Throughout most of the 2010s, we published semiannual development summaries that featured maps, tables, and other graphics that tallied the infill development projects in the greater Downtown Denver area. For example, our end-of-decade summaries that we published in early January 2020 can be found here and here. Now that we’re a couple of years into the new decade and the pandemic-induced lull in development is behind us, it’s time for our semiannual development summaries to return!

In the 2010s, we used a 1.50-mile radius circle around a central point in downtown as our survey area. For the 2020s, our survey area consists of 18 downtown districts and neighborhoods that can be considered as the greater Downtown Denver area. Our neighborhood boundary lines generally follow Denver’s Statistical Neighborhood boundaries but, for areas like Downtown and Five Points, we’ve further divided those into commonly recognized districts. Here’s our new map:

Our downtown survey area, outlined in green, is bounded by Federal Boulevard on the west, 6th Avenue on the south, Downing Street on the east, and 38th Avenue on the north plus the bump in the northeast corner to include the 38th & Blake station area in River North. You may also notice that we’ve labeled a new district called “River Mile – Ball Arena.” There’s no new development in this area—yet. But with the master plan and zoning for the River Mile fully approved, and with preliminary plans (PDF–23 MB) for the redevelopment of the parking lots surrounding Ball Arena recently announced, it’s only a matter of time before we see the first new projects rising in this area.

A bit about our methodology: We are tracking only new vertical construction projects (no adaptive reuse or building renovations) and the minimums for a project to be included are 5 stories above grade and either 30 homes for multifamily residential or 25,000 square feet for office. For projects less than 5 stories in height and/or below these residential and office minimums, we recommend you check out Build Up Denver on Twitter, which does a nice job of covering smaller developments and projects outside of our DenverInfill downtown survey area.

The vast majority of the project data in the tables below comes from the City of Denver’s planning and development permitting system. Project specifications like the number of homes, number of parking spaces, etc., can and do change as a project moves through the development review process. Therefore, while we try to keep our DenverInfill project-tracking spreadsheets up-to-date, the numbers reported here may not be the latest or may be incorrect, so use at your own risk.

Tracking projects that are Completed or Under Construction is fairly straight forward. Tracking projects that are Proposed is a bit more complicated. The first step in the city’s development review process is the filing of a Concept Plan with the planning office. City planning staff review the Concept Plan and have a conversation with the developer about feasibility, zoning and design issues, and other factors the developer will have to take into consideration before the project can move on to the next step. Project specifications at the Concept Plan stage are preliminary and may change before formal plans are submitted to the city for review. Many of the projects listed in the Proposed section of our Infill Summary are at the Concept Plan stage.

If the Concept Plan is approved and if the developer wants to move forward with the project, the next step is the filing and review of a formal Site Development Plan, which requires the developer team to provide substantially greater detail about the development’s proposed site plan and building design. The final step is Building Permit review, where detailed construction and engineering documents are reviewed and approved before construction can begin.

COMPLETED PROJECTS

Let’s get started with the Completed projects. These are the developments in our downtown survey area that have finished construction since January 1, 2020. These projects got their start in the late 2010s but were completed in the early 2020s.

For being only two and a half years into the decade and considering most of that time we were dealing with the pandemic, this is a pretty good list, with a total of 31 completed projects adding 35 discrete towers (using the term “tower” generously here) to the greater downtown Denver skyline. The tallest building completed was the 30-story Block 162 office tower that helped fill a gap in the center of the downtown skyline along 15th Street. But the projects that opened in the decade’s first couple of years that have had the most visible impact on restoring downtown’s urban fabric are McGregor Square, Market Station, the Thompson Hotel, and The Fitzgerald projects in Lower Downtown. Together, they eliminated over 180,000 square feet of surface parking in our most walkable downtown district and replaced ugly dead zones with new homes, offices, stores, and public spaces. The other busy area was River North, with 10 completed projects ranging from 5 to 13 stories in height. But as we will see in our Under Construction and Proposed sections below, that’s just the tip of the iceberg for RiNo.

