Monika Swiderski
Audio By Carbonatix
Negotiations had dragged on for months, and almost upended Asher Luzzatto’s vision.
Luzzatto had spent a good part of 2025 trying to extend a ground lease on a 6,650-square-foot parcel beneath one of his two towers at 621 and 633 17th Street, downtown Denver office towers he’d purchased for a bargain $3.2 million last spring. But without the lease extension, no lender would touch the project.
The ground under 633 17th belongs to Rhoda Krasner, the octogenarian matriarch who also owns Lakeside Amusement Park, and Krasner wasn’t budging. Her position was that prior owners had undervalued the property in a 2015 assessment and that she’d been shorted on rent for a decade. This wasn’t Luzzatto’s doing; he says he was carrying the “perceived wrongs” of owners who came before him.
For long stretches, Krasner’s side went dark. There were moments when Luzzatto considered building only at 621 and abandoning 633 entirely. He calls that “the easy way out.”
But the deal closed in the early morning hours of the last possible day, ahead of a deadline to file paperwork with the Denver Downtown Development Authority (DDDA). “The last week was basically around the clock,” Luzzatto says.
The Luzzatto family and the Krasner family are now bound to each other for 99 years, the length of the new ground lease. But Asher Luzzatto is hoping to get his 17th Street project going much, much sooner than that.
And the city is counting on it.
This 17th Street Tower could soon include affordable apartments.
Monika Swiderski
The Towers
Thirty-eight-year-old Asher Luzzatto is the president of The Luzzatto Company, an L.A.-based real estate firm founded by his father, Marc Luzzatto. Over the past year, the company has accumulated a significant real estate position in downtown Denver: four office towers totaling roughly 1.75 million square feet. That’s about 5.5 percent of downtown’s entire office inventory, roughly the footprint of Empower Field.
The two 17th Street towers — one built in 1957, at the time the tallest building in Denver, the other in 1974 — went for a total of $3.2 million. In September, Luzzatto added the Denver Energy Center’s two towers at 1625 and 1675 Broadway for $5.25 million. The Energy Center last sold in 2013 for $176 million; JPMorgan Chase foreclosed on it in 2022.
Luzzatto is buying into a downtown that’s hemorrhaging value: Office vacancy in the core business district sits near 40 percent, roughly triple pre-pandemic levels. More than a billion dollars in office building value has vanished since COVID, according to a BusinessDen analysis, and some of the lowest-tier buildings are completely empty. The math is punishing: Buildings that sold for hundreds of millions a decade ago are now trading at 80 percent discounts, or not trading at all.
The plan for the 17th Street towers, now branded High Fidelity Plaza, is to convert the office space into 712 apartments while also creating a children’s museum, bodega, wine bar, cafe, bookstore, daycare center, art gallery, coworking space and rooftop pool. The total cost is projected at $315 million, and Luzzatto wanted roughly $63 million in DDDA gap financing for High Fidelity. He plans to apply for a separate loan for the Energy Center, where he wants to add another 360 units.
On March 25, the DDDA board voted unanimously to approve the $63 million loan, its largest to date. The loan still needs sign-off from Denver City Council, but with that vote, Luzzato cleared a critical funding hurdle.
Nothing at this scale has been done before in Denver. Arguably, it hasn’t been done at this scale anywhere outside New York. “Somebody’s got to do it first,” Luzzatto says. “Somebody’s got to do it in a market outside of New York, because every city in the country is facing the exact same issues with their downtown cores.”
The DDDA is a city-affiliated body that collects property tax revenues in the downtown area and reinvests them in development projects. It was created in 2008 to fund the redevelopment of Union Station, and for years operated as a little-known taxing authority covering a small footprint around the station. In 2024, at Mayor Mike Johnston’s urging, property owners and residents in the district voted to expand its boundaries to include most of downtown and authorized $570 million in bonds. No new taxes were levied for the expansion; the bonds are repaid with the increased tax revenue that new developments generate.
