Yesterday I saw a lot of people in Avalanche jerseys walking around downtown and I knew it was a good sign of our return to normal.  But we can’t return to normal without our workforce returning. Getting people back to work starts first with keeping people in their homes, especially those homes that are closest to the jobs.

Over the last few years and certainly during the pandemic, my company has been focusing on the development of affordable housing which I believe to be the greatest need throughout the state.  We are involved with four different projects right now–all rental projects addressing individuals and families with incomes under 60% of the Area Median Income–the people we are building for are the working class in our communities and their housing needs are significant.  These folks were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and housing instability is part of the fall out.   If they live in a rental home or apartment and are being threatened by eviction because they lost their job during the pandemic and can’t pay rent, how can we expect them to return to work until their housing situation is settled? We need them to return to work and they want to return, so it’s part of our responsibility to help them gain that stability.

It is our hope that the travel and hospitality industry will return to pre-COVID levels next year.  But if there is a shortage of people to clean hotel rooms and serve food and beverages in restaurants and bars because the lower wage service workers are still struggling with housing instability and lack of child care  and aren’t returning to work,   we might be disappointed in the pace of the overall economic recovery.  As I said, we need to understand the issues impacting our tenants ability to hire employees and help them address them in whatever way we can. And we need to speed up the production of workforce housing throughout the state.

On the commercial side, our Steam on the Platte project is recovering well–fully leased with office tenants who are beginning to return to the office in June/July.  We are also focused on helping those tenants assure their employees that it is safe to return and that they’d rather be at the office where they can walk their dog on the Platte River trail and have a beer at Raices Brewery is better than staying home.  And Raices Brewery is alive and well, having survived the pandemic by creating significant outdoor seating last summer and having a local following who supports their unique business model of  Latin culture and cerveza (it’s also the winner of a DDP award last year).  Like every other property owner with food and beverage tenants (and office, for that matter), we made considerable concessions during the year to help tenants stay in business so it is very reassuring that they are doing well. But I also witnessed first hand the terrible impacts of COVID on the residents of Sun Valley, one of Denver’s poorest neighborhoods. It will take a lot more for them to recover so let’s make sure that our work to revive our community goes deep into neighborhoods as well as our high rise office buildings.