The Urban Landscape Reimagined with Mike Johnston, Mayor of Denver, and Egon Terplan, Strategist and Advisor on Urban Policy & Economic Development
Willy Walker: Good morning here in Denver, Colorado. Good afternoon to many people who are watching this live on the Walker Webcast. It's a real honor for me to be here with Egon Terplan from the Brookings Institute and Mayor Mike Johnston from Denver, Colorado, to talk about the future of cities in America and, more specifically, the future of Denver. Mr. Mayor, great to have you.
Mike Johnston: Thank you so much for having me.
Willy Walker: Egon, thank you for coming into town.
Egon Terplan: Thank you for having me.
Willy Walker: Mr. Mayor, I want to start here. As a relatively new mayor and coming into a very vibrant urban center almost a year ago in your current job, there were a lot of priorities. There were a lot of things that needed help. There was crime. There was back to the office. There was the safety of the people in the city of Denver. There are housing issues. There are health issues. As you looked at all of that, you had to prioritize. If I was in that meeting with your staff in the first week with all of those things to focus on, what was the first thing? Tell us how you prioritize what to focus on. Because this issue of urban revitalization post-COVID, we all sit here from a lens of getting people back into the office, let’s get rent growth, and get adaptive reuse of space that's not going to be used again. That's one piece of a much broader picture that you have to look at. So help us think about what you looked at as it relates to the priorities, stepping into your job.
Mike Johnston: Yeah, I think we looked at it almost like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. What are the things that have to be in place at each base level to drive the next level? So, for us, of course, the long-term goal is to make downtown Denver the most vibrant downtown in the country, and that has a series of steps that include how you think about homelessness. How do you think about crime? How do you think about placemaking? How do you think about economic development? How do you think about affordability? And I hope we'll talk about all of those in the sequence. But for us, the first step was captured, obviously, in the story where I was talking to a commercial property owner who was touring a CEO who wanted to look at space downtown, and she came in, came up to the 12th floor, looked at all the space, loved it, was very excited there, close to closing the deal. She comes downstairs, and by the time she comes downstairs, the rental car she had broken into, and all her stuff's been stolen. We don't close that deal about how good the offer is on the leased unit. So, we had to start at the beginning, which for us was around homelessness. We had, at that point, one of the fourth or fifth toughest homeless situations in the country. We had hundreds, almost thousands of tents and encampments in our city center that made folks not feel safe there and not want to return to work there. And we had people whose lives were at risk. We had more outdoor deaths in 2022 than any year before. Our first step was to get folks off the streets and into housing, to close those encampments, and keep them closed so we could get those streets reactivated for residents and businesses. We undertook a very aggressive, ambitious plan to try to move 1000 people off the streets and into housing. We've now, one year in, moved more than 1900 people off the streets into housing. We've closed every one of the major 18 encampments in the city. And now, for the first time in as long as I can remember, they are about 500 square blocks downtown that do not have a single tent or a single encampment. We started there because that was the first prerequisite to being able to invite people back. The second one was focused on crime. Happy to talk about that when you are ready.
Willy Walker: Can I pause for two seconds to see how significant an accomplishment that is? What was your goal for year one? Because you weren't thinking you were going to get 1900 off the street.
Mike Johnston: My goal was 1000 in the first six months. We did 1200 in the first six months, and we'll be at 2000 over the first year. And we housed more people faster than any city in America we think has done it at this stage. The key for us was bringing on units we could bring on affordably and quickly, which were either hotel conversions or tiny homes, villages that we built.
Willy Walker: Are you under the same restraint that California is as it relates to having a bed for someone you move off the street?
Mike Johnston: We were, and what we found was that just the type of beds we were offering was not working. When folks said, “Why don't people take options?” When the option was, “Do you want to sleep on a gymnasium floor without any of the people you don't know in the dark,” people would say, “No.” If you have an individual in what we'd call a non-congregate shelter site where you have your own lock, your own door. You have access to a shower, bathroom, and kitchen storage. You can go safely to a job for the day and come back. 100% of the folks were offered that option, took it. So that meant instead of pushing people from block to block or sweeping them from block to block, we found an Encampment. We closed it by moving everyone in that encampment to a housing option. And once we closed that option, we kept that region of the city permanently closed to future camping. Each time you house a new encampment, you're actually expanding the concentric circles of spaces of the city that have no camping left anymore, which is why now all of our downtown is in that category of no camping.
Willy Walker: I had General David Petraeus on the Walker Webcast two weeks ago when we were talking about Israel and talking about Gaza. And one of the things he was somewhat critical of the Israeli strategy is that they are basically clearing but not holding. And he was talking about Iraq when they went in on the surge, and he talked about clearing and holding. And that was the big change in the strategy. You figured that out as it relates to clear and hold, not clear, and move on to the next area.
Mike Johnston: I'm smiling because the phrase we used was, “You have to hold the hill.” Once you eventually clear any of those places and you house people, the key is housing them first. You then have to hold those spaces and reclaim them for activation for the rest of the city. And at every stage, that's been our strategy. We used a unique way to integrate nonprofit partners, private security, and our police department into an integrated response system so that the holding is not an officer with a gun and a badge. It's a nonprofit partner with a yellow vest who walks up to someone and says, “Do you need services? You can't put a tent here.” Because we intensely overstaffed each one of those blocks, we had to hold 24-hour coverage for the first 48 hours. Then you go down to 6 or 7 patrols a day, and you're down to one patrol a day, two patrols a week. But originally, you had to intensely hold that space to make sure people don't return.
Willy Walker: Egon, let me pull you in here for a second. Why is what Mayor Johnson just talked about either so challenging to do or not being done by other municipalities?
Egon Terplan: Yeah, this is a critical issue. Maybe actually stepping back on homelessness for a moment before getting into the tactics in downtown; I think we have to see this very much as a national problem. And clearly, at its root, homelessness is caused by insufficient housing, and it's also an economic challenge. But then, as people become homeless, a whole series of other challenges unfold. Something that you've done very well. We're talking about the tactical side once people are on the streets, but also sort of upstream a little bit. It's actually preventing people from getting into homelessness from the outset. And I think that becomes a strategy we need to think of as being much more affordable, allowing people to stay in the homes that they're in. A lot of people are on the margin. And what we're seeing is an opportunity for something relevant from a real estate perspective, opening up more ownership opportunities opens up more rental opportunities. More people who are currently renters get into ownership. It frees up space in the rental market for a lot of people there at the margins anyway, and those people might become homeless to begin with. So I just want to start by saying I think it's a very important and critical strategy. We all step back and try to prevent it from the outset. Then, we talk about the tactics of how we manage in particular.
