Bill Mosher feared that a one-year pledge he made to Mayor Mike Johnston to oversee efforts to revive downtown Denver and other “special projects” was turning into an indefinite assignment.
Mosher stepped down on Aug. 14 as two of his signature assignments, turning a sinking downtown around and helping convert Burnham Yard into the new home of the Denver Broncos, were in full swing.
From the outside, Mosher might look like a captain who abandoned ship in the heat of battle, or for sports fans, a football coach who walked out at halftime during a grueling game.
But he argues that his decision reflects a confidence in both the plan the city has set in place and the people who will execute it. And with his 76th birthday coming up in October, he was ready to step aside.
“Somebody said, ‘You have got more to do.’ And I said, ‘I could be here 10 years, and there will still be more to do,’ ” Mosher joked. “The only constant thing in Downtown is change.”
As Mosher departs, he leaves behind a map of guiding principles and a handful of warnings on things to avoid.
If there is one message he wants to emphasize, Mosher said it is that Upper Downtown must become a place that more people call home, not just a Central Business District (CBD) where they come to work.
“We have to turn Upper Downtown into a mixed-use neighborhood. The days of an historic CBD office park are over. We will fail if we try to make that happen or wait for it to happen,” he said.
If downtown can add 10,000 residential units over the next 10 years, its future will be much brighter than if it clings to its past as a concentrated office hub.
Not every struggling office tower, however, can convert to residences, said Mosher, who would check requests against a list Gensler, an architectural firm, had developed three years ago of prime conversion candidates.
Complicating matters, metro Denver faces a surplus of apartments, which is pushing down rents and making the math behind conversions harder to pencil out.
Downtown would benefit greatly if the state, after years of failed attempts, finds a way to finally address construction defects litigation and restore construction insurance premiums to manageable levels, he said.
The city needs to let the market pick winners and losers, Mosher said, given that it doesn’t have enough money to rescue every building or business.
But Mosher was also willing to break that rule when the Denver Pavilions, an outdoor retail mall on 16th Street, defaulted on its debt.
The development was too important to Upper Downtown and 16th Street to leave its fate to chance, he said.
The Downtown Denver Development Authority, which is directing public investments in the Central Business District, paid $37 million to purchase the Pavilions, including $8 million for improvements, and $23 million for two adjacent parking lots.
Private investment has largely pulled out of Upper Downtown. But targeted public investments, if done right, could eventually help kickstart more private investments, Mosher said.
Mosher estimates that downtown is struggling with 7 million square feet of surplus office space above and beyond what would be expected if vacancy rates were at historic levels.
About 1 million of that surplus space is on the path to residential conversions, and other adaptive reuses will absorb some of the additional space.
Earlier this month, the University of Colorado Denver closed on its purchase of Independence Plaza, a 25-story tower with only a fifth of its 567,287 square feet of space occupied.
It picked up the building at a nearly 80% discount to its prior sales price, and plans to incorporate it into its campus while also renting out space to tenants.
Residential conversions, while necessary, will only soak up a fraction of the office space now sitting empty. Building owners will need to recruit new tenants.
For that to happen, the city and the state need to encourage more business development, Mosher said.
The DDA has committed $40 million to provide incentives to recruit businesses that will bring new employees downtown. Last month, it extended a $7 million loan to help Alterra Mountain Co. relocate its headquarters from RiNo to Upper Downtown.
Downtown office rents have remained stubbornly high despite the area’s elevated vacancy rates. That reflects owners who, in hindsight, overpaid and their lenders who are unwilling to budge on loan covenants.
As more distressed sales occur, that could pave the way for office rents to drop, which in turn could allow more cost-sensitive businesses, like startups, to find their way to the Central Business District.
Building demolitions may be necessary at some point, but they should only take place if an alternative use is planned, Mosher said. That definition excludes parking lots or otherwise empty spaces.
One of the greatest risks to Upper Downtown looms ahead like a giant whirlpool: the ongoing shift in Denver’s center of gravity toward the Central Platte Valley.
Kroenke Sports and Entertainment’s River Mile project, set to eventually occupy the current Elitch Garden’s site, is slated to create 8,000 housing units across three neighborhoods and host some of the city’s tallest towers.
Upper downtown has a limited amount of time to reinvent itself before newer developments leave it permanently stranded and starved of capital, Mosher warns.
If the mark of a good leader is their ability to chart a course, the mark of a great leader is their ability to ensure a ship can sail without them.
Mosher has done exactly that, said Doug Tisdale, chairman of the DDA and a former member of the RTD board.
“The system has now been put in place. We have a structure that he helped to shape and form, and that structure has been effective and impactful. He created that for us,” Tisdale said.
A steady hand in a difficult moment
Mosher has helped downtown navigate past downturns, going back to the aftermath of the oil bust in the 1990s, when he was in charge of the Downtown Denver Partnership.
As a senior managing director at Trammel Crow, one of the country’s largest real estate developers, he was instrumental in negotiating the master development agreement that brought together private and public parties to reshape Union Station.
The Denver Union Station Development Authority, which raised $300 million in public funds to finance redevelopment efforts, was critical in that transformation, which happened after the Great Recession.
