Q: You’re part of the local group that is hosting the Urban Land Institute’s fall meeting here next week. How big a deal is that for Denver?
A: It’s a big deal for a lot of reasons. You have 5,000 to 6,000 real estate practitioners in town to see Denver in a light it’s never been seen before.
Q: What will be highlighted during the conference?
A: We’ll showcase DIA and T-REX, which is a future vision of the systemwide improvements that will happen under FasTracks. Those two transportation items will earn Denver the reputation as a progressive city for this new millennium.
We’ll be able to show off entertainment in downtown Denver and everything that has happened since the election that allowed Coors Field to happen.
We have one of the showcase base closures at Lowry and the premier mixed-use and largest infill project in the country at Stapleton. We’ve got a shining example of New Urbanist mixed-use development at Belmar and the early stages of planning for a number of transit-oriented development projects along the new light-rail line, as well as a number of premier master-planned communities.
The Denver metro area – through numerous public/private partnerships – has put into place the physical infrastructure that will give Denver the ability to be one of the great cities of the world. There’s a lot to show off in Denver.
Q: How was Denver able to get the Urban Land Institute to have its fall meeting here?
A: It was a fortuitous move by Harry Frampton, then international chairman of ULI. Harry happened to be at a ULI meeting when the group realized it had grown so much over the last 10 years it was too big for the facility it reserved for a meeting in Chicago.
Harry felt that, with a brand-new expansion of the convention center and a new hotel, there was a good chance we could get it here. It shows the importance of the expansion of the convention center and hotel. We could not have gotten this meeting without both of them.
Q: What else is reshaping Denver?
A: Transit-oriented development is providing an entirely new type of land use. It’s really a function of the aging baby boomers who are looking for new lifestyle opportunities. They weren’t needed 10 years ago because that generation was still raising families and still needed suburban lifestyles with shopping and schools.
When the active adult generation was raising its families, there was much more single- use land zoning, residential that didn’t have mixed use or retail.
These new concepts offer a mix of uses that create office, retail and residential that happens to be proximate to light rail.
Q: Being near light rail can also have unintended consequences, can’t it?
A: Yes, we were in a building across the street for 35 years that fell victim to the light rail. We had to move to this building five years ago.
I was co-chair on the finance committee that approved T-REX. Little did I know that at the end of the process, our building would fall victim to it.
Q: You’ve been quoted as saying transportation drives land use. How does it play into your company’s vision of the future?
A: That was my dad’s vision. He started buying ground along an access route called the Valley Highway (now Interstate 25) in the 1950s. A lot of what we’ve done is a function of being on or near transportation corridors.
Q: What other lessons have you learned from your father?
A: First, under all lies the land. You need to respect what you do on the land and do it in a sensitive and responsible manner.
Patience is genius in this business. If you try to make too much happen too quickly at the wrong time, it can prove disastrous.
Too much debt in this very risky business can prove to be even more disastrous.
Integrity is of paramount concern. Do everything you can to enhance it and nothing that will detract from it.
In this business, where the community at large has been good to us, it’s important to give back to the community.
Edited for space and clarity from an interview by staff writer Margaret Jackson.