Since last August, the DDDA has approved more than $242 million in funding for a range of projects: $30 million for Civic Center Park improvements; $23 million to acquire parking lots behind the Denver Pavilions for future mixed-use development; $38 million to purchase and improve the Pavilions itself; $7 million to convert the McNichols Building into a restaurant and retail space; and various amounts for other downtown projects. The first to be approved was $7 million for the Downtown Safety Action Plan, a dedicated police unit and outreach program; that was renewed at the same March 25 meeting where Luzzatto’s ask got the nod.
His wasn’t the first office-to-residential conversion proposal. The DDDA had approved funding for three smaller projects before Luzzatto’s High Fidelity: $14 million for the historic Petroleum Building at 110 16th Street (178 units), $17 million for the Symes Building at 820 16th Street (116 units), and $14.5 million for the University Building at 910 16th Street (120 units). Both the Petroleum Building plan and the Symes Building project subsequently hit some snags; the Symes conversion is currently on hold.
High Fidelity’s $63 million dwarfs all of them.
Luzzatto Company
From L.A. to Taos
Luzzatto grew up in Los Angeles, attending UCLA and then the University of Chicago Law School. Between semesters, he interned at the ACLU of Southern California, working a case in which the ACLU was suing the Veterans Administration in West L.A. for failing to house homeless veterans as its original charter required. The housing eventually got built. “That was my first insight into the desperate need for housing,” he says, “and how underhoused so many important communities in our culture are.”
After law school, Asher worked at a Century City real estate-focused law firm before joining his father’s company in 2017. But at the same time, he built out a whole other life with a 500-hour yoga training in Nepal, a Vipassana silent retreat and years teaching meditation; he and his wife eventually opened a wellness center called Hyperslow in the Fairfax district of L.A.
Their first child arrived in December 2020. Luzzatto says he spent that first COVID year sitting under a tree in his front yard every day, trying to figure out what mattered. He decided to run for mayor of Los Angeles, announcing his run in November 2021. He’d dropped out by March 2022, however, citing his one-year-old daughter and a campaign where he was “yelling into a void.” Karen Bass won the election.
Luzzatto and his wife relocated their family to Taos, New Mexico, where they now run a Hyperslow retreat center.
“The mayor campaign didn’t work out, and that’s okay,” he says, “because then pretty soon thereafter, the opportunity came up in Denver.”
Eyes on Denver
As a developer, Luzzatto had been watching Denver for years, sold on its fundamentals: the outdoor culture, the music scene, the sunshine. What kept him out was price. For a decade, Denver was one of the tightest markets in the country to buy into.
Then the bottom fell out. Remote work gutted office demand. Buildings that had sold for hundreds of millions went into foreclosure. Denver’s office vacancy rate climbed to levels not seen since the oil bust of the 1980s.
“Denver was the first major market that really felt like the bottom had fallen out,” Luzzatto says. “That was going to be my starting point.”
He’s careful to note that none of Denver’s underlying demand drivers have changed. He’s not betting on distress, he says, he’s betting that distress opened an opportunity to build affordably in a city that will keep attracting people. His argument to the DDDA board was simple: At High Fidelity, residents will pay the same rent they would in a four-story building by a highway, but with high-quality construction, a dense walkable environment, child care, a bakery, a park and a bookstore. “A lot of cities don’t have that fortune,” he says.
The Pre-Party
On the last Saturday in February, hundreds of people took the elevator to the thirtieth floor of 633 17th Street for a party. Two stories of gutted office space had been transformed into art galleries filled with live music and people. Outside, the streets were dead…as usual.
Luzzatto had handed the space to musician Julie Davis and her partner, Joseph Pope III, the bassist for Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats. The three had met through a chance breakfast in Taos, and soon Davis and Pope were hauling lamps, screens, paintings and sound gear up to the thirtieth floor for the party.
