Mayor Mike Johnston ran for office last year promising to revitalize Denver’s ailing downtown. He hopes to invest City Hall’s clout and capital to refill office space emptied by the pandemic; to lure shoppers and diners back to downtown’s struggling or shuttered storefronts and eateries, and to ramp up a new wave of residents seeking the cosmopolitan life.
That whole vision is now at risk amid plans for a gargantuan, mixed-use mish-mash of residential and commercial high-rises just a few miles away in Cherry Creek. And only Johnston with his bully pulpit, and the City Council with it’s ultimate zoning authority, have the ability to head it off.
The unprecedented, overly ambitious — and fundamentally flawed — Cherry Creek West would encompass seven buildings of offices and apartments on a sprawling, 13-acre tract between First Avenue and the trail along Cherry Creek. The new buildings would average 10.5 stories in height; some could reach 12 or 13 stories. It would encompass 750,000 square feet of office space, 90,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, and 600 residential units.
Without a doubt, it would wreak havoc on the compact Cherry Creek neighborhood and shopping district. It would upend the carefully maintained, delicate balance between development and quality of life that long has guided growth in Cherry Creek. It would usher in droves of office workers and residents thronging the streets, and it would translate to a transportation disaster. Nearly 2,000 additional motor-vehicle trips a day would gridlock the intersections around First and University. Streets at times would become impassable. The transportation infrastructure — for motor vehicles as well as mass transit — simply isn’t there.
If that scenario leaves City Hall with a bad case of heartburn, as it should, Cherry Creek West’s impending impact on downtown amounts to a gut punch. And it would be self-inflicted.
If the City Council approves the terribly misguided rezoning of the tract to accommodate the massive project, it would siphon off office tenants, restaurateurs, shopkeepers, residents and a host of others who are needed to help resurrect downtown. Downtown would be robbed of such precious and increasingly scarce human capital to benefit booming Cherry Creek — which doesn’t need the help.
At the same time, the monstrous project would devour city resources that instead should be used to rebuild downtown’s flagging infrastructure. The sheer volume of upgrades to streets, sidewalks, drainage, utilities and the like that are needed to sustain such an outsize development as Cherry Creek West would cost the city budget dearly when its focus, more urgently than ever, must be on using those same resources to help resurrect downtown.
Last week, the Denver Planning Board ill-advisedly approved the rezoning necessary to accommodate the project. It now is heading for a Sept. 23 public hearing before the City Council.
District 5 City Council member Amanda Sawyer, who represents Cherry Creek, and the mayor have been avoiding the issue. It’s time for them to acknowledge the toll the project would take both on Cherry Creek and on downtown.
City Hall’s oft-enunciated priority of increasing urban density on an already-tightly-packed city scape — to reduce vehicle miles, promote mass transit and curb the city’s carbon footprint — must not come at the expense of our city’s once renowned quality of life. Nor should the density dogma be permitted to undermine Denver’s economic vitality.
Neither downtown Denver nor Cherry Creek can afford this project. If the mayor and council embrace it, they’ll not only shoot themselves in the foot but in both feet at the same time. Denver’s elected leadership needs to come to that realization before it’s too late.