Mike Johnston: I totally agree with that. And we focus on what I call the entire ladder of housing. Which is right now, you literally have folks who are on the ground with not on the first rung of the ladder. They're experiencing street homelessness, getting them first into a transitional housing site, then into an affordable subsidized rental, then into a market rate rental, then into ownership. Everyone's on some version of that ladder. We have teachers, nurses, and firefighters stuck on the can't-get-access to an affordable unit. Want to talk about what we're making. I also think the biggest bet in the country is affordability or on making sure you can keep an affordable housing stock and also what you do upstream to prevent people from entering homelessness in the first place. We have a rental assistance program. We expanded by $20 million or more last year. The simple math is someone's behind two months on their rent, and it costs $3000 or $4000 to keep them housed in that unit. It costs us $30,000 to $40,000 a year once they become homeless. But it is far better for that human being and for our city for us to keep folks housed then just let them become homeless.
Willy Walker: Why doesn't the federal government understand that as it relates to the housing assistance program? The cost to us as a nation to put HAP contracts out there is exactly, if you will, the math that you were just talking about as it relates to the moment someone tips from being housed to being unhoused. The cost is so exponential for us to give them services. How has that message not gotten to DC?
Mike Johnston: As Egon says, “The trauma also compounds over that time,” which I always say like, “Think about how your drinking habits change during Covid.” I would imagine it went up dramatically for all of us, and that is a small amount of anxiety added to your life. Now think about you being homeless outdoors on the street and tending to re-weather in January in Denver with folks on either side of you who might have weapons or guns, and you might be assaulted, or how would you self-medicate in those moments, the trauma compounds? For us, the human costs get much higher, and the financial costs get much higher. I think for us, the biggest challenge that we think other cities face is the number of units you have to bring on to match the scale of the problem. In many cities, you spend two or three years having a battle to cite one village of tiny homes for 40 units when your problem is 2000 people. We did 60 town halls that I did personally across the city in 180 days. We opened eight sites with 1200 units and 180 days. That's the scale of what you have to play if you want to move 1000 people off the streets, and you get a lot of pushback from neighborhoods on that. We open sites in neighborhoods that have never had a homeless site in them before a homeless shelter before. We pushed through that to deliver those units. Now, those communities are much more excited about the services. But I think normally, people stop because of the political pushback on the scale of units you have to bring on to solve the problem.
Willy Walker: And is that why California can't get their hands around this?
Egon Terplan: California certainly is at the front end of this, going back many decades. And I think there was a confluence of both lack of supply on the one hand. I think California is the national leader in not building a sufficient amount of housing to match the demand out there. And, of course, going back decades, there was a variety of the shutting down of mental health hospitals and a series of factors. But your question about the federal government is that it was much more in the housing game in prior decades. And it's been a many-decade process of not being involved. However, it is important to note that there are some still very effective federal programs, such as Section eight, which is rental vouchers people can take two landlords. Yes, not all landlords will take them in the same way, but that's an effective program. It doesn't solve homelessness writ large, but it is something that keeps a number of people within units.
Willy Walker: Mr. Mayor, homeless was kind of a task one. And while I've heard you say repeatedly, you're not done, and we all know the issue will never go away. It has gone from being these big encampments with 100 or 200 people. You've gotten rid of the encampments. If you go down the Platte River, you'll see a couple of people here and there, and you'll be working on that. But once you got that under control at a more rapid pace than had been expected, what was number two?
Mike Johnston: Number two was crime and public safety. And I would say, quickly, we view stage one of this as building the infrastructure to solve the problem in an ongoing way. We have 1200 units now that can bring 1200 people off the street in one year. But if we get to a six-month length of stay at these sites, you're up into permanent housing in six months. We can move 2400 people off the streets and through those units in one year. If we get a length of stay of down to three months, we're getting folks into housing faster. We have the infrastructure to now move 4800 people off the streets and into housing every year. We have now built the machine that, if we get the case management right, could get us to what we would call functional zero, which is street homelessness, mostly, if it ever exists, is brief, rare, and non-recurring. If 30 folks come down on their luck in one month and end up homeless, 30 folks exit to housing in the same month. That is the status we're after. I think it's achievable.
But the next one was about public safety. For us, there are two parts: one is increasing the presence and visibility of officers. More officers on the street are actually the best intervention on crime prevention and have the best impact on equity. The way you decrease the over-incarceration of Black and Latino people in our incarceration system is by making sure those crimes don't happen in the first place. However, increasing sentencing actually has a disproportionate impact on over-incarceration. But increasing prevention actually undoes both of those. And so we wanted more officers. We made historic investments in expanding our police force both last year and this year. Most cities are seeing huge declines in their police roles because of increased retirements and a decrease in new entrants to the field. So that was stage one. But the second was we have a number of strategies, both focused on auto theft, focused on group violence reduction, on gun violence reduction.
Willy Walker: You've dropped auto theft by 30%.
Mike Johnston: We've dropped gun violence by 30%. We've dropped catalytic converter theft by 95%. That's a component of what we were seeing citywide. We're making great strategies there. But part of the focus in places like downtowns is how do people feel safe without feeling policed. But you don't want the feeling of an officer on every corner with an AR-15 that feels like North Korea. But what you do want is to go for a run at 9:00 at night as a 25-year-old woman in your downtown and feel safe there. And so we use the analogy of the blue phone system you see on college campuses where every hundred yards you'd see a blue phone. You could call someone to contact someone. We created these Denver ambassadors, which our Yellow Vests partners with the Downtown Denver Partnership, who's here. We have nonprofit partners who are out visible walking the streets in yellow vests. And if you have a question, a problem, or a concern, if you're in the coffee shop and there's someone who seems mentally unstable in the coffee shop, they are the first responders. They're better at de-escalating a situation like that than an officer with a gun and a badge might be. And it preserves our officer's time and allows them to respond to more serious issues. And so that's both been not just an increase in presence but a triaging the way you would in a hospital system. Doctor don't need to see you when you walk in the door. You have two or three layers of medical staff that can see you first.
Willy Walker: And one of the things that I heard you say in a previous interview was that by closing down the homeless encampments has freed up a huge amount of capacity, if you will, on the police force to police in other places.
