Quote:
Originally Posted by mhays
If the economic case was compelling, developers would come. Several have poked at Denver.
As for established giants building supertalls, what's an example? Comcast and Salesforce are in cities with several times Denver's land prices and tiny parking ratios...what's an example outside of that sort of city?
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Several well heeled developers have built and are building in Denver, just at smaller scales than other places despite Denver outperforming coastal cities (from a RE return standpoint for nearly a decade). Why Denver always gets smaller, I don't have a good explanation other than the remaining perceived fear that we have a boom and bust economy.
As for giants building supertalls, the entire City of Charlotte comes to mind with all the banks that built vanity towers in their lifeless downtown, Chicago is getting quite a few new ones in this cycle (BofA Tower is a gem!), Los Angeles' Wilshire Grand anchored by a giant, pretty much everything in NYC has a giant behind it...even Atlanta has a 53 story tower proposed (mainly residential) with several hundred thousand sf of office in it - that's how Denver needs to be getting supertalls - mixed-use towers. Giants also build campuses or occupy suburbia. Charles Schwab, Ball, Newmont, Western Union - these are all companies who could have been leveraged to build supertalls in Downtown Denver, but instead chose mediocre suburban office space not because the lease rates are drastically cheaper but because that's where their employees want to work (RE occupancy cost for companies of those sizes is minuscule and $10/sf or more isn't going to influence a decision such as corporate headquarters relocation. I am of firm belief that Denver doesn't get supertalls because DTC and SE can still attract those companies to locations 2 miles from their executives Cherry Hills homes and all their employees making $85k+/year. DTC is getting close to full so that's positive, but now with Lone Tree v2.0....