We now know that Denver Mayor Michael Hancock is planning to leave the City and County of Denver for Miami, Florida, at the end of his 12 years of wreckage. It also appears that large sections of the Denver business community have decided to abandon the city as well. The Denver Post reported on August 23rd of this year that restaurants are leaving Denver due to rent hikes and labor shortages. A report from the Downtown Denver Partnership shows the downtown workers are refusing to return to work, with only half the number of office workers coming to downtown compared to 2019, thereby badly hurting Denver’s business district.
Roughly a quarter of the office building space is empty and there are even proposals to turn office buildings into apartment houses. Denver police report that arrests are down 64% over 14 years but crime is up by 50%. The homicide rate is on track to break Denver’s all time high of 100 homicides set in 1981. According to the real estate firm Redfin (and reported in the Denver Business Journal) one in every four Denver homeowners are looking to relocate out of the Denver metropolitan area. Over half of that relocation was due to concerns over, crime, as well as cost of living, taxes, and quality of schools.
Quality of schools is always a key indicator of the future health of a city. There was white flight out of Denver in the 1970s and 1980s over the school issue. The business community began to becom
e involved in Denver School board races so that the teachers’ union was not the only voice in an election. Denver began to start and implement charter and specialized schools which were highly popular with Hispanic and Asian communities. But several elections back the business community stopped funding races. As a result, the Denver School Board and the Denver schools are a mess as reported by Glen Richardson on the front page of this month’s Chronicle.
Denver’s 710 KNUS radio host Stephan Tubbs has declared that Denver is “irretrievably lost.” We are not quite so pessimistic. But we do believe that the mayor’s race this spring is, however, absolutely critical. The truly horrific Michael Hancock is finally term limited. If the choice is between a destructive social justice warrior or another high-density whore like Michael Hancock, then Denver will be in real trouble. The business community (sans high density real estate developers) needs to coalesce behind a candidate that actually cares about the many wonderful Denver neighborhoods (and not just how to destroy them); cares about downtown Denver (and not just how to make it a homeless encampment); cares about the parks and open space (and not just how to blow them up for high density projects); understands that ever increasing fees and taxes make the city ever more unaffordable to live in; understands that many Denver cultural institutions are worth preserving; and, most of all, will cause all Denverites to feel welcomed and not just always dividing everything into identity politics.
Is there such a candidate in Denver and will the business community support him or her? The future of the city is depending upon it.
— Editorial Board