Mike Johnston: Totally true. Our officers downtown before last year, 60% of all of their calls were calls to encampments, and 60% of their entire workload was response to encampments. By eliminating that, you've now freed up 60% of their patrol time to be able to respond to other issues, quality-of-life crimes, and other theft and robbery businesses. And we do now call trust patrols, which is we have officers just affirmatively stop in and talk to business leaders and say, “How are things going on the block? Anything we should worry about?” And they're like, “Yeah, street lights out, the end of the corner. It's a problem every night, can I get the streetlight replaced. Great. We're on it.” So you can now build proactive relationships by building trust and visibility when you get that time back from having to be responsive to places, you can make a big impact.
Willy Walker: Now you're doing patrols through both problem areas and then also nonproblem areas. Talk about that strategy.
Mike Johnston: So we have two parts. One is the hot streets, which is if you have an officer present for 10 to 12 minutes in a location where you have a high propensity for crime, the likelihood of a crime occurring in that site over the next two hours drops more than 90%. We take the 40 intersections at which we have the highest degree of current crime. We schedule patrols with those officers who are there five or six times a day just for a stop in a check-in. Crime is down in those spots, 80% from our stop in. And so that's sort of hot streets patrolling.
Trust patrolling is proactive outreach to business and commercial centers and residential areas where we can build a relationship, build confidence in the police, build trust in the police, and be able to be present proactively. So we're doing both of those at the same time. And that's where you can use officers' time differently if you take back the time they were using to respond to encampments where they can do very little. Because there are people who need mental health support, addiction support, or housing, you need a warrant to enter the tent anyway because it is considered a domicile, so they can't actually enter. It's quite complicated and not productive for them. So that time, we freed up. We can now use it to strategically drive down crime in other places.
Egon Terplan: And I think, interesting place to think about, there's policing on the one hand, but there's also sort of the sense of security and safety. And I know the business improvement districts, Denver has them. Cities all across the United States have really put ambassadors on the street. Now, that may not change per se, as some of these overall crime rates, but it's a perception. And many people in the planning world have heard the famous Jane Jacobs phrase of, “The importance of eyes on the street.” But it really creates a sense of safety when you see more people out there. And some of that is a factor of density.
And maybe just to give an example here, we were doing an analysis of the future of downtown San Francisco and downtown Oakland about 10 or 12 years ago. Before before times; downtown San Francisco had a lot more crime than downtown Oakland. However there was a perception that downtown Oakland was much less safe. And there's a variety of other things. And some of this is racialized to an extent, but a lot of it's also the lack of density. The sense of you might be one of two people on a block at one time. And I think it's important to underscore the importance of the presence of people on the street for that sense of safety. To some extent, it might also prevent some crimes from taking place.
Mike Johnston: Egon hit stage three of our plan, and that is after you get through homelessness and crime; now it's placemaking and activation because the safer street is a busy street.
Willy Walker: And that's one of the pieces to your overall framework as it relates to the revitalization of the downtown is a don't count cities short in the sense of, they've gone through lots of revitalization over history and don't count them out. Second is proximity, and this is the proximity piece to your analysis. And then, finally, don't be too radical about the changes you put in place. Let's hold that for two seconds. I want to dive into that in a second.
But before I do that to round out the crime issue, Mr. Mayor, talk about the use of technology and your plate scanning technology. I think that's been one of the things that's helped you as it relates to dropping auto theft as much as you have.
Mike Johnston: It has. We had a strategy we used at the airport where we had a lot of theft, as a lot of airports do, which are called license plate readers, which seems simple. But that is the camera technology; you can mount it on light poles or on stop lights that track your license plate. So when you call and say, “My car has been stolen,” you give us the license plate. We can now scan that license plate on any light camera that it's passed. We know what time you left and what direction you were heading. The problem was we had an inadequate network of those, so we had them just at the airport. We were going to add 10 or 20. I said, “What would it take for us to blanket the entire city?” So we have the full network covered, and they said, “111 sites.” And I said, “Great, let's do all 111 sites.” Now, we did all of those citywide. And so now that means wherever you steal a car in the city, whatever direction you had, we now know where you are, what direction you're heading, and what your last known location was. That means our auto theft team can respond much more swiftly with much better information. We've also done other things like people can install tracking devices, whether that is your own car's activation of its tracking device, or you can do something simple like a tile system for old cars. But that ability to know where they are now is what's allowed us to cut auto theft so dramatically. And we think it will only get better as we build more of the networks.
Willy Walker: I think the use of technology in this area is so fascinating. I was at a mall near my house down south a year ago, and I was checking out of the Ace Hardware store. And one of the guys in the red apron said there's a carjacking going on outside. And I went to the door, and I had parked my car right in front of Ace Hardware and saw that my car had been moved from the space right in front of the store to about four spaces to the right. It was also sideways, and it had gotten hit. Long story short, somebody had been stealing from a store next to where I was, had gotten into a car, backed up, hit my car, and then hit another car. In the process of hitting the other car, the accomplice in it fell out of the car. The driver ran over that person, ended up killing that person, and then sped away.
The reason I tell the story is that they had drones in the sky in Greenwood Village within five minutes of when that took place to be able to track the gentleman who had taken off. And I sat there and was talking to the police real time. There were a couple of things that fascinated me. One was that because of the cams that they had on themselves, they had the picture of man on an iPhone within two minutes. They knew exactly who it was because they'd seen him driving away. And then, instead of calling Centennial Airport to get a helicopter in the air to try and chase the thing, they had a drone that was launched right off the top of a mall near there to start tracking the vehicle.
Mike Johnston: That is a really great example of how it makes it much safer because, in most cities, we don't do high-speed chases anymore. You're not going to send three police cars chasing through downtown Denver to chase after that guy, but then your options, if you don't, they know that, and they run because they know you won't chase them. They can use a drone to track them. That means we're still going to track you. We're still going to find you. We're still going to arrest you when you stop. We don't have to tear up the city in the process by having a Dukes of Hazzard-style chase with four cop cars running through Colorado Boulevard. And I think it's a great example of technology creating a breakthrough.
Willy Walker: It's quite something.
Egon, let me loop back to you on that. On your sort of the revitalization of cities. A, they are resilient, so don't count them out. B, the sense of community and what comes from community. And then the third is don't change too much too fast. Why don't you dive in.
Egon Terplan: Thank you. So I think part of it is as we look at this moment and, in the room, we have been hearing a little bit about the sense of history and where we've come from. But downtown cities have faced major crises before. Cities have burned down in Chicago. Denver has had those issues. Major cities obviously have had earthquakes on the West Coast, boom and bust cycles, high vacancy rates. And throughout the arc of all that, cities have come back. And this is going back kind of generations. And I think it's important, even in the urban planning context that people often talk a lot about decentralization and what happened after World War II.
