Business

Efforts to calm traffic on West 38th Avenue, Wheat Ridge’s once and future Main Street, have drawn some positive reviews — and confusion, anguish and anger.

The main report in Last Week Tonight With John Oliver’s May 14 episode tore into the kidney dialysis industry, with a particular focus on Denver-based DaVita, a company the HBO host said owes an apology to Taco Bell because of CEO Kent Thiry’s comparisons between his firm’s business practices and the approach of the fast food giant.

Finding that dream house in Denver’s red hot real estate market has become so difficult that one couple has sent a letter to approximately 1,200 homeowners in the Park Hill neighborhood whose properties aren’t for sale in the hope of convincing someone to let them buy their place anyhow.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Thirty-five years ago, the 16th Street Mall was a shining light in Denver’s tourist scene. Designed by the world-renowned I.M. Pei and Associates, the mall was supposed to be a pedestrian-friendly, well-designed hub of businesses in the heart of the city. But come 2017 and…

The new Denver Renter Confidence Survey from ApartmentList.com reveals that most local renters give the Mile High City excellent marks, placing it among the most highly rated large cities in the country. But there are warning signs in the findings, including great discontent with high rent costs and other daily expenses, as discussed in our recent post “Why It’s So Hard to Make a Living in Denver Despite Strong Economy.”

Experts suggest that the number of real-estate listings in Denver’s red-hot housing market is at an all-time low. But there’s no shortage of real-estate agents looking to sell those homes. Right now, there are more agents than there are properties on the market in Denver, and perhaps as many as ten times more.

Since it opened 35 years ago, the 16th Street Mall has changed the face of downtown Denver. These days, the mall itself looks like it could use a facelift. But there are definitely bright spots along the mall, as well as blight spots. Here are five of each.

In the 35 years since it was created, Denver’s 16th Street Mall has morphed from the heart and soul of downtown Denver into a sometime civic embarrassment showing its age. But $68 million in leftover TIF money could give the place quite a facelift.

The $3 million budget for incentive money to lure filmmakers to Colorado, which had been marked for elimination in March, has instead been slashed to $750,000. Colorado Film Commissioner Donald Zuckerman, who argued in this space for the $3 million figure to be increased last October, is relieved that some money remains for the program. But he sees little chance of attracting big Hollywood productions to the state for the next year as a result of this development.

The costs in the ten most expensive Denver neighborhoods to rent a one-bedroom apartment are at a level associated with the priciest metro-area places for two-bedroom rentals less than two and a half years ago.

More evidence that the Denver area’s housing market remains red hot: Property values in the seven-county Denver metro area are skyrocketing, according to a joint announcement from the assessors in each jurisdiction. The value of residential property in the majority of locations is up by at least 20 percent over the past year, and often considerably more. In addition, the value of property in other categories has risen by as much as 68 percent.

Denver was barely a century old in the go-go ’60s, when eager developers began wiping this city’s past off the map, demolishing old buildings downtown and replacing them with surface parking lots, all in the name of urban renewal. But much of that stopped when Denver City Council approved the Denver Landmark Preservation Ordinance in March 1967, a year after the National Historic Preservation Act was enacted and two years after Dana Crawford began creating Larimer Square.

Forty years after her father bought the historic Zang Mansion, Janet Greiner has sold it for $2 million to a buyer who plans to upgrade the electrical and plumbing systems. It’s bittersweet for Greiner, whose father, Rodney Greiner, died last fall. Greiner says she doesn’t have the time or the…

Thanks to Denver’s red-hot real estate market, more and more people trying to buy a home in the metro area are finding themselves in bidding wars, resulting in offers that frequently blow past the property’s listed price. The incredible demand, as well as the speed with which purchases are being made, explains why some real estate agents have started putting up “Coming Soon” signs on houses before changing them to “For Sale.”

Three Colorado-related proposals are among eleven U.S. finalists in a global challenge being staged by Hyperloop One, a project associated with billionaire Elon Musk that aims to produce high-tech tubes through which passengers and cargo can travel at speeds up to 700 miles per hour.

A new survey lists Denver among the top ten U.S. cities for job seekers owing to the area’s strong economy, low unemployment rate and plenitude of high-tech industries. But the man behind one of the city’s most popular job sites feels that these factors mask the difficulties many people in Denver are having when it comes to making a comfortable living.

Frontier Airlines finished dead last among the twelve carriers analyzed in the 2017 Airline Quality Rating, just as it did in 2014. According to the report’s co-author, Frontier sunk to the bottom of the rankings again after finishing in eighth and eleventh place during 2015 and 2016, respectively, due largely to customer anger over a series of delays and cancellations last December at Denver International Airport and other facilities around the country. But he also feels the airline may be suffering from something of an identity crisis.

Denver is suddenly stuck on nicknames. Developers are smacking hip labels on once-dowdy parts of town; the Colorado-born creators of South Park are smacking those developers with SoDoSoPa mockeries. So far, though, only three neighborhood nicknames have passed any test of time. One of them is RiNo, and the area is holding its annual meeting April 13.

A new survey lists Denver as one of the ten best cities in the country for job seekers. And the city’s status in this area just keeps improving.

The ten priciest homes for sale in Colorado right now are scenic, spectacular, sprawling and spendy in the extreme. The least expensive of the batch costs $35 million, and the top pick on the list can be yours only if you have more than $50 million at your disposal.

Rent prices in Denver and throughout the metro area are up over the past month, according to the April report from Apartment List. But while rents in specific Denver neighborhoods aren’t exactly cheap, the majority of those spotlighted in the report are actually lower than they were just over a year ago.

A pair of massive high rises towering 32 stories over a neighborhood of modest homes in Wash Park West reached another construction milestone during a recent “topping off” ceremony in which the final beam, signed by those attending the event, was lifted into place.