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Businesses occupying about 2 million square feet of industrial real estate in Denver are going to be displaced as a result of the widening of Interstate 70, the $1.1 billion National Western Center project and ongoing gentrification in and around the River North Art District, a CBRE broker said Wednesday.

And those businesses are finding themselves at the mercy of an increasingly competitive market in their search to find a new home: Asking lease rates for industrial space, already near record highs, continued to climb across the metro area in the first quarter of 2017, the 28th consecutive quarter of positive leasing activity in the market, according to a report from the commercial real estate firm CBRE.

"Finding space is a difficult issue. The cost of the space is a difficult issue," said Tyler Carner, senior vice president of CBRE Industrial & Logistics Services. "It's very competitive. When a good space is on the market, it's not uncommon to have 4 or 5 people clamoring for it."

Average lease rates for all types of industrial space hit $7.62 per square foot in the first quarter, up 2.8 percent since the end of 2016. Rates jumped even higher for warehouse space, hitting a record $6.54 per square foot, an increase of 5.3 percent quarter over quarter, according to CBRE.

Vacancy rates ticked up slightly to 5 percent from 4.7 percent in the fourth quarter, due in part to some big-box retailers getting rid of warehouse properties. In central Denver, though, where the displaced tenants are coming from, vacancy was below the metro average.

"These tenants almost uniformly want to stay central," Carner said. "Depending on what sector of the central market you're talking about, you are sub-3 percent (vacancy) in the central market. It really is the tightest market."

Carner was part of the team that recently negotiated four leases at the new Hub 25 industrial park along Interstate 25 in Adams County. One of the tenants, Cabinet Warehouse, was forced to relocate because its current I-70 facility is being condemned as part of the interstate project.

Of the 3.2 million square feet of speculative industrial space under construction in the Denver area, 44.5 percent is already spoken for, said Matt Vance, economist and Colorado research director for CBRE. That's unusually strong pre-leasing activity for the local market.

"There is this feeling that maybe we're being overbuilt but the demand is truly keeping up. We expect that to continue in 2017," Carner said.

Retail market

Fundamentals in Denver's retail market remained positive in the first quarter despite the spate of store closing announcements, said Jim Lee, vice president with CBRE Retail Services.

Vacancy ticked up and net absorption was negative, but if you factor out the big boxes - including the still-vacant Sports Authority stores - small-shop space is seeing good leasing activity in the market, he said.

"We continue to see lease rates move up," Lee said. "The Denver market is strong for retail. We're definitely going through some changes that are occurring nationally, not just in Denver."
First-quarter retail, by the numbers

Vacancy rate: 5.6 percent, up from 5.3 percent in fourth quarter 2016

Average lease rate: $17.88 per square foot triple net, up from $17.73

Net absorption: -111,071 square feet

Under construction: 1,074,629 square feet

Denver's office market started the year slow when it came to investment sales, but Vance said momentum is expected to build throughout 2017.

Through the first three months of the year, office transactions totaled $557.9 million, down 4 percent year over year, according to CBRE. Downtown, though, saw its largest sale since 2015 - the $169.7 million purchase of 1125 Seventeenth Street by Goldman Sachs.

"By and large what we're hearing from leasing professionals is all the new buildings we're seeing downtown are chugging pretty quickly toward stabilization. Investors watch that. They don't want to see an oversupply situation," said Mike Winn, vice chairman of CBRE Capital Markets. "Downtown will be very busy this year, and the suburbs will, as well. Denver is going to be busy for investment sales."
First-quarter office, by the numbers

Vacancy rate: 12.8 percent, up from 12.1 percent in fourth quarter 2016

Average lease rate: $26.31 per square foot full service gross, up from $25.71

Net absorption: -82,967 square feet

Under construction: 5 million square feet

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Denver industrial real estate market "very competitive" for tenants displaced by upcoming development

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Businesses occupying about 2 million square feet[cq comment="cq"] of industrial real estate in Denver are going to be displaced as a result of the widening of Interstate 70, the $1.1 billion National Western Center project and ongoing gentrification in and around the River North Art District, a CBRE broker said Wednesday.

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Metro Denver's housing market could diverge in a big way this year, with apartment rent increases slowing to a crawl or even reversing, while home prices continue to race higher.

Signs of cooling are strongest on the multifamily side, where a large number of high-end units are expected to hit the market this year.

