By all accounts, Bill Mosher had done his part.
In nearly 40 years working in the city, Mosher’s fingerprints were everywhere: The Colorado Rockies baseball stadium, the Denver Pavilions Mall, Union Station, the Denver Post’s former headquarters, the convention center’s Hyatt Regency tower. From posts atop the city’s economic development nonprofit and then leading the local Trammell Crow Company team, he secured locations for some projects, pushed for development on others and designed complex funding mechanisms for still others. Many eventually helped the city’s downtown recover from its worst moments.
At the end of 2023, Mosher stepped down from leading Trammell Crow’s Colorado division. He was in his 70s and ready for more downtime, plus his wife had retired and the ski slopes were calling. He maintained a small shop to do one project: a $70 million renovation of the Hyatt Regency he’d built two decades earlier. But it was time for someone else to think full-time about downtown Denver.
“[I was] working when I wanted to,” Mosher said.
Meanwhile, downtown suffered. Work-from-home culture had led to record-high office vacancy rates and hushed city streets. Indicators of bad — crime, property distress — were up, and indicators of good — the public’s sense of safety, property values — were down. The city’s center of gravity for retail had migrated a dozen miles south to the Cherry Creek neighborhood, and across the highway, billionaire developer and sports magnate Stan Kroenke was positioning his Ball Arena redevelopment plan as an alternate downtown.
The city’s downtown property owners understood the jeopardy, and they had the start of a solution, voting in November 2024 to expand the boundary of a tax increment financing district that Mosher had set up a decade earlier. This meant the district’s governing board now had $570 million to invest in reviving the central business district.
Denver wasn’t alone in fretting about how to rescue its downtown. But unlike many similar cities, it now had the resources to do something about it. It just needed a captain.
As Thanksgiving approached, Mosher received a phone call from a man he knew of but had hardly interacted with, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston.
Johnston wanted to know whether Mosher would join the mayor’s office as chief projects officer to oversee the recovery. Saying yes would bring Mosher back to save downtown, giving him the opportunity to revitalize some of the properties he’d help get built in the first place. He’d be able to give the city he loved a chance to overcome a difficult period.
It was an easy answer.
”I said no,” Mosher told The Real Deal.
Gold rush on repeat
In keeping with its founding during the 1858 gold rush, Denver has not escaped a cycle of booms and busts. Railroad and silver booms were followed by Dust Bowl and Great Depression busts. In the 1970s, oil wealth expanded the city’s economy. Between 1973 and 1984, developers added at least 52 downtown buildings, reshaping the city skyline with the Wells Fargo Center and Republic Plaza. Office workers flooded the streets.
Not long after Mosher finished his master’s in urban planning and started his career in Tucson, Arizona, in the 1980s, the national recession brought the next bust, crushing Denver’s economy. Flush with new supply, Denver’s office vacancy rate rose to 31 percent, tied with Houston for the nation’s highest, according to then-mayor Federico Peña.
Mosher took a job at the nonprofit Downtown Denver Partnership in 1991. The city was already on a self-improvement push, with a new airport and expanded convention center. Mosher helped secure a downtown location for the Colorado Rockies’ baseball stadium and advanced the development of the Denver Pavilions Mall along 16th Street. Tourists, shoppers and residents returned downtown.
“So many developers … would love to do this work and are basically a bridge loan away from being able to do it.”
Again, when he broke off to start his own firm in 1999, a public-private partnership was central to his development of the Hyatt Regency hotel. After his firm merged with Trammell Crow Company, Mosher managed the redevelopment of Denver Union Station into a mixed-use transit hub, overseeing a complex equation of federal loans, state and local permitting and construction timelines. He led downtown property owners in a popular vote to create the tax increment financing district and repay nearly $500 million in federal construction loans.
The successes solidified Mosher’s worldview: that recovery spins out of harmony between the public and private sectors, and that the right investments and projects can reverse a downward spiral.
And they brought the next boom. Through the 2010s, Denver’s mix of city life and outdoor recreation made it a relocation darling for young professionals. Major companies pursed this talent pool and opened offices. This primed the area for the pandemic’s office shutdowns and even attracted relocators in 2020 and 2021. The city’s allure was not the office but the freedom to go cycling on lunch breaks or find a cabin with a Wi-Fi signal and ski-on access to the slopes. But six years later, the bill came due. Employers haven’t rushed their staff back to their cubicles. Even state and city employees are not required back at the office full-time.
The downtown office vacancy rate rose to 38 percent, a record high for a city familiar with busts. Headlines described Union Station as a “lawless hellhole.” In upper downtown, which hosts the more traditional central-business district, office vacancy reached toward 50 percent. The Pavilions Mall, once the jewel, lost a majority of its tenants and fell into distress.
Money on the table
Though Mosher said he wouldn’t come back, Johnston persisted.
