The stretch between Larimer and Arapahoe streets on Denver’s 16th Street Mall reopened Tuesday with great fanfare, including a MyDenver Day block party and a pep talk to prepare for the day when the whole mall can celebrate.
“We will, by the time we are back here next summer, have opened the entire 16th Street Mall from Union Station to buses that will be running all the way up to the Sheraton,” said Mayor Mike Johnston, during the Downtown Denver Partnership annual meeting held outside the organization’s headquarters at 16th and Arapahoe streets.
It seems like it’s been forever since the chain link fences went up, the free MallRide was rerouted off the mall and stores, restaurants and businesses posted signs to help customers navigate to open businesses. Technically, it’s been 2.5 years since construction began in the Spring of 2022. But blurred into that history is about two years of pandemic conditions that had a devastating effect on the core of the city.
Even Downtown Denver Partnership CEO Kourtny Garrett didn’t let the crowd of local officials, business leaders and employees at area businesses forget about the ongoing challenges.
“Let’s ground ourselves in the reality of this moment,” Garrett said. “There is more promise emerging every single day, but it is fragile and we cannot take it for granted. One of our greatest vulnerabilities is our office market. Upper downtown holds 44% of our overall commercial office inventory and is 31% vacant. … Valuations are dropping almost by the day, leaving nearly one third of our 30 million square feet of commercial office in distress.”
Denver has become one of America’s most expensive housing markets outside the coasts, which makes it difficult to attract and recruit talent and support its middle-income residents.
“These vacancy rates call for immediate and proactive interventions,” Garrett said, as the city works to support individuals and businesses to a downtown address, while also “growing and attracting new businesses, capitalizing on new and emerging economies and advocating for a balanced regulatory environment that doesn’t add insult to injury.”
The roughly $170 million project — which is funded through a combination of federal, state and local dollars — was initially scheduled to be completed at the end of 2024, according to an earlier Colorado Sun story.
Progress, however, can be seen in the latest data. In the past year, the city has added 2,300 new apartment units in the city’s center and occupancy is at 90%, Garrett said. There’s also 34 new restaurants that have opened in downtown Denver this year with another 21 on the way.
And according to DDP, Colorado Convention Center activity, hotel occupancy and the number of beers sold at the Skyline Beer Garden at the mall’s Skyline Park — 10,000 this summer — are comparable to 2019 numbers.
“We read headlines of restaurant, retail challenges due to labor costs, regulation, construction and continued pandemic impacts,” Garrett said. “Yet, as you just heard from people like Chef Mary, there are bright spots that tell us if we make it easier, if we support the entrepreneurs and the new businesses and those who have hung in there with us through the hard times, the businesses will stay and businesses will grow in 2024.”
Chef Mary is Mary Nguyen, the chef-owner behind the Olive & Finch Collective. She spoke earlier in the shindig and announced that the company is adding three more locations in the city — one at Union Station, one near the Performing Arts Complex and a third in the Golden Triangle neighborhood.
“When I decided to open Little Finch on the mall two years ago, it was a risk, but I was eager to contribute to this revitalization,” said Nguyen, whose Parallel 17 in Uptown helped make Denver a sought-out dining destination decades ago. “As an entrepreneur, I understand the vital role that we all play in revitalizing downtown and the wider Denver community.”
Restaurants and businesses are still having a rough go post pandemic, and with ongoing construction and regulatory challenges. The Colorado Restaurant Association provided some perspective: Prior to 2020, about 200 restaurants opened in Denver each year, growing at an annual rate of 3% to 5%. In the past year, the number of restaurants in Denver declined 4.5% with a loss of 183 businesses, Denise Mickelsen, a spokesperson for the restaurant association, said in an email.
Mickelsen said the opening of 55 new restaurants in downtown Denver “is a very good thing, but as a whole, that is not the growth we once had nor wish to see going forward.”
But, she added, the city has reached out and wants to hear from local restaurant chefs and owners in what she hopes is “a constructive first step towards addressing the challenges local restaurants are facing.”
Johnston said he’s still working on it and there’s noticeable impact. He rattled off a number of improvements helping the city’s businesses, including moving 1,950 people off the streets and into transitional housing in the last year and a 30% drop in crime reported in downtown.
“And what we know is that that impact is making a difference,” Johnston said. “Already we see from the blocks that are reopened when we talk to vendors, 30-35% increases in revenue. … The blocks that we’ve had open, we have had three times the number of leasing requests and inquiries over the last three months as we have over the last three years combined. That is a sign that downtown is making a comeback.”
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Publish date : 2024-10-09 23:04:00
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