The authority was so successful in generating additional tax revenues that it paid its bonds off 14 years ahead of schedule and set the stage for further private redevelopment, including RTD’s Market Street Station site.
When faced with an even bigger challenge this decade, city leaders returned to the playbook of a public investment authority and public-private partnerships.
In November 2024, Denver voters approved the Downtown Denver Development Authority covering more than 1,000 acres of the city’s urban core. And they granted it $570 million in tax increment financing.
Mosher, a Denver native, was the person Johnston wanted to oversee that effort.
Although Mosher declined Johnston’s request to become a city employee and to stay through his term, he did agree to lead the effort for a year.
He would get the process off the ground, set priorities, and help vet funding requests headed to the DDA.
Around Christmas time, Mosher agreed to stay another quarter, and then somehow found himself staying into the second quarter.
But as the year wore on, he realized if he waited too long, he risked resigning during Johnston’s upcoming re-election campaign — something he didn’t want to do.
Mosher said much of the money that Denver voters approved to revive downtown has been committed, and that the speedy deployment was intentional.
“We are at an absolutely critical juncture. This is not something that could wait five years. Catalytic investments were needed immediately,” said Kourtny Garrett, president and CEO of the Downtown Denver Partnership.
Mosher estimates that the DDA has another $20 million to $50 million available to award over the next 12 to 18 months. With most of the money earmarked, the focus is shifting from deployment to execution.
When it comes to getting approved projects across the finish line, Mosher said Jen Welborn, who is Denver’s Deputy Chief Projects Officer, is well-equipped for the task given her 30 years of experience with the city.
She will be supported by Johnston’s Chief of Staff, Jenn Ridder, in taking over Mosher’s duties.
A fast deployment
The Downtown Development Authority lists .
But another $170 million needs to be set aside to cover interest payments and the reserves that bond investors require, Mosher said.
Also, the $570 million that City Council and voters approved was a ceiling, not a guaranteed spending pot. What investors will lend in the future is tied to how quickly downtown property tax revenues rebound.
Successful early projects that boost property values will generate additional funds in the future. As they are repaid, DDA loans can provide additional funds for other projects.
But in pushing funds out quickly, the DDA risks some misses. One of the most notable has been a $400,000 tenant improvement loan provided to the Denver Immersive Repertory Theater.
DIRT’s founders pledged to use the money to refurbish 1431 15th St., a former REI space. .
Given the current situation downtown, some of the loans are high-risk.
The DDA has committed $114.5 million to four office-to-residential conversions, including the historic Symes, University and Petroleum buildings, as well as the renovation of the Barth Hotel.
More than half of that total, and the DDA’s biggest assistance package so far, involves a $63 million low-interest-rate loan for High Fidelity Plaza.
Last year, Los Angeles developer Asher Luzzatto picked up two office towers at 621 and 623 17th St. at a 97% discount. Once valued at $100 million, he was able to purchase them for $3.2 million.
Luzzatto plans to invest $315 million to convert 1 million square feet of distressed office space into a mixed-use residential development with more than 700 apartments and a host of amenities, including an on-site daycare, a children’s museum, and new ground-floor retail space.
The DDA loan, however, will only kick in after Luzzatto has lined up other financing sources. And while the authority loan might represent the last money in, that’s because it is holding the door open so other lenders can walk through.
“Without it, High Fidelity Plaza would not have moved forward,” Luzzatto said of the DDA loan. “We don’t just need to get equity onboard; we need to get the debt markets onboard. Senior lenders like to see (the development authority’s) involvement.”
In a sign of just how distressed commercial real estate has become in Upper Downtown, Luzzatto picked up another pair of towers at 1625 and 1675 17th St., known as The Energy Center, at a 97% discount from their prior purchase price.
He plans to convert one of the towers into 360 apartments, while keeping the other as office space. He has applied for DDA assistance on that project as well.
“On balance, he has prioritized the city’s needs over our desires, but he has oriented (the development authority’s) financing in a way that encourages private developments like ours,” Luzzatto said of Mosher.
And for its part, the DDA is counting on developers like Luzzatto to chart a path for future conversion that can be funded without public support.
“If the (the authority) can demonstrate that the conversion of these office buildings to residential dwelling units does work and that it can be successful and provide a return on investment, then private developers will come along,” Tisdale said.
The work involves everything from hammering out architectural and engineering innovation required to efficiently convert older buildings into apartments to developing a market for the new units and attracting tenants.
Luzzatto said Denver may eventually need to put more money on the table, but believes the payoff will be worth the effort.
“Revitalizing one of the most important downtowns in the U.S. is worthy of whatever investment is required … provided the private markets take the first, largest and most time-sensitive risks,” he said.
Mosher said the DDA represents community capital investing in itself, in a way that hopefully spurs local entrepreneurial investments.
Public confidence can help restore private sector willingness.
“Once those things start being successful and hopefully help us turn the corner, institutional capital will return,” he predicts.
One memory that stands out for Garrett was when Mosher addressed the State of Downtown breakfast the Downtown Denver Partnership hosted last year.
In something only Mosher could pull off, he called on the crowd to “stop whining” about the woes downtown faced and to strap up their boots and get to work fixing them.
“He brought the perfect balance of leadership, inspiration, and motivation to the community,” Garrett said.