You’ll notice that, compared to our 2010s decade summaries, we’ve added a couple of additional data points we’re tracking and reporting this time: the ground-floor retail/restaurant space in a building (when included), and the residential parking ratio. Long-time readers of DenverInfill know our editorial position on automobile parking—both the surface lot variety and parking in general. Great cities are designed and built for the pedestrian, not the private automobile. As Denver continues to evolve into a denser and more urbanized city, we must decrease the space we dedicate to car storage and increase the space we dedicate to pedestrians and housing people. We cannot continue to welcome new residents and businesses and also have the private automobile serve as everyone’s primary means of personal mobility. It’s spatially impossible given Denver’s limited and fixed amount of public right-of-way; it’s not sustainable economically, socially, or environmentally in the long-run; and on-site parking significantly adds to the cost of housing. Clearly, part of the solution is better public transit and improved bicycle/scooter/pedestrian infrastructure, services, and amenities. But the solution must also include removing the city’s minimum parking requirements for new development and imposing parking maximums citywide. The city government has been inching in that direction, but far too slowly and timidly. However, there’s evidence that we are making some progress on this front—as we will see as we evaluate the parking ratios in the group of developments found in the Completed, Under Construction, and Proposed categories.

We’ve limited our parking ratio calculation to just residential-only projects because a.) residential projects are by far the most dominant type of development going on in Denver these days and b.) it’s easy to calculate and understand. One on-site parking space per home should be considered a maximum for multifamily residential developments in an urban area, with ratios well under 1.00 spaces per home preferred and, ideally, approaching zero on-site parking spaces for projects in highly walkable areas with great transit options.

For the 20 residential-only projects in our Completed list above, their combined average parking ratio is 1.01 (4,371 parking spaces for 4,328 homes), which isn’t great but could be worse. The biggest offender is The Pullman, with an absurd parking ratio of nearly 2 spaces per home for a building a block from the region’s largest transit hub. The project with the lowest parking ratio is the new CU Denver student housing on the Auraria Campus with virtually no on-site parking. But since that’s a public educational facility, if we look at private development, the winners are both in La Alma-Lincoln Park: Art District Flats and Inca Commons each have an average of 0.39 parking spaces per home.

Together, these recently completed early-2020s developments have added 4,757 new homes to Denver’s urban core along with almost 1.5 million square feet of office space, 826 hotel rooms, over 320,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, and 6,744 automobile parking spaces.

The distribution of these 35 completed buildings by floor count is: 22 buildings in the 5–9 story range, 12 buildings in the 10–19 story range, and 1 building of 20 stories or more.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS

Next, let’s take a look at the projects in the Under Construction category. Many of the tower cranes you see across the downtown landscape, which Ryan recently tallied in our Summer 2022 Tower Crane Census, are helping build these projects.

There are 40 infill developments (41 discrete towers) currently under construction in our downtown survey area. Of these, the tallest and only multi-tower project is the 38- and 32-story “Block 176” condominium development at 18th and Glenarm. Not far behind in floor count is the 30-story office tower at 1900 Lawrence and the 22-story X Denver 2 project in Arapahoe Square.

River North leads in the number of projects with 14 developments currently underway, with seven of them below 10 stories and the other seven ranging from 12 to 17 stories in height, and featuring a good mix of multifamily residential (nearly 3,000 homes) and office (over 600,000 SF) uses. The two most architecturally interesting buildings under construction are the 16-story One River North with its fractured facade, and the 13-story Populus hotel in Upper Downtown with an aspen-tree-inspired facade.

As mentioned above, the combined parking space-to-home ratio for the 20 residential-only projects in the Completed category was 1.01. Those are projects that were designed and permitted in the late 2010s but finished this decade. Looking at the 31 residential-only projects that are currently under construction, their combined average parking ratio is 0.93 (7,951 spaces for 8,532 homes)—an improvement! As projects designed and permitted more recently, this lower average parking ratio would seem to reflect the combination of parking-reduction incentives offered by the city and growing recognition by developers of the cost of providing too much parking.

In all, the 40 projects currently under construction in the greater downtown area will add 8,624 new homes to a housing-deprived city, 478 new hotel rooms, over 1.3 million square feet of office space, over 200,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial, and 9,731 automobile parking spaces.

The distribution of these 41 under-construction buildings by floor count is: 20 buildings in the 5–9 story range, 17 buildings in the 10–19 story range, and 4 buildings 20 stories or more.

