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Originally Posted by TakeFive
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Some amazing numbers. As a Denver native, I remember the very start of the Central Denver boom in early 90s. It seemed so daunting with the vast tracts of abandoned industrial land, and yet people like Dana Crawford were screaming about the potential for redevelopment. I always thought the area very cool, with potential, but probably viewed their optimistic views as a bit of pie in the sky. In fact they were visionary.
I just saw this old 1998 article form the New York Times, talking about the "boom" in Denver (even though not a single apartment had been built yet in the Union Station area). The people quoted in this NYT article were so bullish on their view of the potential for downtown:
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DENVER, Dec. 28— From her fifth-floor apartment in a freshly converted flour mill, Dana Crawford surveyed the abandoned railroad yards at the core of downtown Denver and envisioned lofts and more lofts.
As carpenters built 350 apartments and bulldozers opened utility trenches for 3,500 more, Ms. Crawford, a developer, waved to a cluster of vacant red-brick warehouses near the freight tracks and predicted, ''All these warehouse buildings will be turned into lofts.''
* * *
'Denver fits the pattern of a Western automobile city, so for a Sun Belt city, what is happening here is very inspiring,'' said Brad Segal, an urban consultant who is on the board of the International Downtown Association, an organization of city planners specializing in downtowns. Noting that delegations from cities as diverse as Albuquerque, N.M., and Baltimore have recently toured downtown Denver to get ideas, Mr. Segal added, ''Most of the cities I work in want to be like Denver.''
Planners caution that the move downtown, here and elsewhere, is a mini-trend in the face of continuing suburban expansion. Indeed, while the city of Denver's population grew by 2 percent, or 12,000 people, since 1980, to about 500,000 people, its suburbs grew by a third in the same time, adding 505,000 people.
But looking ahead, Mr. Segal and other urbanists believe that demographics and accumulated wealth are pointing to radical transformations in American downtowns in the coming decades. Virtually none of the people moving into downtown Denver have children living at home. They are singles, childless couples or older people, the ''empty nesters'' whose children have left home for college and careers.
If anything, they were overly cautious on their projections! LoDo, the focus of this article, has now been or is being surpassed by developed areas (or revitalized neighborhoods) they didn't even have a name as of the date of this article (LoHi, RiNo, Riverfront, Union Station, etc.) The City population now exceeds 670,000 - quite the jump from the 505K quoted in the article. It's been a fun ride.
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/29/us/den...ward-downtown-living.html?pagewanted=all
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