You actually have to go back to the Great Depression and think about what we did in a little period of time during that. In the 1930s, office vacancies obviously went up significantly. Many cities demolished significant amounts of their buildings to make way for cars. We think of automobiles as post-World War II. Actually 10% of the office buildings in Chicago and Detroit, lots of places were torn down in the 1930s in part to make surface parking lots. Because downtown was competing with other small centers. That was a loss of historic fabric that we're not going to have come back.
Now, certainly, there might be reasons to demolish an existing building to come up with a higher and better use at times. But the sense that the economic value has totally been eliminated is one, I think that we ought to put a little bit of a cautionary note on. So as we think about the strategies going forward, demolition is one, we should talk about a little bit.
Mike Johnston: We'd like to instead demolish surface parking lots.
Egon Terplan: Exactly.
Mike Johnston: Bring back density and inactivation.
Egon Terplan: And then let's talk about the kind of density and activation piece. And I think this is where we think about what's the purpose of a downtown. Why did downtowns matter? Why are they important? They are in a sense an economic center. And I know we have seen data, and we talk about the data. Most of the people downtown are visitors, not workers. But there's still an economic proposition of a place to be there. So downtowns should not cede that. And this is where the agglomeration benefits come from. It's a big word, but the idea of being face-to-face is critical for knowledge generation and innovation. We live in a knowledge economy. People learn from each other. There are knowledge spillovers, it's called. There are dense labor markets. You can hire people from other places and your suppliers are close by. That goes back a thousand years as a concept, and downtown is just a manifestation of it. It's been challenged in the world of Zoom, but there is still no duplication of the trust that you generate, and you benefit from being face-to-face. I think that's a starting point. It doesn't mean you need to be in the office five days a week, but it does mean you need a connectivity center. And so downtowns are part of that.
Willy Walker: As you were thinking about your priorities, Mr. Mayor, once you'd gotten your hand on those first two and obviously you had a lot of other things going on at the same time. But if you think about downtown Denver, you think about what LoDo has been and is kind of being revitalized two versus upper downtown where we are here. The Wells Fargo cash register building across the street was valued at $475 million in 2019. It was appraised last year for $286 million. So almost $200 million of value has been destroyed in that building across the street. First of all, how much of an impact does that have to your tax base?
Mike Johnston: Dramatic. I'll tell you briefly that just our sales tax alone is down this year. We'll have the tightest budget we've had in 15 years. And the gap and the decrease of sales tax from downtown dropped from 12% of our total 8%. That total gap is about $40 million of the sales tax alone for us, which is about the size of our budget cap this year. It is directly driving the gap in our city budget year over year is the drop in downtown sales tax.
Willy Walker: And so as your team sits around and says, “How do we get that back?” You're not trying to get Walker & Dunlop to move into the cash register building.
Mike Johnston: We would actually. I would love to talk to you about that.
Willy Walker: Unfortunately, I just signed a ten-year lease up in Cherry Creek. But other than working to try and get corporations to come back I want to hear what your efforts are on that. But as you think about those sales taxes come from someone going to the dry cleaner to drop off their clothes. It comes from going to the restaurant. It goes from coming downtown to the park to going to a Nuggets game, etc. What are you doing to try and activate downtown? And one of the things that I want you to jump in on is talking about the 16th Street Mall because I know you just opened up a five-block portion of it. Half of it gets delivered by December and it's fully completed by May 2025. How much are you all banking on the 16th Street Mall to revitalize downtown?
Mike Johnston: Yes. First of all, we are all downtown. I think some people are agnostic about it. Not sure where downtown's going to go. We're going to sit back passively and watch seats and popcorn and see what happens. That is the opposite of our strategy. Our strategies are all in on believing downtown Denver is the economic center of the city. It's the cultural and athletic center of the city. You cannot revive the rest of the city in the rest of the region without reviving downtown. So that is a critical point right there theory. And frankly, it's the biggest economic driver in probably 20 states between Chicago and California. This is it.
And so we are preparing to make the largest investment in our downtown per capita of probably any city in America. We're going to get three-quarters of $1 billion into downtown over the next ten10 years through both the 16th Street Mall renovations and the expansion of the downtown Denver Development Authority, which was started at Union Station but would now cover all of downtown. And that includes a couple of strategies. One is, yes, the activation of the 16th Street Mall. It is the spine of downtown and has been under construction for two years. You had COVID, then you had the construction of the 16th Street Mall. Many folks haven't come back downtown since 2020 or 2021. They have no idea of what it looks like now and how it's transformed. We think the grand reopening of 16th Street gives us an incredible chance to make a new first impression, which is to bring people back and have them remember why they fell in love with downtown in the first place.
We are working on placemaking and activation all along 16th Street so that what you have is the city you often find in Europe where you can walk downtown, and you can get lost. You can meander through different activations and retail experiences that make you want to just stay. And whether it's food, retail, restaurants, climbing walls, or activations across the city. We'll make a deep investment in that with our partnership with Downtown Denver Partnership; who's here, Courtney Garrett and her team. So we're all in on that.
More broadly, we're pursuing this expansion of the downtown Denver Development Authority, which would give us half of $1 billion to spend to invest in reactivating downtown, which allows us to do things like commercial to residential conversions as part of it. However, the entire strategy allows us to attract and retain more vendors and businesses downtown, allows us to build public parks and childcare, and provides the spaces you need to make this a permanent neighborhood. We want our businesses to not just to be a business district but a residential district, we want it be a central neighborhood district, which means you do have more folks living, more folks walking their dogs or folks going to the dry cleaner, and more folks taking their kids to childcare. So it's both more eyes on the Street, which is about more residents. It's about more commercial presence. And we directly have invested. We bought the Denver Post building because we weren't willing to walk away from it or downtown. We've kept all of our folks in person because we want to be able to keep our own presence downtown. We offer all of our employees’ free light rail and bus passes. So it is easy to get to and from downtown.
Willy Walker: Of course, it helps when you own it.
Mike Johnston: It does. We actually don't own RTD. It's a multi-jurisdictional partnership, so we got to pay like everyone else. We just buy in bulk.
Willy Walker: How important, Mr. Mayor, is the 169, I'm swaggin in that of 40 for the NHL, 40 for the NBA, 80 for Major League Baseball, and then 9 for the Broncos. How important are those 169 home games?
