Denver businesses change course, focus on the best of the city
When Walter Isenberg moved to Denver in the 1980s to start Sage Hospitality Group, he read a Wall Street Journal article claiming Denver had the lowest office rents in the world.
“Not just the United States,” Isenberg told The Colorado Sun. “It was a crazy article, but you know, I lived downtown and there were 500 residents in downtown Denver. Monday through Friday, from 9-to-5, it was busy. And then on the weekends, you could shoot a can down the street and you wouldn’t hit anybody.”
In 1984, Denver did have the nation’s highest office vacancy rate, The Rocky Mountain News reported (the WSJ story couldn’t be found). It was pretty bad. Blame the overbuilt office market and an energy bust with oil companies abandoning the city.
“So, this group of business leaders — (homebuilder) Larry Mizel started it — but they came together and just said, ‘Hey, we can’t allow this to happen. This is our home,’” Isenberg said. “We love this place and we need to bring everybody together and really make an effort to change the perception. And you can’t change the perception without changing the reality. You’ve got to do both.”
Local business leaders, like Isenberg, supported efforts by Mayor Federico Peña and Gov. Roy Romer to do both. Within the next decade, the city added the Colorado Convention Center, a professional baseball team and a downtown mall. Isenberg and cofounder Zack Neumeyer went on to grow Sage into a national company managing more than 60 hotels, 70-plus restaurants and an assortment of mixed-use developments, like McGregor Square.
Now, Isenberg, who still lives in Denver, is at it again. He’s on the board of the new ”Denver: The best return on life,” a marketing campaign led and funded by local businesses that want to change the city’s post-pandemic perception. They want to focus on just the positive.
“The reason I’m involved is I love Denver. I love Colorado. This is our home. I’ve lived here 42 years, raised our kids here and was really tired of reading all the negative press because it’s not accurate,” he said. “It’s certainly not painting the whole picture.”
According to data collected by the Best Return campaign, Denver is a top city for entrepreneurs, offers workers some of the highest household incomes and shortest commutes (compared with the national average) and is more affordable than major cities like San Francisco and New York. Crime rates are falling, fewer people are living on the streets (they’ve moved to stable housing) and there’s the amenities, like proximity to ski slopes and hiking, several professional sports teams, and more sunny days than San Diego.
The city itself has sped up construction permits, committed to investing $100 million to support the growth of 10,000 new jobs, and has taken big steps to redevelop underused office towers, attract new retail and restaurants and host events that have contributed to the ongoing growth in downtown visitors.
“We gotta change this”
The positivity differs from what other business groups have shared this year. The Colorado Chamber of Commerce said the state is losing its competitive edge in a relocation report documenting 98 companies and 13,607 jobs lost to other states due to the challenges of operating a business. Another group of tech leaders voiced concerns about how the business climate has deteriorated, and regulations on artificial intelligence could encourage companies to leave or never consider moving here. A critical restaurant industry report suggested “rebalancing how wages are financed.”
Willy Walker, CEO of commercial real estate lender Walker & Dunlop in Denver, didn’t need to read any of those reports. He’d heard plenty from clients.
“Every single meeting I had with national owners of multifamily assets, invariably in the meeting someone would say, ‘What’s up in your home city? Because my worst performing assets are in Denver, Colorado,’” Walker said.
Walker would discuss those challenges back home in Denver over dinners with “my buddy Matt” Jablon, CEO of Denver-based real estate firm BMC. The duo began studying similar metros to determine what was working and what wasn’t. They met with Mayor Mike Johnston and other public officials to get a better sense of what has been done and where the challenges were. They concluded that “data points that have been overwhelmed by a narrative established in 2023 isn’t the reality of 2026,” Walker said. “And Matt said, ‘We gotta change this.’”
Those dinner meetings evolved into a grassroots campaign that launched earlier this week and is backed by $2.5 million in donations (so far) from more than 100 businesses. There’s also support from the city and the Downtown Denver Partnership and even companies not even based here, like Driven Plastics, a Pueblo-based company that figured out how to turn flimsy plastic bag waste into an asphalt additive that extends the life of roads.
“While Driven Plastics manufactures in Pueblo, Denver is the economic epicenter of our state,” Marie Logsden, CEO and cofounder of the innovative recycling company, said in an email. “For my employees in Pueblo to thrive, for our company to grow nationally, and for Colorado to continue attracting talent and investment, Denver needs to thrive, too.”
The first marketing campaigns should hit Seattle and Portland soon with larger markets beginning three months later. The plan is to track progress and collect data that shows the “best return on life” — wording that was specifically chosen despite pushback from some who felt it was too business-y and should be softened.
“We’re like no, there’s a return on life here in Denver that you can get in very few other places,” Walker said. “It’s not a trade-off of where can you have your job or where can you recreate. Where you can access good healthcare or where can you get to the office quickly. Denver is a place where you can do one and the other, not one or the other.”
Downtown planning is shifting
The new campaign may skip depressing stats like high office vacancy rates, slowing job growth and business closures. And it probably won’t share stories, like last spring’s Wall Street Journal story that called Denver ”America’s emptiest downtown.”