ApartmentList estimates Colorado apartment rents rose 1.8 percent year-over-year in December, while metro Denver apartment rents are up 0.8 percent, both down from annual rent increases in the 4 percent range in July.

Axiometrics estimates that metro Denver apartment rents were rising at an annual pace of 1.7 percent in the fourth quarter, down sharply from the 6.4 percent pace they moved into 2016 with.

Abodo, in its annual rent report, puts metro Denver in the category of declining markets, recording a 6.7 percent drop in one-bedroom apartment rents in January compared with a year earlier, the seventh steepest decline among the cities it tracked.

"We anticipate that, starting with luxury developments, the rent for apartments in Denver should remain pretty consistent in 2017," said Sam Radbil, a spokesman for the Wisconsin-based online apartment listing firm.

Seattle-based Zillow, whose rental index includes single-family homes, puts metro Denver rent increases around 2.8 percent last year and is projecting an increase of 2.5 percent this year.

One of the more upbeat reports comes from RealPage in Texas, which estimates metro Denver rents are rising at a 4.4 percent pace, down from gains in the 8 percent to 10 percent range a year ago.

"It has been a meaningful slowdown," RealPage chief economist Greg Willett said. "But it is still a good number."

In metro Denver's favor are the large number of young adults moving in to take relatively higher-paying jobs which can support the higher-priced units hitting the market, he said.

"Denver is pretty much viewed as the perfect rental market," he said. "The demand numbers are very solid."

RealPage estimates about 11,000 apartments came onto the market last year and that another 13,000 should become available this year out of a construction pipeline of around 21,000 units.

So far, the Denver market has managed to absorb the new supply, but landlords, eager to fill their projects, are offering more concessions - including a month or two of free rent - to win over tenants, a key reason why rent increases have slowed.

Willett said apartment developers, initially focused almost exclusively on downtown areas, are casting a wider net, although the economics have them still focused on higher-rent or luxury units.

Whether the metro Denver apartment market holds up or rolls over will depend mostly on continued job growth and in-migration, given that developers can't easily put the brakes on projects launched years earlier.

Abodo notes that Denver, while still enjoying strong population gains, ranked second among the country's 50 largest cities for the percentage of the population moving out.

Home prices

If too much supply is an issue with apartments, the opposite is the case with single-family homes and condos, where new construction has failed to keep pace with gains in population and employment.

The Colorado Association of Realtors estimates the median price of a home sold in Colorado last year rose 10 percent, with both new listings and the inventory of homes available for sale in December at historic lows.

The Denver Metro Association of Realtors puts the gain of the median price of a home sold last year at 11.4 percent, down from 14.2 percent in 2015.

"We are looking at a 2017 that looks a lot like 2016, with some of the froth off the market," said Mark Trenka, chairman of the Colorado Association of Realtors.

Stable or falling rents could leave more tenants comfortable with not making a move, while also persuading some investors to take their chips off the table and sell their rental homes.

Rising mortgage rates could also prove a headwind to future price increases by reducing the ability of buyers to qualify.

"Each rate increase takes a small percentage of buyers out of the market," Trenka said.

But a slowing in home price gains from the double-digit pace of the past two years could actually be health for the market.

Zillow predicts metro Denver will rank as the country's ninth hottest real estate market this year, with home prices rising 3.6 percent. That is down from a 9.7 percent increase last year that made the city the country's hottest housing market.

Among metro Denver's hottest neighborhoods, with home-price appreciation rates of 7.6 percent or higher, are Aurora's City Center North and Centretech neighborhoods and Denver's Elyria-Swansea, Globeville and Westwood neighborhoods, Zillow said.

Clear Capital is calling for a 7.3 percent increase in metro Denver home prices this year, down from the 10.7 percent increase last year. That places Denver second in its rankings after Dallas.

Not every forecast expects metro Denver to come off its double-digit pace. VeroForecast places five Colorado cities among its list of the 25 top performers for home price gains in 2017, led by metro Denver with a 10.2 percent gain that will rank second only to Seattle at 10.6 percent.

Other top performers among Colorado cities include Fort Collins at No. 11 with an 8.5 percent gain; Boulder at 14th with an 8.2 percent gain; Greeley at 18th with a 7.6 percent gain; and Colorado Springs at 24th with a 7.2 percent gain.