A few days after rejecting the offer, Mosher had a change of heart. He’d had coffee with the mayor’s chief of staff and realized what more than a half billion dollars in TIF money could do: not just launch the city’s recovery but also be a model for other cities stumped by their post-pandemic reality.
“Ultimately, I thought if I could help a city that was struggling — my city that was struggling, through no fault of its own — then, that’s good,” Mosher said.
The new job doesn’t have an easy description. Mosher characterized it as part “herding cats,” part “pushing a rope up a hill.” Some days he is reviewing project applications before they reach the development authority’s voting board. Other times he is keeping the many arms of bureaucracy on time and on track with permit reviews. He negotiates any public improvements the city is willing to cover for major developments and keeps the mayor abreast of development opportunities in the city. On top of all of this, he is also working to negotiate a deal for the Broncos’ new stadium.
including the towers at 621 and 633 17th Street, known as High Fidelity Plaza (High Fidelity Plaza)
Kate Barton, current president of the Downtown Denver Partnership, likened Mosher to a quarterback or coach.
“The private sector trusts him, he knows how to get deals done, he’s worked so closely with the city that he understands those city hall dynamics and you need leaders like that,” Barton said.
Much of the work is in office-to-resi.
In its first year, the development authority committed $166 million in low-interest loans to revitalization projects, and of that, about $45 million went to three conversion proposals promising 500 units.
The money works as subordinate debt, aiming to cover around 20 percent of a project’s cost. No developer receives money until they secure permits and the rest of the financing. Any expenditure over $500,000 — which accounts for all but one — requires city council approval.
“I feel like we’re sort of inventing the model,” Mosher said of the city’s financing strategy.
In 2025, a record 71,000 conversion units were in the pipeline countrywide. Cities such as New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas have led the way.
But, Mosher said, “the jury is still out on residential conversions.” In New York, a converted office building can probably fill up, there’s so much demand. But the idea that more urban-core living will attract tenants is still unproven in Denver.
That hasn’t stopped the push forward.
“There is a strong belief that there is this pent-up desire to live downtown,” Douglas Tisdale, board chair of the Downtown Development Authority, said. “We all benefit from that blending of different economic statuses, living around and blending together.”
‘Sentiment matters’
Public money only goes so far. For Mosher and the development authority, proof of their impact will be if the private sector follows.
“If Denver can figure this out, it could create the biggest housing boom this country’s ever seen,” Los Angeles-based Luzzatto Company’s Asher Luzzatto said.
Last year, Luzzatto purchased four office towers in downtown Denver, picking up 1.8 million square feet for just over $4.80 per square foot. His plan is to spend about $470 million to convert much of the space into 1,200 housing units. Deep discounts and the potential for development authority funding drove his buy in Denver, Luzzatto said.
He has applied for $62.7 million in development authority funding for one of the projects — the conversion of mid-century towers on 17th Street into a mixed-use “vertical village” with at least 700 housing units. The application, still pending, would be far and away the most expensive project funded by the development authority.
“If I could help a city that was struggling — my city that was struggling, through no fault of its own — then, that’s good.”
“There is so much empty office space, and there are so many developers who would love to do this work and are basically a bridge loan away from being able to do it,” he said.
Under Mosher’s leadership, the development authority is not only subsidizing but getting involved directly with the market.
In December, with unanimous support from Denver City Council, the authority purchased the 350,000-square-foot Pavilions Mall — the same retail center Mosher pushed for in the 1990s — and two adjacent parking lots for $60 million. The mall was headed to foreclosure and the lender didn’t want it, Mosher said. The authority plans to spend another $3 million to renovate the parking garage, draft a master plan to position it as the next Union Station and then sell the property to a developer.
Johnston called the purchase a “critical opportunity” to “create an anchor destination for upper downtown.”
The effort is showing promise.
A year ago, Andy Klein of Westside Investment Partners, the largest owner of office space in downtown Denver, might have been one of only a couple local bidders on an office property.
Now, he said, he’s often up against a number of out-of-town investors trying to stake a claim in Denver.
“Sentiment matters, and the biggest benefit of the development authority is it shows a willingness of the city to put its money where its mouth is,” Klein said. “That Pavilions buy shows serious interest from the city in improving downtown.”
Still, there is skepticism. The development authority cannot force people back into the office, or into new apartments. And downtown’s revitalization is only one of several major developments in Denver. Will investors put money into a residential conversion in the central-business district when they could invest in Kroenke’s “new downtown?”
In February, one of the development authority’s first approved investments — the 116-unit conversion of the historic Symes Building — fell through. The lender foreclosed on the property and took control of the building. The development authority has since pulled back its $17 million commitment to the project.
Mosher, who will stay in his role until the end of Johnston’s term next summer, remains confident in Denver’s direction, if for no other reason than the fact that the city has been here before.
“It’s time to get scrappy,” Mosher said. “We need the kind of pioneering, bootstrap attitude Denver has always had.”