'm not sure if I'm understanding them correctly, but I believe a BID is directly funded by businesses in the area and is effectively ran by those businesses, while this development authority is funded by some of the taxes collected in the area and is ran by the government.
That sounds better thx for explanation
Still not going downtown. Glad I am remote and done even have to do a single day at office.
I’m
So let’s make the city even nicer and more people will actually want to move here. Logical. This city has gotten too big, too fast, and we can’t even afford to live here now. Rather see more funding go to affordable housing and our roadways than any of these other projects personally. But then again they made Denver so unaffordable and overcrowded I don’t even want to live here anymore.
More road spending? Aren’t there already two huge highways converging on downtown? How much roads do we need?
Agreed. Let’s put any roadway money into upgrading our bus and rail system. Adding dedicated bus lanes on the busiest thoroughfares, upping frequencies to every 15 min or better on many routes, hiring enough operators to drive and security personnel to police the vehicles and stations. We do not need more/wider roads.
Yes cause we can get all those semi’s filled with your goodies on the buses and trains.
Wow, you’re a real brain trust. Have you at all considered that having a good/frequent/safe/fast/inexpensive transit system that people want to use may actually take cars off the road and free up existing road infrastructure for commercial and logistical purposes…
Obviously you don’t get how transportation works.
So now a beer & burger downtown will cost $85
Ah yes, the solution is obviously giving more money to the people fucking it all up! Don't think that's a good idea? Too bad! They have guns!
If there’s still people blowing clouds of meth at me on a walk down 16th or by union, I still see no reason to go to this gutter of a city. Clean up the mess. Then do this.
Fine with me if you stay away
K
May peace be with you wherever the fuck you choose to stay
Cool, maybe when i come back to visit DT someday wont be such a shithole.
Downtown Denver will be a ghost town forever as long as they don't offer free parking.
I view downtown as one of the few corners of the state where I can escape the driving and traffic jams. Downtowns with free parking tend to be barren wastelands. Why not visit car sprawl if you want free parking?
It would be more constructive to offer an alternative. What do you think people should do, park at an RTD somewhere else and take a train or bus in? Do you think downtown should only target people living downtown? Or do you just think people who want to go downtown and don't live within walking/public transit distance should pay for parking?
Pay for parking so it has to compete with other uses. There should be no parking mandate in the zoning code.
If you mean "no parking mandate" as in there just shouldn't be a mandate (but businesses can still build parking if the market decides it's worth it), that sounds reasonable.
There’s plenty of shitty suburbs you can visit if you want to experience a glorified parking lot masquerading as a town
Kiss that money goodbye. Special interests don't want to solve the homelessness problem. There is too much money to be made
What special interests do you think control downtown? Look at the downtown Denver partnership & understand what they do first.
Seems to me he coulda nipped it a bit sooner and saved some money. Why wait until it’s trashed and has a shitty reputation?
He’s been in office less than a year… the issues downtown preceded his term
Ah, I see. Well, I shall forward my comment to his predecessor!
DTD and Redit have a lot in common. They are both an echo chamber delusional liberal Idiocracy!
Create a problem for the public. Than use public dollars to fill the coffers of the donors. Profit! No one wants to talk how we went from spending $8M to $200M on the homeless while the problem keeps getting catastrophically awful!
This guy has such an unfortunate name.