Across the state, foreclosures, a measure of distress in the for-sale housing market, continue to drop. Colorado foreclosure starts were down 18.4 percent last year and they are down 83.05 percent from the peak hit in 2010, according to ATTOM Data Solutions.

CoreLogic found that Colorado and metro Denver had some of the lowest rates of homeowners in a negative equity positions, meaning they owed more on their mortgage than their homes were worth, which is a big contributor to foreclosures when a market softens.

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Metro Denver's housing market developing a split personality, sending rents down and home prices up

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Metro Denver's housing market could diverge in a big way this year, with apartment rent increases slowing to a crawl or even reversing, while home prices continue to race higher. Signs of cooling are strongest on the multifamily side, where a large number of high-end units are expected to hit the market this year.

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: I think most people hate to think of themselves as middle class.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: You have what you need, but maybe not everything you want.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: We have a car, but we live in an apartment. That's middle class.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: If you add a boat, then you're not middle class anymore. That's what changes it right there.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: The middle class are families who are earning six figures.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: Thirty thousand, $35,000 probably.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #5: That means me. And it means I'm in trouble (laughter).

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

This is Hanging On, our series about the economic pressures of American life. And today, we're going to talk about gentrification. It's happening in cities all over the country. People, often white people with money, move into neighborhoods that are less white, where there's less money.

New businesses move in. Condos go up. Longtime residents end up moving out. Bobby LeFebre has watched that story play out in his own neighborhood of Northside in Denver. He's a poet and an activist. And his art addresses the complexity of gentrification. Bobby LeFebre joins me now. Thanks so much for being with us.

BOBBY LEFEBRE: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: Tell me about the Northside that you grew up in, your neighborhood.

LEFEBRE: I have deep roots in the neighborhood. My grandparents and great-grandparents were all living in the neighborhood in the, you know, '50s until today, so long history - long family history there. And when I grew up, you know, the neighborhood was definitely different than it is now. Predominantly a Chicano neighborhood, so there was a lot of mom-and-pop businesses, local restaurants and strong ethnic enclave that had been developed over generations - and so that is sort of being erased with this process right now.

MARTIN: How has that manifested? What does the change look like in Northside today?

LEFEBRE: The neighborhood has always existed as sort of an immigrant community. From the founding of the neighborhood back in the, you know, 1800s, there were these different identifiable waves of immigrants that came by. You know, the Irish were there. The Germans were there. Before the Mexican and the Chicano community, the Italians had built community there.

And our community is the kind of most recent, you know, arrival to the neighborhood. And just about everything in the neighborhood is shifting. Demographics are shifting. We're having lower-income folks that are being forced to move. Real estate has increased rents and home prices resulting in, you know, not only involuntary displacement, but just really a lot of tension around people who had been there for while.

MARTIN: So who do you blame? Who do you think bears most of the responsibility?

LEFEBRE: I think everyone has a little bit of blame. You know, I blame my own community. I blame myself for not starting to organize sooner. I blame developers who are coming in opportunistically and not caring anything about the character or the history of the neighborhood. And I blame our elected officials who are so concerned with authoring Denver as the next great, world-class city that they're forgetting to write into that story the people who made it great in the first place.

MARTIN: Your own neighborhood, as you mentioned, used to be a different kind of place - right? - with Italian immigrants and before that, immigrants from Ireland or Germany. So to some degree, is change just inevitable?

LEFEBRE: It is inevitable, absolutely. But the type of change that is occurring at least can be critiqued. So we're having people with more money, more social and political capital coming into these areas. And with that comes a certain ignorance. And I mean that in the, you know, dictionary definition sense of - they don't know necessarily what was here before. And to a large degree, a lot of people that we've spoken to don't necessarily even care.

MARTIN: How do you fix that? I mean, when outsiders move into your neighborhood now, do you want to make them part of your community? Or would you rather them create their own separate thing?

LEFEBRE: No, no.

MARTIN: And if you want that integrated community...

LEFEBRE: No, no.

MARTIN: ...How do you make the first move?

LEFEBRE: It's absolutely necessary for them to become part of the community. But part of that requires a process of unlearning for those folks because a lot of these folks that are moving in benefit enormously from white privilege. And there's sort of a disconnect from that privilege. So the first step is really folks need to unpack some of that and recognize their privilege. They need to learn the history of the neighborhood. They need to become part of the fabric of the neighborhood. They need to stretch themselves outside of their comfort zones and listen to long-term residents.