Mike Johnston: Incredibly important. And I think one of the reasons why we know Denver is going to be a vibrant city for a long time is we have some assets that no other cities have. We have four professional sports teams, all housed in our downtown. You find that almost nowhere. We have maybe the best theater district off of Broadway anywhere in the country, all housed in our downtown. We have a great museum infrastructure. We have a great restaurant scene. We now have four Michelin-star restaurants in Denver. I mean, those things are all we'll continue to draw folks to downtown. You just have to make sure when they come, the experience is wonderful enough that you come and you stay, not that you come and park and go back, but those are real powerful activations for us. In retail, around 600 would say a Broncos game is actually a four-day activation, not a one-day. Because you come in on a Thursday, you stay for the weekend, and you spend and invest. So those are critical for us, and they're great opportunities to build around.
Egon Terplan: I was gonna say this is something on a national level, to put it, kind of a series of deeds. Denver is extremely strong in this destination. You have a significant amount of diversity of uses. And then density. And I think density is something we're working on.
I have a question, maybe for the mayor, something I've been reflecting on coming to Denver. One of them is distance and size. And as we're talking about walkability and downtowns, ultimately, our experiences block the block depending on where we arrive from. Downtown Denver is actually a reasonably large place. If you imagine you go back kind of historically to places like Florence, it's about a 20-minute walk from one end to the other. Florence is a small city by today's standards, but the idea of a city center, a downtown, a place of learning that 20-minute distance is a critical one. And San Francisco, when it did its downtown plan in the 1980s, which was quite important, tried to maintain that 20-minute walk. Downtown Denver is a little bit bigger than that, depending on the direction you're going. I was curious how you're trying to understand that, and kind of what pockets are within there to make sure it's a continuous activation?
Mike Johnston: That's a great point for us. Really think about downtown as multiple neighborhoods. You still want a lower downtown neighborhood, which has its own brand and identity right now. We want to rebuild an upper downtown brand and neighborhood, just like there are brands across the city. When you look at how you get to a walkable, bikeable new Urbanist City. I think it's hard to get from where we are to that because you still have folks like me with three kids and a wife, and I have two jobs that each have five activities, and it's hard to do all that on a bike. But what you can do is create nodes throughout the city of those neighborhood pockets where you might drive to get there. But once you get there, all the activities you do are walkable. So you do know that's what people love about Cherry Creek because you can walk to work, walk to a restaurant, walk to shop. And even if you don't live there, you drive there to do that. We want you to drive downtown, to the Highlands, or to RiNo to do that. But each of those needs to be self-contained activations where you can find that experience once you get there. So that's what we're trying to build downtown to be that engaging, enticing neighborhood experience, even in separate clusters that you might come down to and get lost in.
Egon Terplan: Parking Policy park once environment you want to make sure people are enabled to people.
Willy Walker: Yes. But doesn't that sort of, Mr. Mayor, set up kind of a line to Egon's point as it relates to where the stadiums are and walkability? So, in other words, if I'm going to a Broncos game and given where the stadium is, it's tough to get a whole lot of amenities there to walk to. But if you think about where the Rockies play and where the Nuggets and the Avalanche play. If you're sitting there saying, “Let's go somewhere before the game,” there are lots within walking distance that attracts people downtown to go have a meal or go out afterward. But there is a big delineation line as you move uptown that says you're not going to come and have dinner up here and go down to the Pepsi Center or go across to the baseball field. How do you deal with trying to make this part of the town as vibrant as the lower part of the city?
Mike Johnston: I think it is the power of placemaking. If you think about what Union Station was 15 years ago, it was desolate. No one would go there. There was no activity that would have brought you downtown. We created this Downtown Development Authority, invested in the creation of Union Station as an activation. Now it has that beautiful patio and park in front of it. It has fountains. It's got restaurants and, yes, it has transit linked there. But we place made a spot where people love to come for their favorite places to eat. And a lot of people come there and never go to a game. And so I think there are ways we can place make. You might not come to upper downtown before you go to a Nuggets game, but you might come before or after you go to the art museum or before and after you go to the Carter History Museum or before and after you come to work downtown and then stay for a meal or dinner. Or if you live in upper downtown, where we have a high density of new apartments being built in great neighborhoods, then this would be part of the lived experience here. You can still take the mall ride down to the Ball Arena if you want to, but your neighborhood is a series of restaurants and retail experiences. And you have Civic Center Park here, which is an incredible asset we're going to revive as one of the great jewels of the city.
We think there are different activations in different places that you can build around. But we want to make those more permeable. So we also want to make it more permeable the connection between what is lower downtown now and what will be the future developments of River Mile and the Ball Arena. The future of Ball Arena is not going to be a stadium with 50 acres of parking around it. It's going to be commercial and residential integrated on that site. We want to do the same thing with the Auraria campus. So those are integrated, dense living, working, and playing environments because I think that's how you get connected to different neighborhoods across the city that are all vibrant.
Egon Terplan: But this might be a good moment to throw in a cautionary note here in the well; it's how we bring new models to kind of imagine what happens to downtown spaces. And the cautionary note is that in some environments, let's say you want to bring nightlife and entertainment to really happen. If you put too much residential right close by, you actually might shut down that very nightlife that you've sought to create. And imagining actual areas that can become entertainment zones, but there's a different set of rules. It's actually a new policy in California. You can buy alcohol at a bar and walk down the street to other places. But that's actually something that I think we've seen in the activation space. Having parties on the street shutting down has been quite helpful in changing the behavior and mindset of people who have not been going downtown for activation. And many cities don't have the four sports teams, don't have the convention center, and don't have that regional tax for the arts, but that's something you can do. One cautionary note about where you place the residential actually matters quite a bit. Also in terms of demand for people, for supermarkets and assets.
Willy Walker: It's actually a really interesting point, Egon, because we have a loan on a multifamily property in Atlanta right next to the Braves stadium, and I was with the owner of that property two years ago, and I said, “How's it going?” He said, “It's unbelievable.” We've got a line out the door of residents who want to live there. But the churn in that asset is the highest churn of any asset we have because people get there, they feel like they're living in New Orleans, on the Strip every single night because there's so much activity at the ball field and in that residential/commercial area that kids move there. They got their first job. They say, “Well, I might not be able to hold down my first job if I keep having so much fun.” And so it's great. They've got tons of demand for it, but at the same time, the churn is significantly high, and it's a very young demographic; you're not getting older people.
Egon Terplan: And I can tell you examples from other cities where you might have built a condo tower, and then those people become opponents of other towers being built in their adjacent area. The Nimby effect of people that have a strong association with the place that they want it to stay exactly the way it was when they moved in becomes an issue. I think that's a cautionary note about where you should place the new residential and activation.
