Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

I think Denver (I live here) is an example of our horrible zoning. We have entirely focused our cities (especially Denver and RTD (Regional Transportation District)) around people commuting in for work.

This is one of the main principles of BAD design, where you create an entire area around close to a single use (offices). That creates a very fragile city. This "single use" zoning that the US proliferated makes us really fragile to changes like working from home vs in-office work.

Another point is that cities are rather hostile for families. We create cities so they need to be fled as soon as people have kids. We have streets entirely of concrete and 1 and 2 bedroom apartments. If we want cities to be more resilient we need to rethink them. We need streets that have greenspace as a fundamental part of the infrastructure. We need permeable surfaces.

I went to Park am Gleisdreieck in Berlin and stayed in a multi-family unit right along the park. There were tons of families with kids playing in the park, people riding bikes for transportation along the park bike paths, adults playing ping pong on outdoor tables together. It was wonderful. It made me rethink what a city can look like.

Denver needs to take notes. We don't need a single use city and a light rail system that only goes into that city. We made an incredibly fragile city. We can build better cities.

They've got a graph of vacancy rates going back to 2023. But I'm wondering about longer term. Does anyone have data going back to, say, the 1980s?

(Why the 1980s? Because I go back that far. I have some sense of what the business cycle was doing during those times. I'd like to know if this is really historically unusual, or just a blip, possibly a COVID-related one.)

Well but is the demand for office space in Denver so high?

Looks like there is an opportunity to convert a lot of that into residential space.

Denver is an interesting place. The Democratic Socialists of America managed to lobby to protect a golf course to prevent housing from going in there. Sort of an inversion from what you’d expect.