So a lot of the times when we're organizing something or when we're, you know, creating a protest or even an online forum dedicated to discussing gentrification and critiquing it, we get a lot of backlash from people, mostly new residents, who are saying, you know, kind of - get over it. Times change. There's nothing you can do about it. And so we created an online platform called We Are North Denver that really aims to have those conversations.

We absolutely want them to be part of the neighborhood. But it requires work on both ends. And if that work's not being done, we're really just creating further segregation and siloing that isn't going to lead to anything good in the neighborhood.

MARTIN: Do you think you could share a poem with us?

LEFEBRE: Sure. Sure, I could do that.

(SOUNDBITE OF POEM, "DENVER, WHERE HAVE YOU GONE?")

LEFEBRE: I remember when my neighborhood was just called the Northside. Now they've rebranded it the Highlands. Bilingual bookstores are now boutiques. The liquor store is carrying exotic wine. They call it progress.

MARTIN: That's Bobby LeFebre reading from his poem "Denver, Where Have You Gone?".

(SOUNDBITE OF POEM, "DENVER, WHERE HAVE YOU GONE?")

LEFEBRE: Last night, I walked your streets in search of you, bounced around like a pogo stick possessed. You were nowhere to be found. Or maybe, maybe I passed you a million times. Maybe I didn't recognize you through the new makeup and clothes. Maybe you are more comfortable with I, with who you are becoming. Maybe you crossed the street on purpose as you saw me coming your way.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Gentrification Pressures Weigh On The Economy

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: I think most people hate to think of themselves as middle class. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: You have what you need, but maybe not everything you want. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: We have a car, but we live in an apartment. That's middle class.

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Two elementary schools in working-class north Denver neighborhoods that are feeling the sting of gentrification will share a $120,000 grant to fund a staff member at each school to address some of the challenges facing the changing communities.

Swansea Elementary, located in the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood, will use its $60,000 share of the money to continue to fund its school psychologist. The school was in danger of having to reduce the position from full-time to part-time after rising neighborhood rents caused student enrollment to decline, costing the school state per-pupil funding, said principal Gilberto Munoz.

"Over the last three or four years, rents have really doubled, so it's pushed people out," he said Monday after the grant was announced to a crowd of parents and dignitaries packed into the Swansea Elementary gymnasium. "All throughout last year, we saw families leaving."

Garden Place Academy, an elementary school in the adjacent Globeville neighborhood, will use its $60,000 to hire a new family liaison to encourage parents to become involved at the school.

"This has been a desire and a need and a want on our wish list for quite some time," said principal Rebecca Salomon.

Garden Place is also losing students as housing prices increase, which Salomon said has made it impossible to fund this type of position.

The positions are partly being funded by the city's North Denver Cornerstone Collaborative, which is tasked with overseeing six projects in that part of town, including the expansion of Interstate 70 and the redevelopment of the National Western Center stock show complex. The Mile High United Way is also providing funding as part of an investment in underserved communities.

Some north Denver residents have raised concerns about the projects, which are meant to rejuvenate a historically industrial part of Denver that has suffered ill effects from past civic projects - including the construction of I-25 and I-70, which bifurcated the neighborhoods.

The first of the new projects - improvements to gritty Brighton Boulevard, which runs through Elyria-Swansea - is scheduled to break ground Oct. 13, according to a city spokesman.

The school principals said families aren't as worried about the projects themselves as they are about how the impending changes will affect their ability to stay in their homes.

Swansea Elementary lost 79 students in the past year as their families moved to more affordable neighborhoods such as Montbello in far northeast Denver or nearby suburbs like Aurora, Munoz said. One family has been given notice to vacate their home because the land it stands on is set to become part of the new and improved National Western Center, he said.

Anna Jones, executive director of the North Denver Cornerstone Collaborative, said the city can't control how much private landlords charge their tenants - but it can help soften the financial blow to schools with shrinking student populations.

"The thinking was these positions would be able to fill in the gaps that are created through the rapid changes these neighborhoods are experiencing," she said.

She said the city decided to invest in the schools because "schools are where that story begins."

At the event, Denver Public Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg called the schools "the heart of the community."

"This is a community that is undergoing a lot of change right now," he said. "Some of that change is wonderful and promising, but some of that change is scary."