One other point about how we imagine opportunities in these areas where there is a significant amount of office space. Some of it is the public space and activating that, as well as events and great design. But the other one is actually imagining the insides of buildings. And just to take a page out of Japan, which is a place with a significant density. You can imagine a floor being 25 or 26 different little bars. They have that in Osaka. There's an old office building. Unfortunately, I heard it might be getting torn down, but there are two floors where there are about 40 or 50 unique individual bars. Could that work in the market context? I don't know. But we should be imagining places that bring people inside and create something very unique because that's what's going to drop stuff that you wouldn't actually be able to do in other parts of the city.
Mike Johnston: The lobby of this building, when you go through now, has a bar that Troy Guard opened, which we go to frequently, which is a space that was empty before, it's now a way to activate that space that's different. You can do it on the ground floor, and you do it on many floors. We think there are lots of creative ways to use those spaces.
Willy Walker: I know that your team had Gensler do an analysis of downtown Denver and try and identify the most likely buildings for conversion, and they came up with, I think it was a short list of 16 properties that had the best potential for conversion. What are some of the thoughts you've had as they relate to trying to stimulate that conversion activity?
Mike Johnston: We do want to stimulate it. We have the first pilot that is starting around this. We also think we're open to different kinds of housing structures you can create with these four plates. Sometimes it's hard to have seven two-bedroom apartments on a given floor, but you might be able to do innovative things around kind of single-room occupancy type structures for the 22-year-old who's looking for their first apartment and are willing to have different structures where you might have some shared bathrooms or shared showers or things that could be easier to build around with the current plumbing of those buildings. And so this is one of the reasons why we're excited about the downtown Denver Development Authority, which creates resources we can use to stimulate some of these conversions. Also, which I want to talk about it allows us to stimulate those conversions in a way that makes those units affordable at the end. Everything you need is the diversity of housing stock that gets the diversity of residents who live in your downtown area. Downtown can't be there just for wealthy people or old retirees. It's got to be accessible to the 25-year-old server who works at a restaurant downtown to be able to afford to rent downtown. We haven't had that historically. This is an opportunity for us to bring on more residential units in an affordable way.
And I think this is our other big bet is if you look at. I literally did slides last night in northeast Denver on San Francisco and the cost of an increase in housing and what you see as the rate of the increase of housing goes up dramatically, the curve that goes up even more aggressively than that is the rate of increase of the average income of the resident who lives in your city, which is when housing stock goes up like this average income of your resident goes up like this. Which means your city is only for rich people. And at the end of that, Denver now has a faster rate of increase in housing costs actually, and San Francisco does a faster rate of increase and accelerating the homogeneity of the income class of folks that live in Denver than even San Francisco or Boston or Austin or New York. And for us, the real moment is you really lose what you love about the city if teachers and nurses and firefighters and servers can't live in the city anymore. Dramatically set back our climate goals. If everyone lives 30 or 40 miles outside of Denver and has to drive in both traffic, the climate impact will be worse. So our big bet is like we did in homelessness. Look at the total scale of the problem. Figure out what's required to solve that scale. We're about 45,000 units short over the next ten years of affordable units, and so we're put on the ballot this year what I think is the largest affordable housing measure the cities ever proposed would be $100 million a year of tax revenue over the next 40 years, with the ability to be a good partner to private sector developers who want to be able to build units that can be affordable. Allows us to be an equity investor or a debt investor into units where we can get deed-restricted affordability as opposed to rent control. This is what you do when you have no tools, but regulations left. If we can actually bring dollars and investment, we can bring on 4000 to 5000 units a year. That would be affordable rentals and affordable homeownership, be that through downpayment assistance or land lease-type structures. If we do that, you actually can dramatically increase the supply, and you can increase supply at rates of needed affordability for working families. That means you have the fastest growing economic engine in the country, and you are still in a city where when you drop your second grader off at school, your second-grade teacher can still afford to live in the city. Cities like Austin, Denver, and San Francisco are at risk of that. I think it's a relic of the past if you don't get aggressive on this.
Egon Terplan: But I think it's an interesting thing. Where does downtown fit into the equation? We did some work at Brookings looking at the conversion question, which, again, challenged a little bit some of the myths around it, such as the notion that office is over. Clearly, it's not. It's adapting, and it's changing. One of the tradeoffs I think is important here is what kind of subsidy we should be putting into this and where. And clearly, it's phenomenal. You're thinking about this on a citywide basis and trying to come up with a revenue stream for affordable housing. But I think one interesting question is, “Let's say you've got some dollars to spend downtown. Is it better to pay the expensive cost of re-skinning a building and converting it or just to throw this out to be provocative, subsidizing some small businesses to come in, break a building up into more of a co-work facility, and you have 200, 300 people having their small startups or other environments in space.” A notion of kind of if you have limited dollars, what is the better use of the dollar?
Mike Johnston: And our answer is yes, we want to do both. And actually, the beauty is that we have two parallel revenue streams on this. We'll have the downtown Denver Development Authority, which is dollars used for all of that commercial activation and placemaking. We'll have the affordable Denver Fund that could be used for the conversion but doesn't have to be exclusive. So we could do both strategies, which is what we hope.
Willy Walker: But, Mr. Mayor, on that, a question for you here. I was looking at some of the data that was put together by the study the University of Denver students did on this project. One of the things that it highlighted was Denver's unemployment rate and job growth rate. And if you look at Denver in 2019 and 2021, it had a lower unemployment rate than the national average and it had a much higher job growth than the national average. In 2024, unfortunately, the unemployment rate has gotten to the national average, and the job growth number has actually gone negative when the national average is at 1.8%. That says something about the core economy. So as we sit around and say, “Let's convert this into housing space,” it's great and fun except if there are no jobs for those people to live here, whether it's remote or whether it's in person, we got a problem. What are you doing from an overall economic development standpoint? I think Egon's point is that rather than converting to residential, let's try to figure out how to stimulate more economic activity. The numbers right now in Denver aren't great.
Mike Johnston: Yeah. So, a couple of things. I agree with you. We do have a couple of benefits going for us. A recent study said that this is the hottest job market in the country, Denver, which has the highest number of well-paying, well-pursued jobs. But you need more growth in those also of the top 50 cities in America where people under age 30 want to move. Denver is ranked number two. So, we will continue to be a real magnet for talent if we do the other economic development. So, there are a couple of things. One is that we want to continue to open up international markets for folks in Denver to be able to access international trade. We just opened a direct flight to Dublin. We opened one to Istanbul, pursuing others in Dubai.
