Posted Nov 28, 2019, 1:51 AM
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mmmm... infillicious!
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Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Lower Highland, Denver
Posts: 3,355
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ich
It’s not that central Denver can’t handle that much new office space but the CBD kind of sucks from a marketing standpoint. Especially from a tech perspective which is driving the majority of the growth, they want to be in trendy areas where their workers can live work and play. CBD doesn’t really have that going for it. Union Station, LoDo, RiNo is taking a lot of that demand and probably will continue to for a while.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SirLucasTheGreat
You touch on a lot of issues that I think inspired the Downtown Denver Partnership to go about a rebranding strategy for the CBD. You might have heard the story a couple weeks back where people were looking to have the CBD referred to as upper downtown.
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While LoDo, Union Station, and RiNo have certainly captured a lot of tech firms locating to the Downtown Denver area, there have been several big tech companies settle in the traditional high-rise CBD part of downtown, such as SendGrid, Gusto, Personal Capital, Full Contact, Vertafore, Ibotta, Marketo, Evolve, and Faction. There was a big Denver Business Journal article about it recently. Here are a few paragraphs from that article (the whole article is behind a paywall):
Quote:
Denver's tech scene is growing up and moving up.
Downtown high-rises built in the late '70s and early '80s are seeing new energy as tech tenants plant their flags in or near the city's Central Business District.
The movement has been driven by tech companies that may historically have favored LoDo (Lower Downtown) and the Central Platte Valley, in smaller scale buildings with fewer tenants but hip spaces.
Now, these companies are gaining employees and looking for better deals in rental cost and space availability while maintaining access to the people drawn to the area.
"Tech companies are focused on downtown Denver for a number of reasons; one of the main drivers is a proliferation of a young and talented workforce that now lives in and around downtown," said Andrew Blaustein, managing director and tenant representation specialist at Newmark Knight Frank.
"There has been a philosophical shift in how Denver has grown up," Johnson said.
Tech companies originally wanted small, satellite offices outside of the Central Business District in areas like the Central Platte Valley and LoDo, according to Johnson. Younger tech talent wanted to live, work and play in the same area, driving a lot of office demand in the Market St. and Wynkoop St. areas, said Rick Door, also a managing principal at Cresa's Denver office.
But that isn't the case anymore, because as those companies grew and matured, they couldn't stay there, Johnson said.
The Platte Valley and LoDo areas' lack of supply and cost of rent helped drive the tenant migration into other downtown areas, said Door.
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With more hotels, housing, and other amenities continuing to be added in the CBD, plus the city's/DDP's new emphasis on placemaking in this part of downtown, I suspect this trend will continue.
Also, "CBD" and "Upper Downtown" are not synonymous. The Central Business District is considered everything downtown other than LoDo, Golden Triangle, Arapahoe Square, or Auraria/CPV. In other words, everything from the alley between Market and Larimer to Colfax, Speer to 20th, plus the area north of the Capitol around the "cash register" building. It is the southern "upper" part from Champa south that was the focus of the recently completed Upper Downtown Plan. The term "Upper Downtown" isn't new, just the name of the district for that part of the CBD.
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