Each time I walk my doggies from my tiny loft in LoDo over the Millennium Bridge and around Commons Park, I feel like I’ve entered another dimension, a place where the skyline changes at warp speed.
The former abandoned railyard continues to be transformed into an urban dweller’s dream. The centerpiece is the park, with its rolling hills that lead to the Platte River. Surrounding it are mixed-use buildings: condos set above chic restaurants, boutiques and a funky café.
Developers race to add hundreds of new condos to the market here. Three buildings are going up in the Riverfront neighborhood behind Union Station, and more are in the works. Last week, as I marveled at cranes hoisting support beams, a woman walking past stopped and asked, “Who is going to buy all these condos?”
Good question. Do we really have that many people in Denver who can afford $500,000 for a 1,300-square-foot condo with a sliver of a patio?
The answer is yes.
Home foreclosures in Denver are at a high, and the number of homes listed for sale has reached a record. It’s taking longer for moderately priced homes to sell. But that’s not affecting LoDo and the Central Platte Valley.
The development is changing more than just the skyline; the cultural landscape of downtown is shifting. The wealthy are moving in, but in this case there is no gentrification, no low-income people or starving artists being displaced.
It’s an odd neighborhood in some ways: There are few children (couples get dogs instead), and you rarely see senior citizens.
For some of these condo owners, it’s their third or fourth home.
“The people that are buying them are the DINKS (couples with dual incomes and no kids) and the empty nesters,” says Byron Koste, executive director of the Real Estate Center at CU-Boulder’s Leeds School of Business.
He says in the next 30 years baby boomers will get $30 trillion in inheritance from their parents. All that money is allowing boomers to buy these second and third homes.
That explains why the $1.5 million townhomes that were built last fall on Little Raven Street were snatched up as quickly as they were built.
I often hear people grumble that these condo owners are buying more than they can afford. They peer into the windows of the townhomes, see no furniture and assume every cent of the owner’s money is going toward the mortgage.
In a reality the working class may be unfamiliar with, those townhome owners are just waiting until the interior decorator finishes coordinating with contractors to put in custom fixtures. (The hot-mod furniture, imported from Scandinavia, will come afterward.)
This growth is good for Denver. As a person who grew up in a vertical city, I prefer that cities grow upward rather than outward. Density allows people to mix in a way that you can’t amid endless rows of cul de sacs.
It would be great if there were more moderately priced condos so teachers, artists, social workers and others who give so much, yet get paid so little, could move in.
Fabby Hillyard, executive director of LoDo Inc., a business and residential organization, says that because there are enough people to snatch up expensive new lofts being built here, it “puts us at risk of becoming the Upper East Side,” referring to the tony Manhattan neighborhood.
Her advice: If we want a mixed-income neighborhood, “we have to fight for the mix.”
There’s no reason we can’t – especially when we’re building upward. The sky is the limit.
Cindy Rodríguez’s column appears Tuesdays in Scene and Sundays in Style. Contact her at 303-820-1211 or crodriguez@denverpost.com.
