When Denver’s Downtown Area Plan — a document to guide city policies for the urban core over 20 years — was last developed, Apple’s first iPhone came onto the market, the housing market was collapsing and the Colorado Rockies made the World Series for its first and only time.

A lot has obviously changed since 2007 — not the least of which includes downtown office vacancies hitting decade highs following the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Wednesday, city officials and the Downtown Denver Partnership kicked off work to develop the next downtown plan to shape the area for another generation a little earlier than necessary.

It’ll be a 9-month long process to survey community members and others to draft a document that must go through City Council for approval.

“That is our blueprint. That is our north star,” said Kourtny Garrett, president and CEO of the Downtown Denver Partnership (DDP), at an office vacancy conference on Wednesday before the kickoff.

With the pandemic’s effects — officials had shut down businesses, suspended in-person learning and curbed public gatherings at the height of the crisis — and the expansion of the Downtown Development Authority, the tax-increment financing tool created for Union Station’s restoration, to cover the rest of downtown, project leaders told The Denver Gazette it seemed the timing was right to revisit the Downtown Area Plan.

There’s many ideas and projects floating around to revitalize downtown, such as office conversions to residential housing, 16th Street Mall’s full reopening and creating more public spaces.

While some of the propositions under consideration may not be new, the Downtown Area Plan is meant set the city’s priorities and establish a strategy.

“It helps us really organize those thoughts and be strategic,” Andrew Iltis, DDP’s vice president of planning and community impact and co-leader of the plan, told The Denver Gazette.

What the 2007 plan set

The plan created almost 20 years ago and updated in 2017 pushed to make downtown more diverse, walkable, connected and “green.”

“It kind of set the stage for a lot of the mobility changes downtown,” Denver Principal City Planner David Gaspers said in an interview.

The 2007 plan highlighted reinvesting into the 16th Street Mall and evaluating its transit services, leading to the extensive refurbishing construction project to expand patio and sidewalk space and move mall shuttles to the center of the thoroughfare.

The plan also advocated to support the 2014 redevelopment of Union Station.

Other highlights included pushing for more mixed-use development in Arapahoe Square and the Golden Triangle.

The document laid the groundwork to make downtown more of a residential and cultural destination — especially with the then-recent additions of major league sports stadiums, such as Coors Field, Ball Arena and Empower Field, Iltis said.

“I remember the conversations about going from an eight hour or 10 hour city to an 18-hour or 24-hour city,” Iltis said.

When the plan was adopted, downtown had 9,000 residents, according to data from the DDP. It aimed to get 34,000 residents by 2027. A mid-point reflection in 2017 found residential growth growing faster than projected, 153% compared to original estimates of 139%, and the 2017 update adjusted the goal to 38,200 residents.

At the end of 2023, downtown had attracted up to 33,000 residents.

The next 20-year master plan is likely to “lean even more fully into the idea of downtown serving as a neighborhood,” Iltis said.

Need for solutions in downtown

Mayor Mike Johnston has emphasized transforming the Central Business District into a “Central Neighborhood District,” particularly as companies fled and fewer people visited the urban core following the pandemic.

In 2024, the number of visits to downtown is around 80% of what it was before 2020, Garrett said.

The number of residents is the only segment of visits that have exceeded pre-pandemic levels, but total visitors and office workers are still behind.

About a third of offices downtown are vacant, according to commercial real estate firm CBRE. And the rate of vacancies is expected to climb as years-long leases end and companies decide to either downsize or leave altogether.

“Only about half of the leases that were signed pre-pandemic have come to term,” said Rick Pederson, partner at Denver private-equity firm Bow River Capital. “And so we’ve got another half.”

The city has studied converting downtown’s older offices into housing, which is an arduous and expensive task some developers or investors aren’t confident enough to take a risk on. Denver is working to extend the Downtown Development Authority in order to use the tax revenues from Union Station’s revitalization program and invest the money into projects downtown, such as office conversions.

The expansion is set to go on the ballot in November for residents, businesses and property owners in the authority’s current boundaries.

At a University of Denver Education Opinions conference in Republic Plaza to discuss the city’s office vacancy problem on Wednesday, a group of fellows released a report based on “anonymous, unfiltered” interviews with stakeholders, urban planners, architects and downtown office tenants across Denver, finding office conversions would require heavy public investment and many worry it won’t be enough to revitalize downtown.

“It is clear that conversion to residential is not the panacea for downtown Denver’s vacancy issues or the city’s broader housing crisis,” the report concluded.

A popular preference was for demolition of the old buildings to lower vacancy rates and open space for new developments, but it also offers challenges, such as waiting for leases to expire.

Egon Terplan, a place-based economic development expert with Brookings Metro, cautioned against both conversions and demolitions.

“Could there be portions of those buildings that could be activated?” Terplan asked. “It doesn’t have to be the entire building all at once.”

Terplan said pedestrians can’t see what’s happening in all the floors of a tower; their experiences are mostly shaped by the ground floor. The office vacancy is a problem for the owner to worry about and there needs to be more creative solutions for the empty spaces, he said, but on a “bit-by-bit” basis.

Smaller activations can help create a demand curve, he said.

“Adaptive reuse” is already going through a pilot program in the city. A Downtown Area Plan would “augment and support that at a policy level,” city planner Gaspers explained. He added it could also outline what goals adaptive reuse policies should meet.

With the advent of the next downtown plan, both Gaspers and Iltis mentioned the pandemic showed gaps in the city core’s economic power.

“Hopefully, there’s never a pandemic again, right?” Gaspers said. “But the idea that we can make downtown more resilient by having a greater mix of land uses and creating a better environment for people to move around and to stay and just enjoy being in downtown will put us better footing for the next big thing that happens, whatever that is.”

While housing is one component, the plan will also look into what other assets go into a neighborhood from adding public spaces, playgrounds, childcare facilities, schools or grocery stores.

The Downtown Area Plan will start with asking residents for feedback on what they’d like to see in the city center through mid-October. A public draft is expected to be released in April or May 2025 and the adoption of the plan with City Council’s approval is projected for summer or fall of next year.