Willy Walker: Have you taken that flight, by the way?
Mike Johnston: Not to Türkiye. I've not yet done so, but I will later this year. So that's one. This also allows international companies that are looking to have North American headquarters to open in Denver. We think it's an ideal location for people to have a North American headquarters. You can get to each coast on a day flight. That's part one.
We're also looking at how we can support growth in targeted industries that we think are well-suited to Denver. One of those for sure is tech. Just hosted last week the first-ever city convening on AI was called the DenAI Summit, which is focused on AI companies that are looking for how you can use AI as a tool for social good. What is the overlap between AI, innovation, and government so we can come up with better ways to solve hard social problems, like how you accelerate permitting timelines, for instance, where AI has great solutions that could make this faster for us and for developers? We'll both look at targeted industries where we can continue to drive growth and expansion, how we can attract and keep talent, and how we can open up international markets both for our own local businesses to grow and for international companies looking for North American headquarters to bring here.
So we think a big part of this is about talent. As long as we can keep and grow a great talent base in the city, we will continue to be able to attract companies with our natural benefits. But we got to grow and maintain talent and grow and maintain access to markets.
Egon Terplan: Yeah, this is interesting. When we look at the job numbers of what's been happening, I think there's a lot of attention to the last year and the sort of flatness. But if you go back to 2020, there's been growth in Denver and Seattle at these places. But we're at this bifurcation where there's a gap between the strength of the economy and the strength of the office market. Because a lot of the industries that traditionally have gone into office-using industries are the ones that have digital ties. They're much easier to go remote. That's been the experience we've been in; that is a change from the past. And so that's why the Seattle’s, the San Francisco’s, and the Denver’s are seeing the challenge in the office space. But that's why pulling back and thinking about the nature of the regional economy and really what's overall driving growth is important.
I would point out that we're in the midst of a massive change nationally toward what we might call the relocalization of the economy. One of the big COVID shocks was the supply chain crisis. A lot of the policies at the federal level have been geared towards reindustrialization. Now, that's benefited some places relative to others. But really trying to bring a much closer connection between innovation and manufacturing. I think an interesting question for Denver and Colorado is not just tech on the software side, but it's also tech on the hardware side and new industry growth. And that ability to do some design work in the downtown or other adjacent areas and then do some prototyping and production work in nearby areas as part of your metropolitan economy. We're doing a lot of thinking about that in California. That's happening in a number of parts of the United States. But I think we have to think about where the economy is going. And that's one of these larger shifts towards relocalization. And then you bring in the climate before. But the shift to carbon neutrality. So sort of throwing that out there is like we're actually in a shift economically towards something where we're trying to decrease the carbon input in the entire economy, which is creating all these series of massive new industries. And so cities that are in front of that are able to find space for that I think are going to be very successful. But broader than downtown is part of it.
Willy Walker: Yeah, this is not downtown, but I would put forth that the connectivity. The opportunity that sits around going from 60 million passengers at DIA, I think 100 million passengers DIA, and then all of the logistics around that, of all the things that I believe are a hugely untapped opportunity here is the logistics infrastructure around DIA with 100 million people coming through it. Right now, you know better than I do and Phil Washington's doing a fantastic job with the whole new rental car parking structure is going to completely revolutionize the space out toward where all the parking lots are right now. But just being able to use that now employs about 30,000 people. I think it's the largest employer in Denver.
And the question I ask for you is that Peña Boulevard has become a real bottleneck as it relates to access to getting in and out. When's Peña Boulevard going to get ripped up and or not ripped up once a new line comes down the middle of it?
Mike Johnston: Two things. First, I would put this in the category of incredible assets Denver has that puts us in a unique position. It is the third busiest airport in the country. It is the fifth busiest airport in the world. It has 30 direct international flights. And that means you can get access to markets everywhere. Like I'm trying to get it out of Austin next week for an event. It is very difficult to get anywhere on the same day as those that constrain your eventual market growth and your connectivity with the rest of the world. Denver is very well positioned. Dallas is the second. Atlanta is the top. Atlanta is very different. The other benefit Denver has is not just that it is the third busiest or the only of those three airports that have three hubs all of its own airport. We have United, Southwest, and Frontier, which means you have competition and opportunities within the site. Atlanta is essentially a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta, which is a different structure. You have different problems with doing that.
We think we're incredibly well-positioned for that to drive economic growth for the city. But yes, it was built for 50 million. It'll be 100 million people. That requires some infrastructure change. We are looking at options on Peña. We just had a study of what is possible there in terms of widening. The other thing that happened is we built whole new neighborhoods out by the airport with Green Valley Ranch in Montbello. So now, 30% of the traffic that is on Peña Boulevard is not airport traffic anymore. It's people who live by the airport. And so that's a different challenge to manage.
We do have the A line, which has public transit connectivity there. We want to work on maximizing the use of that for both airport passengers and employees. That would relieve a lot of congestion of Peña. So we're going to come up with some big swing ideas and how we can make it much easier for airport passengers and employees to use the A line. And then we'll have to look long term: what are the strategies to make Peña less of a bottleneck? I think public transit will have to be part of the solution for sure, along with expansion and more use of that. But I think we also have to look at whether there is a need to widen or expand Peña, and those are the two items we are evaluating now.
Willy Walker: And given post-pandemic, the decreased usage of public transportation across any mode you investing there, is that one of those things you should say, “I'm not sure whether people go back to public transit and kind of keep the infrastructure as it is, but don't put new dollars into it.”
Mike Johnston: To Egon's point, I think public transit finds itself on the same doom loop that many downtowns find themselves in, in which people stop riding it. When it gets less busy, it feels less safe. When it feels less safe, you ride it less than the routes become less convenient and less routine. Now it's less flexible for you, it's less reliable. And then you stop using it. The worst light rail car is an empty light rail car because it both feels unsafe and it's not worth the money you invest in to do it. So our big purpose, I think, is to have lost leaders here where you chase with getting more people on them first, which then drives more reliability and more frequency. The state has done this in partnership with us around free August month where you make public transit free for the month to drive up user ship, which has been effective. We want to look at other ways we can incentivize more people to use it. We have kids under the age of 19 who are now free. That's been a big driver. We think for seniors, the ability to make it free or low or no cost would be great. The ability to have people that have boarding passes to go to or from the airport to have low or no cost to use it, employees low or no cost. That activation of it is going to make it far more useful and building targeted residential areas around those transit to-development sites or take the light rail spots where we do have and create walkable, livable neighborhoods around those locations like we're doing in Central Park. There are thousands of units that come up right on the RTD spot in Central Park, and that's now a walkable way to get your dry cleaning and go to a restaurant, hop on the light rail, and go to work downtown. We think part of that is a deliberate city development strategy around how we plan growth.