But the paid professionals whose job is to promote downtown Denver feel the effort is needed and supplements what they’re already doing.
“We’re not denying what the numbers show,” said Kourtny Garrett, CEO of the Downtown Denver Partnership and a board member of the new organization. “Our perspective is that it’s not the only way to judge a city.”
Even if the city’s urban core struggles to fill offices — Denver ranked as the worst office recovery since 2019 in August, according to Placer.ai — the city has become known as a place where hybrid work opportunities abound. Visitors have returned, making it more of a 24/7 city rather than a place just for weekday work.
While overall daily foot traffic downtown is 90% of what it was in 2019, it’s different outside of office hours. On nights and weekends, “it’s overperforming,” Garrett said. “The phenomenon we’re seeing here downtown is indicative of this change of use.”
And that’s forcing a change of thought for officials. In areas like LoDo, or Lower Downtown, more housing is intertwined with offices, hotels and entertainment, like Coors Field and Union Station, she said. Office vacancies are lower in LoDo than in the mid-Central Business District, between Arapahoe and Lincoln streets.
“We have to think about how we embrace or how we plan for this moving forward,” she said. “Denver is a lifestyle city so there is a strength there that people are drawn to a hybrid work environment because we are a place where you can have a great career and a great life.”
Meanwhile, one number not mentioned by the campaign is 38.6%, which was downtown’s overall office vacancy rate on June 30. It’s down just a tad — two-tenths of a percentage point — from the first quarter. But it’s the first quarterly improvement in two years, according to commercial real estate researchers at CBRE. LoDo, meanwhile, was at 19.4%, the lowest since third quarter 2024.
Sun economy stories you may have missed
➔ Cash from feds will spark $1.2B electric transmission project in eastern Colorado. Most of the cost of the 28-mile project, intended to make the electricity supply more reliable, will be passed on to customers >> Read story
➔ Weld County approves $1.7B green energy project across thousands of acres of active ranchland. The Enyo Energy project will bring 2,200 acres of solar panels and 79 wind turbines to the Chalk Bluffs region >> Read story
➔ How a growing El Paso County regenerative agriculture operation turned bullish on … sheep. Firefighter Will Vogl learned from drought-induced failure of his parents’ ranch. Now his own farm charts a new course. >> Read story
➔ Colorado health insurance prices poised for another big jump in 2027. State and federal subsidies, though, will blunt the price increases for people with lower incomes >> Read story
➔ Ski resort industry urges lawmakers to reject daylight saving legislation that would “lock the clock” The Sunshine Protection Act would have economic and safety impacts for ski areas and mountain towns, ski resorts say >> Read story
➔ Colorado rescinds more than $100M in federal awards to Maverix Broadband amid investigation. The bankrupt internet provider was paid $9M for rural broadband service. Some work has been done, but $3.2M appears to be missing. >> Read story
➔ In a fading Colorado Eastern Plains town, one man seeks to spark new economic life with an RV park and tiny homes. It’s boom or bust out there for many Eastern Plains towns. >> Read Story
Get What’s Working in your inbox every week Follow this link!
Other working bits
➔ Denver’s rent growth trails pre-pandemic projections. ApartmentList economists said in a report this week that the national median apartment monthly rent is $1,390, or about where it should have been if the COVID pandemic never happened. But not Denver’s. While rents were initially frozen in 2020 and 2021, they shot up dramatically in 2022 and 2023 but nationwide have cooled back down and “converged back to a long-run trend of slow and steady growth,” according to the latest ApartmentList report.
While a number of Northeast and Midwest cities have seen rent growth increase faster than pre-pandemic projections, Denver joins San Antonio, Houston and Phoenix that are trailing. In August, Denver’s median rent was $1,616, or 14% below where ApartmentList economists thought it’d be at by today. Had growth continued, the metro area’s median rent would be $1,957. The cause of the lower rents? Tens of thousands of new apartments have been built during the last several years, which has many Denver apartment complexes still offering move-in specials, like free rent. >> See the report
➔ World Trade Center Denver names new CEO. The Denver organization known for connecting small and large companies to import and export possibilities has hired Stephanie Garnica as its new CEO. Garnica has worked in various roles with the Denver Economic Development & Opportunity office, as well as Denver International Airport and the state’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade. She replaces Karen Gerwitz, who led the organization for 16 years.
➔ Verizon providing free training on how to use AI tools. Verizon has launched a nationwide initiative that will offer free training online to folks who want to get a better grasp at artificial intelligence tools from companies like IBM, Google and Microsoft. It’s called the Verizon AI Skills for America.
A poll by Verizon and Morning Consult found that 90% of employers say it’s important for employees to have “strong AI skills” but only 30% felt they did. The training is also just part of the telcom’s 15 years of programs to help consumers improve their own tech knowledge, according to the company. >> Details
Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww
Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. ~ tamara
Miss a column? Catch up:
What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.
Support this free newsletter and become a Colorado Sun member: coloradosun.com/join
Corrections & Clarifications
Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.