PROPOSED PROJECTS

Here’s the list of Proposed projects in our downtown survey area:

There are currently 111 proposed infill developments (for a combined 123 discrete towers) in our downtown survey area. That’s a lot! Still, we have limited our Proposed category to include only projects with a Concept Plan filing date sometime in 2022 or projects from prior years that have had some development review activity with the city in 2022 (such as progressing to the Site Development Plan or Building Permit review stages). This means that, despite its length, the list above includes only projects that are fairly “fresh” since we have weeded out development proposals from pre-2022 that have grown stale due to inactivity. Of these 111 projects, 75 of them are projects filed with the city for the first time in 2022 and 36 are projects from 2021 or earlier that have remained active to some degree in 2022 in the city’s development review process.

The main reason for the length of the Proposed project list is simply the continued strong demand for housing development in Denver and the attractiveness of Denver for real estate investment in general. But certainly another reason for the large number of Concept Plans that were filed in the first half of 2022 was developers rushing to get their projects submitted by the June 30 deadline to be exempted from the city’s new Expanded Housing Affordability program that took effect on July 1.

The other thing to keep in mind is that not all of these proposed projects, particularly the ones that are in the Concept Plan review stage, will become a reality. In fact, after tracking infill developments here at DenverInfill for 18 years now, we’d say that if half of these projects get out of the ground, that would be an achievement. This is the nature of real estate development, particularly in a downtown setting where development is more costly and complex, and definitely given the issues with skilled labor shortages, the cost of construction materials, uncertainties in the economy, and so on. Nevertheless, a longer list of proposed projects is better than a shorter list, and hopefully many of these projects will come to fruition to help address Denver’s severe housing shortage.

Looking at this list of Proposed projects, it’s clear that River North remains the juggernaut in the downtown area, with over 8,200 homes and 1.8 million square feet of office space proposed across 36 projects. In second place is the Golden Triangle, which is surging (finally!) with high-rise residential proposals ranging from 12 to 30 stories that would add over 3,800 homes to the district—on top of the 1,590 currently under construction. Other areas with strong development proposal activity include Arapahoe Square (over 3,100 homes proposed), Capitol Hill (almost 2,600 homes), and Uptown (over 1,400 homes). The tallest proposals can be found, naturally, in the core downtown districts where towers of 53, 47, 38, 36, 31, and 28 stories have been proposed.

For the 92 proposed residential-only projects where we are able to calculate a parking ratio, their combined average parking ratio is 0.94 (20,880 spaces for 22,137 homes)—almost identical to the 0.93 combined ratio for the projects currently under construction. An encouraging sign is that of these 92 proposed projects, only 37 have a ratio greater than 1.00 space per home, and 26 have a ratio less than 0.75, including three with no on-site parking. The remaining 29 projects have a ratio between 0.75 and 1.00. Still, adding tens of thousands of additional private automobile parking spaces to the urban core is counterproductive to Denver’s goals of “increasing mobility and safety while reducing congestion and fighting climate change” and achieving Vision Zero in the process. We must do better.

If all 111 proposed projects were to be realized, they would add 24,951 new homes, over 1,000 hotel rooms, almost 3.0 million square feet of office space, over 500,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, and 26,790 automobile parking spaces to the greater downtown area.

The distribution of these 123 proposed buildings by floor count is: 48 buildings in the 5–9 story range, 52 buildings in the 10–19 story range, and 23 buildings 20 stories or more.

CONCLUSION

Let’s wrap up this post with a graphic that shows the amount and extent of infill development throughout greater Downtown Denver. Yellow icons represent Proposed buildings and green icons represent buildings Under Construction, with the figure at the top the number of above-grade floors. To be clear, the building icons are not placed in their actual geographic locations but are simply clustered by district and neighborhood. For a higher-resolution version of this graphic in PDF format, click here. Later this month we will publish our first “3D Future Skyline” feature of the 2020s, where the specific location and approximate height of each building covered in our Summer 2022 Infill Summary will be visualized. Stay tuned for that!

We hope you enjoyed our first semiannual Infill Summary of the 2022s! In addition to following the blog for our regular roundups by neighborhood and other special posts about downtown development, we encourage you to follow us on social media if you are not already. Check out all of our high-quality photos on Instagram, and follow us on Twitter for breaking information about new projects and construction activities. We link to each new blog post on our Facebook page as well.