Wayne Dale has been a big-city guy for years. He enjoys walking or riding his scooter to restaurants, sporting events and the office.
But when he remarried seven years ago, Dale wasn’t ready to give up the bright lights and skyscrapers for a home in the ‘burbs.
So, he began what became an almost-quixotic quest to find a four-bedroom loft in downtown Denver that he could afford for his daughter, Alex, and his new wife.
“It’s tough unless there’s something new going in,” he said.
Turns out, Dale couldn’t find the loft he needed, but his real estate agent, Dee Chirafisi of Kentwood City Properties, discovered that the loft next to his was up for sale. Dale bought it and combined the two.
Today, there are more larger units available, but it’s still difficult to find a three- to four-bedroom residence downtown. There are about 60 units that size, but only about half a dozen are on the market at any given time, Chirafisi said.
And then there’s the price.
“The cheapest one would be $1 million to $2.5 million,” Chirafisi said.
Not exactly family-friendly.
While downtown Denver has enjoyed a renaissance the past decade, driven in part by a growing influx of single residents and married couples without children, growth and metropolitan-design experts say the city’s urban core may hit a ceiling because it lacks a key ingredient to successful community building – families.
“If you only cater to young professionals and they get married and leave, then you have a hole there,” said Susan Goltsman, a national environmental-design expert and principal with Moore Iacofano Goltsman Inc. “It’s just an economic and human development situation.”
According to Goltsman, about 30 percent of the population in a healthy community should be children under 13 years old. Families are pivotal for “building a constituency,” she says, and downtown Denver falls well short of such benchmarks.
While the downtown population has tripled in the past 20 years, of the roughly 9,000 people who live in the urban center, there are only 325 families.
Though plenty of housing is available for residents with no children, the dearth of family-oriented developments bodes badly for building a greater residential base downtown, experts say.
“An entire housing market dependent on empty-nesters is not as sustainable,” said Robin Kniech, program director for the Front Range Economic Strategy Center. “It doesn’t hold up to market downturns as well as a more diversified housing base does.”
Family amenities lacking
While downtown has a slew of attractions for singles and tourists alike, it doesn’t offer the affordable housing, parks and other amenities that would draw families from the suburbs.
“It’s the age-old chicken and the egg,” said Jim Basey, co-chairman of the Downtown Denver Area Plan steering committee. “People would come downtown if we had a school and a grocery store, and the other side says we’d have a school and a grocery store if people were downtown.
“At some point, we have to make a community commitment that these amenities are important to balance downtown with who lives there.”
The lack of a downtown school may be the most significant deficiency, developers say.
“It’s a missing component, and it’s an important part of the city,” says Riverfront Park developer Mark Smith, who spent six years in the 1990s trying to get a school to open in the area.
A shortage of nearby schools pushes families away from downtown living, not only in Denver but across the country, said Nicolas Retsinas, director for the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.
“Where a family lives is a function of where they are safe and where their children can get a good education,” Retsinas said. “There’s a legitimate question as to whether downtowns can have that kind of environment.”
The Denver Public School district owns about 3 acres near The Children’s Museum that it acquired through a series of land swaps and a financial commitment from Smith.
“If and when they want to do something there, I would help them with fundraising,” said Smith, head of East West Partners, developer of Riverfront Park.
DPS has an independent panel evaluating the system’s 154 assets, including the 3-acre downtown parcel. Over the next three months, the committee will evaluate where growth is projected before making its recommendations, said John Kechriotis, general counsel for DPS.
The district could decide to sell its downtown site rather than develop it. Given that DPS has an ever-tightening budget, a downtown school may never be cost-effective.
“It’s just an economic issue,” Smith said. “The reality is that a downtown school costs more to build.”
Meanwhile, the Dales make do without a nearby school. Five-year-old Carson attends Steele Elementary School in Washington Park, and Alexandra, 11, who lives part of the time with her mother, attends Campus Middle School.
The biggest challenge for the downtown family is finding a babysitter, said Dale’s wife, Leigh. “There just aren’t a lot of teenage girls downtown, so it’s expensive.”
’90s project progressive
The first new residential construction downtown, the 70-acre Riverfront Park, was considered extremely progressive when it started in the mid-1990s.
The project was deemed risky as well.
“The value proposition of living downtown was unproven,” said Todd Johnson, a principal of urban-design firm Design Workshop, which created the master plan for the Central Platte Valley. “No one believed you could ever do for-sale product here. Affordability wasn’t even on the radar screen.”
Since then, Riverfront Park and other downtown developments have been successful, and the building continues.
About 4,500 downtown condos are either under construction, planned or recently completed, more than double the number of rental units, according to the Downtown Denver Partnership.
Most of the properties, however, won’t be sold at prices that are competitive for families.
“Because of scarcity of product and need for levels of returns, you don’t see anybody take high-end property and make it into rental property,” Basey said.
The median price of the 3,389 units planned downtown is $378,950, according to statistics provided by Hanley Wood Market Intelligence. That compares with $332,900 for all of Denver County; $260,200 for Adams County; and $314,995 for Arapahoe County.
“With kids, you need more square footage, and square footage is more expensive downtown,” Mayor John Hickenlooper said.
Other cities take action
Unlike Denver, cities such as Seattle, Portland, Ore., and San Francisco are trying to bring back families they lost to the suburbs, Goltsman said.
“Denver never had (families) downtown,” she said. “They just have to build the right mix of housing, so the right family groups will come in. You can’t put a family of four in a two-bedroom apartment for very long.”
Denver has tried to address the affordability issue with its inclusionary housing ordinance, which requires developers to reserve 10 percent of projects with 30 or more units for families earning less than 80 percent of the area median income, or AMI.
“It targets the wrong income level,” Kniech said. “What’s most needed is housing around 50 percent of AMI and below.”
Kniech suggests financing it by creating a more sustainable source of public funding to subsidize housing for people with families.
While the challenges remain daunting, Hickenlooper said drawing families is critical for making downtown a part of the larger Denver community.
“Kids add a lot in terms of what you do for public safety and parkland,” the mayor said. “People are willing to invest more when their families are downtown.”
Staff writer Margaret Jackson can be reached at 303-954-1473 or mjackson@denverpost.com.
