Colorado Real Estate Journal -
After watching the commercial real estate market come of age over the last 50 years, I was challenged to fulfill the assignment of identifying commercial real estate developments that made a difference in Colorado. The first part of the assignment was to establish a definition of what it was that made a development something that made a difference. The initial criteria had to be size. The development had to be one that not only represented a flagship building but also had the size and scale to allow for many buildings then and now as well as in the future – in a word, a campus. Next, the development should have been the vision of one or many people, all of whom were committed to the challenges of raising the necessary capital to get the project off the ground, working with community leaders to obtain the necessary land entitlements and making sure the infrastructure was in place to allow for the long-term growth envisioned by the projects’ visionaries. The vision never limits itself to a single piece of construction. The vision calls for progressive growth over a period of several decades. A development that makes a difference becomes “iconic” over time. Often it is a flagship building or a marquee sign that, due to high visibility, becomes so well-known that the very mention of the development provides a basis for a conversation in which the participants begin speaking with a base of knowledge that comes from quick and familiar identity of the project; thus, everyone starts the conversation by being on the “same page.” Transportation corridors are an integral and important condition of these campus-like developments. Once, transportation corridors were basically limited to major arterial streets like Broadway or 17th Street downtown. Now, any discussion of transportation corridors includes not only the automobile and freeways, but also, almost equally importantly, Regional Transportation District and transit, bicycle lanes and, more recently, accessibility by pedestrians located in nearby housing developments. A real estate development that makes a difference functions as the basis for gathering people together. These people take on different profiles. Many are employees of the companies that operate within the campus. These people may educate, create technology, process information, or provide services or entertainment to a vast number of students, clients, customers or visitors. Whatever the case, tens of thousands of people regularly visit on a daily basis and, depending on the situation, that number might easily increase to well over 100,000 on a given day. The sheer size of the development makes it an economic engine by itself. We used to think of such developments in geographic terms, such as downtown. But the tremendous growth of the metro Denver area has brought the population to nearly 3 million, a number too big to be confined to one single location. This population requires space in which to live, work and play in a location that provides a mixture of uses that all fall within the general definition of office, retail, industrial and the noncommercial component of residential. Thus, recent demand for individual projects has been stimulated to include requirements for all of the previous property types as well as other, more specialized uses, such as hospitality, senior housing and entertainment. Here are a number of metro Denver’s iconic developments that fall within the definitions outlined above. All of these commercial developments made a difference when they were first constructed and will continue to be drivers for change in the future: • Denver International Airport • Auraria Higher Education Campus • University of Colorado Hospital/Anschutz Medical Campus and Fitzsimons Innovation Campus • Union Station • Denver Tech Center • Coors Field