Downtown Denver Ranks Third Nationally in New Apartments

Apartment construction in many downtown areas across the country is dwindling, but downtown Denver is still booming with thousands of new units being built in the last five years.

According to a new analysis of apartment data from RentCafe, Denver ranks third among the fifty biggest cities in the country for apartment construction, with only Washington, D.C., and Chicago ahead of the Mile High City.

In the last five years, builders in downtown Denver constructed 13,419 new apartments. In similarly-sized Phoenix, just 5,201 apartments were added in that time. Even Atlanta, the fourth-place city right behind Denver, is over 2,000 apartments behind adding 11,130 apartments in the last five years.

“In the West, Denver leads in downtown apartment construction, signaling continued confidence in its urban core,” RentCafe found.

That finding may not totally jive with the way people in Denver feel, as the city hired Bill Mosher as the new Chief Projects Officer late last year with the express goal of bringing back downtown Denver from a downswing caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Downtown Denver still hasn’t fully bounced back from the pandemic, but it's not because of vacant apartments.

According to the Downtown Denver Partnership, a local booster group, downtown Denver pedestrian traffic in April of this year saw a 21 percent dip compared to pedestrian traffic in April 2019. The overall recovery rate has lingered at around 80 percent since 2023. Still, 73.6 million pedestrians came to downtown Denver in 2024, the DDP notes.

According to RentCafe’s findings, the apartment occupancy rate in downtown Denver is still high and growing; DDP's numbers match that assessment, with about 87 percent of downtown multifamily units currently occupied, and over 320 new apartments added to the market in 2025. The current average rent in Denver, $1,843, is at its lowest point since 2022, according to the Apartment Association of Metro Denver.

The impending end to 16th Street Mall construction should help foot traffic numbers. In the meantime, developers are still maximizing opportunities in downtown Denver, as RentCafe found 48 percent of new Denver apartments over the last five years were built downtown.

And more are yet to come: A condo development at 16th Street and Glenarm Place called the Upton is under construction now and set to open in 2026 with over 400 residents. The building will sit at over 400 feet tall when completed, becoming Denver’s newest skyscraper.

Along with building new apartments in downtown Denver, developers are showing more interest in converting office buildings into housing, a concept called adaptive reuse. In the last five years, 5.5 percent of new downtown Denver apartments were part of adaptive reuse projects compared to just 1.6 percent from 2010 to 2019, according to RentCafe. Yet, in the rest of the country, adaptive reuse projects decreased by 4 percent in the last five years compared to the previous decade.

The Art Studios, an old art school recently converted into studio apartments in Capitol Hill, is just one example of an adaptive reuse project in Denver’s urban core.