Egon Terplan: This is interesting in terms of what makes transit work. Frequency and reliability are key and, obviously, a sense of safety. And we are likely going to have to put money into maintaining these systems. And just to go back, quick sense of history. In the 1950s, we tore up a lot of streetcar lines that had been around for 80 years. Thirty years later, in the 1980s, there was a whole move to bring back Streetcar. That's part of the cautionary tale. We have something we want to maintain because transit absolutely can have this downward spiral because of the kind of fiscal requirement from it. But this is also one where land use comes in because the data really shows transit ridership is driven by your destination, not your origin. And I think the planning world is really focused on transit-oriented development around housing. That's great. We need a lot of housing and walkable areas. But what's going to drive that trip is you get off the train or the bus, and you're right by where you're going, whether it's the ballpark, a restaurant, a convention center, or an office. And that the mixture ultimately makes sense. But I would suggest for Denver, I'm curious about the kind of thoughts here, connecting downtown with these successful nodes. The office environment where your office is going, is there a nice downtown transit connection between here and Cherry Creek?
Mike Johnston: There's not.
Egon Terplan: Maybe with that, how would that be as a potential?
Mike Johnston: But I do think, I'm glad you said that, because I do think we have an advantage on the destination solution, which is right now, there is a place you want to go to if you get a light rail. If you come to Union Station, you walk at Union Station; you're two blocks from the Nuggets, the Avs, and the Rockies from all the great restaurants and nightlife. I think they are definitely in the convention center. There are destinations to go to. We'd love to have more to go to. The places are now your destinations to come from because right now, if you have to drive ten minutes from your house to go to a park and ride to wait for a light rail to take it downtown and then walk to the restaurant, that's less convenient than just driving the 20 minutes from your house there. I think that the opportunity for us is to have more density around locations to drive them to destinations.
Willy Walker: And I would put forth as it relates to destinations. One of the things that if you go to European cities and you land in a major international airport, whether in Amsterdam or in London, you can get on an express train that takes you from the very suburban out-of-the-city airport directly to downtown on a bullet in 20 or 30 minutes straight through; Stockholm is the exact same way. Here, as well as in Washington, DC, and a lot of other places, have tried to connect their airport with downtown. They put these light rails on so that they don't move that fast, and they stop 15 times between when you get on them at the airport and get downtown. In D.C., they put it up on a train. And if you get on at Dulles Airport, it takes you an hour to get downtown. It's not practical for someone who wants to get to downtown DC to get off and hop on public transportation. There's something related to redesigning, like Belleview Station here, Mr. Mayor. It's got such great development around Belleview Station because it's got, I think, part of the big drivers of the development around Belleview Station is because there's RTD there. The issue with it is you get on RTD at Belleview Station, and there are many stops to get into downtown. And so, to some degree, figuring out how you get some express lines from real urban hubs to getting people in and out to the spots they want to be at could help revitalize some of that.
Mike Johnston: I think you're right. I think it's both speed and its customer experience on the ride. Does it feel like a train in Switzerland as opposed to a metro North? Do you have an experience of being well-curated and taken care of, and you don’t mind 30 minutes of effective reading, sightseeing, or other activities. But I think you're right. Speed is a big one, and I think user experience is the second. And if we make it more convenient to get, we walk right off the train. You already have a pre-paid ticket, and all you do is they shuttle you, and it comes frequently and reliably. Those things all matter together. But I do agree speed is a key part.
Egon Terplan: And speed is really relative to driving. And that's sort of the time constraints. One other piece on the.
Mike Johnston: The predictability of it versus driving could be 30 minutes or 60 minutes.
Egon Terplan: Then legibility, because most people don't take transit even in high transit environments, New York is a national exception. And if there's a barrier to getting on to buying the ticket, knowing where it goes, the signage is a barrier for many people. And so I think a lot of places are doing that just to the point of getting dedicated transit lines. I think there's an opportunity here for profound collaboration between cities and districts. And we've seen a lot of challenges all across the country of a transit district that says we want to do a bus rapid transit line and have a dedicated lane in the middle of it. And it goes through a series of cities, “No thank you. We don't want that. That's going to disrupt our community too much.” That tension and that fight have actually been limited, and this is not a post-COVID situation. This goes back a couple of decades and has limited the ability to have more frequent, more reliable transit. I think a mayor, a city that's really promoting or championing that, can give you the opportunity to work with your transit agency and the surrounding cities.
Willy Walker: Mr. Mayor, we're winding down here. I've got one sort of final question as it relates to orientation and where you are focused on development and investment.
A number of years ago, when I was living in Washington, DC, I went to the National Stadium, and Mayor Vincent Gray was giving a presentation. I can't remember what group I was there with, but he's standing up and saying, “I don't know where development is in Washington. DC is going to go.” And he's standing up. And behind him is National Harbor. And here we are at Nat stadium. National Harbor is literally right over. And I go, just turn around and look behind you because that's where the growth of DC is going to happen, from Nat’s stadium to the south and towards National Harbor. If this didn't have a screen behind you and you're standing up, and there's an area of Denver behind you that everyone in this room would say, “That's where the growth is going to be.” Where is it going to be?
Mike Johnston: I think there is a necklace or an arc of opportunities which are on the west side of the city, and on the north side of the city that I think there are both huge opportunities. You look at the Washington Street corridor. If you take the river as it runs north of I-70, it goes into Globeville, Elyria, Swansea, and the stock show. There are great opportunities for growth and development there.
I think the west side of Denver similarly has a whole set of other options for growth and development that are going to be close to downtown. They're going to be affordable, they're going to be vibrant, and there's space there that can be used much more efficiently. I think there's been a lot of build-out in South Denver, a lot of out on the east side. I think the big opportunities over the next 20 years are going to be North Denver and West Denver. And we have some big ideas we're working on. We're excited to roll out on those fronts not too long.
Willy Walker: We look forward to seeing them happen again. Egon, thank you for your input today. It's really helpful to have you with us. And Mr. Mayor, thank you so much for your perspectives. And by the way, congratulations on a wildly successful first year.
Mike Johnston: Thank you so much.
Willy Walker: Thank you, everyone.