Luzzatto uses the phrase “vertical village” to describe what he’s building, and he does it without apparent irony. Kids getting dropped off at daycare. Jazz in the outdoor plaza on Sundays. A bookstore, a bodega, the rooftop pool. His company takes the infusion of public dollars seriously, he says, aiming to create a community that brings activity downtown, including for families with children. At least seventy of the units will be restricted to 60 percent of the area median income, and 10 percent of the $63 million loan is earmarked for the community-facing spaces.
“I really do believe it will have a profoundly positive impact on downtown,” he says. “But I also recognize this project is not for everybody. This isn’t a solution to the city’s problems, but I hope it’s a blueprint for additional solutions.”
Courtesy of the Luzzatto Company
Addressing Vacancies Downtown
Bill Mosher has been thinking about downtown Denver for four decades. He led the Downtown Denver Partnership for nearly twenty years, and oversaw the initial transformation of Union Station. He was a private developer late in 2024, when Mayor Johnston called and asked Mosher to become the city’s chief projects officer, tasked with standing up the newly expanded DDDA and putting its $570 million in bond authority to work.
Mosher describes the current downtown as “a tale of two cities.” Past Skyline Park, office occupancy is holding at or above average. But going the other direction, in the core historic Central Business District, vacancy approaches 50 percent, Mosher says. Layer in the region’s sluggish job creation and the permanence of hybrid work schedules, and the math gets difficult.
The city’s own analysis identified roughly seven million square feet of office space above the historic average vacancy, some of which may never be filled. According to Mosher, some of these buildings may eventually come down — though he notes that demolition currently costs more than acquisition. The DDDA’s current strategy is to attract new office tenants, convert viable buildings to residential housing, and transform the Central Business District into what Mosher calls a “central mixed-use neighborhood” with jobs, attractions and residents instead of just commuters.
If council approves the gap-financing loan and the project goes as planned, High Fidelity Plaza could eliminate more than a million square feet of that seven-million-square-foot overhang and deliver roughly 700 of the 4,000 new housing units the city’s downtown area plan envisions.
Mosher is candid about the unknowns. The DDDA’s gap-financing model, lending at roughly 3 percent in a subordinate position behind a commercial bank loan, is itself untested. “We’re trying to fit ourselves into a 20 to 30 percent range of gap financing,” he says. “I would say that’s a little bit of an experiment, too, because the private sector loans have to show up.”
One thing Luzzatto’s towers have that most conversion candidates lack is parking. The High Fidelity buildings have underground garages, and the Energy Center has some parking of its own. Most of the historic buildings the DDDA is evaluating for conversion have none. “That’s the other thing we’re watching,” Mosher says, “how important parking is to the lease-up.”
Beyond the bonus of parking, though, Luzzatto faces plenty of challenges.
Eyeing the Challenges
The conversion won’t be easy. Older office buildings weren’t built for people to sleep in. Floor plates are large and deep, starving the core of natural light. Plumbing systems need to be rebuilt at a scale the buildings weren’t designed for.
Luzzatto’s guiding principle is what he calls a fifty-year standard; he has no patience with cheap construction. “This is concrete, steel and glass,” he says. “I think people will be, frankly, very pleasantly surprised, given everything that’s been built in the last few years.” High Fidelity rents will run roughly $1,400 to $1,700 for affordable units, up to $3,800 for the larger market-rate units.
Luzzatto has a practical element to his vision: Other lenders and investors need a data point. If one project demonstrably works at this scale, in this market, the next developer can point to it and say if they did it, we can, too. Right now, that data point doesn’t exist, but Luzzatto is trying to become it.
He thinks about all of his developments through the lens of stewardship, not ownership. The buildings will outlast him; he’s just nurturing their evolution. “I was not first to this party,” he says. “I will not be last at this party. But I’m at the party.”
On the thirtieth floor of 633 17th, amidst the artwork, music and revelers, that vision was realized one night in February.
Party on.