Boasberg said the ultimate goal is to make sure the changes benefit everyone - and the $120,000 donation is a step toward ensuring that happens.

The funding is solely for this school year, according to a DPS spokeswoman.

The two schools serve an at-risk population. More than 90 percent of students last year qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, an indicator of poverty. At Garden Place, 46 percent of students were English language learners. At Swansea, 55 percent were.

Most students who attend the schools come from the neighborhoods, according to the district.

"Because of the pressures they're facing in their own lives, they bring it to school," said Munoz, explaining why he decided to use the money to fully fund Swansea's psychologist.

"Some of the things they're facing would challenge most adults. So teaching them how to manage that is essential - and having a professional that does that for you is really helpful."

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Gentrification is impacting north Denver schools. This is how $120,000 could help.

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Two elementary schools in working-class north Denver neighborhoods that are feeling the sting of gentrification will share a $120,000 grant to fund a staff member at each school to address some of the challenges facing the changing communities. Swansea Elementary, located in the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood, will use its $60,000 share of the money to continue to fund its school psychologist.

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Denver Is Losing Residents As Quickly As It Gains Them - 5280

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A new report shows that the metro area lost 9.25 percent of residents between 2014 and 2015. Is gentrification to blame?

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A familiar sight in the Whittier neighborhood.

Photo by Lauri Lynnxe Murphy

Denver home sales reached a record high in June, according to the Denver Metro Association of Realtors. "Despite the slight cooling in the market, June still set records in home prices and closed dollar volume, as the lack of inventory available in the Denver-area over the last eighteen months is continuing to drive prices upward," the group reported.

And one of the hottest neighborhoods is Whittier, where prices rose 14.1 percent last year - pushing many of the long-term renters out of the rapidly gentrifying area. That development inspired a teacher at Manual High School to start the Gentrification Project, so that students could study what was happening around them. Lauri Lynnxe Murphy, herself a longtime resident of Whittier, reports on that project and other developments in the area in the current Westword cover story, " The New 'Hood."

In Denver, the topic of gentrification is as hot as the real estate market."'Gentrification' is a word on everyone's lips in Denver these days, from wild-eyed developers scraping and building as fast as they can, to artists losing their studios to the marijuana grow houses of the green rush, to new residents flocking here, starry-eyed about Colorado's legendary sunshine and blissfully unaware of the lack of affordable housing - until they get here," Murphy writes. And her piece inspired a long response from another Whittier resident who requested anonymity:

I've never sent in a comment to Westword before (although I'm a longtime reader and I love the paper), but I just had to comment on the recent cover article, "The New 'Hood."

I've been a Five Points resident since 2009. Obviously, not as long as those who have spent their whole lives in the community, but pre-brewery explosion, pre-restaurant explosion - when Zona's Tamales still existed. And I get that the article is about Whittier, but it's really about Five Points too.

My problem with the article is that the clear implication is that gentrification (i.e. the movement of white people into the neighborhood) is a disease that needs a cure - that I'm part of a problem that needs a solution. I'm not rich, or afraid of diversity. In fact, as a transplant from a much more diverse culture than Denver, I moved to the neighborhood because it had both racial and economic diversity.

Some questions and issues I have with your article include: Why is it okay to complain that Fuller Park has now turned into "a dog park primarily used by new white residents"? There's no sign on the park that would prevent anyone at all from taking their dog there - and most people in the neighborhood have dogs! My husband and I were at Fuller Dog Park last week, and there was a drunk gentleman in the park area screaming at the white folks in the dog park, "Get out of our neighborhood, Whitey!" and "This park ain't for you!" And just the week before, we were literally chased out of Curtis Park by two Latin men screaming at us to "Get the f-k out of our park!" and "This is our neighborhood, stupid, spoiled Whitey - get out!" In the past two months, I've been called "stupid Whitey," "cracker," "birdsh*t" (i'm guessing because birdsh*t is usually white in color - that was a new one on me) and worse. I've never seen this happen in the six years I've lived in the area, but it's happening with startling frequency these days. That's really not a way to make the neighborhood feel inclusive. And instead of there being meetings to address the issue, or anything done about it, the conversation is all about how gentrification is ruining the area.

I have no control over property values. I don't like how high Denver has assessed my house, either - my taxes are going up too, making it harder for me and my husband to stay where we are. But what I can control is how I treat my neighbors and my community, and I try to do that with respect and pride. My husband and I have spent the past several years contributing to the neighborhood - planting trees and gardening, getting to know our neighbors, going to neighborhood meetings, cleaning up trash thrown down by walkers-by all along the streets, painting over graffiti, and more. Why are our contributions a threat? Why do people who claim to love the neighborhood and want to keep it for their own trash the street, graffiti over the public art and people's homes, yell at strangers in the parks to keep out, and basically fail to show any respect for the neighborhood at all? Isn't that counter-productive? I feel that this component was notably lacking from your article. I am not a disease. My presence in the neighborhood is not a problem. And I don't think it was fair of this article to be so one-sided about the issue.

Thank you.

What do you think of the development in Whittier? Across Denver? You can share your thoughts here, or post a comment on "The New 'Hood," the story that inspired this response, right here.

Patricia Calhoun co-founded Westword in 1977; she's been the editor ever since. She's a regular on the weekly CPT12 roundtable Colorado Inside Out, played a real journalist in John Sayles's Silver City, once interviewed President Bill Clinton while wearing flip-flops, and has been honored with numerous national awards for her columns and feature-writing.

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Is Denver's Gentrification a Problem That Needs a Solution?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Denver home sales reached a record high in June, according to the Denver Metro Association of Realtors. "Despite the slight cooling in the market, June still set records in home prices and closed dollar volume, as the lack of inventory available in the Denver-area over the last eighteen months is continuing...

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Gentrification represents a double-edged sword - revitalizing older neighborhoods but also often shredding the social fabric of those communities in the process.

"What is bad is if gentrification causes involuntarily displacement," said Paul Washington, executive director of the Denver Office of Economic Development, which released a study on the issue Wednesday, a day before the city's 2016 Housing Summit.

With more than 1,000 new households moving to Denver each month, the city has seen a large share of formerly affordable neighborhoods go upscale.

Since 2000, about 42 percent of the Census tracts that are prime for gentrification in the city are doing so, according to the study.

Nationally, only about 5 percent of urban tracts are in that process, which involves higher-income residents displacing lower-income ones.

Gentrification is, in itself, neither good nor bad, Washington said.

What Denver officials, from the mayor on down, want to avoid is the unraveling of the historic, cultural and demographic identities of a community that results when residents are pushed out, he said.

Displacement happens in two key ways. Rising property values jack up property tax bills to the point that the original residents, especially seniors on fixed incomes, can't afford them.

Rising rents are another concern, as older apartment buildings get purchased and spruced up, pricing out the original tenants.

Neighborhoods such as Cherry Creek and Washington Park long ago blazed the path, with a high income now the price of admission to live there.

Highlands has gentrified too, going from two-thirds Latino to two-thirds non-Latino whites since 2000. Even long-affordable places such as Five Points and Globeville are moving down the same path.

Stephen Moore, policy director for FRESC, a group focused on improving conditions for low-income and minority communities, said the study shows the city realizes the situation might be at a tipping point.

"We see this as a big step for the city acknowledging where we are and where we have been. The research is really needed," Moore said.

The metro area faces a shortage of 80,000 affordable housing units, he said. The normal ebb and flow in which some areas revitalize and rise in cost while others decline and become more affordable has been disrupted.

Compounding matters, the vast majority of new homes and apartments hitting the market are on the higher end, Moore said.

Washington said the city plans to tackle the displacement problem in a variety of ways. By knowing where gentrification is likely to happen, the city and its partners can strategically buy up parcels on the cheap, especially along transit lines.

That land can then in the future be combined with tax credits and offered to developers focused on affordable units.

Another approach is to provide workforce training so residents of gentrifying neighborhoods can command a higher wage that will help them to afford the area.

Making residents aware of property tax abatements and other programs to help them stay in place is another approach, Washington said.

Moore said research shows that property owners who cash out of gentrifying neighborhoods typically end up worse off than those who stay put and make the transition.
Aldo Svaldi: 303-954-1410, asvaldi@denverpost.com or @aldosvaldi

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Denver seeks gentrification without displacing residents

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Gentrification represents a double-edged sword - revitalizing older neighborhoods but also often shredding the social fabric of those communities in the process. "What is bad is if gentrification causes involuntarily displacement," said Paul Washington, executive director of the Denver Office of Economic Development, which released a study on the issue Wednesday, a day before the city's 2016 Housing Summit.