Destination 2016: Denver

The Source, an artisanal food market housed in a 140-year-old industrial building that anchors the river north neighborhood (RiNo), downtown Denver’s latest development frontier, is a good spot for observing the city’s zeitgeist. The building includes one of Denver’s best restaurants, Acorn, and around the perimeter small retail shops sell fresh bread, flowers, jewelry, wine, espresso and locally raised meats. A brewery and a Mexican restaurant round out the mix. The central atrium is filled with the clicking of laptops and Lululemon-wearing moms chatting over almond-milk lattes. With a modern industrial feel balanced by exposed brick and graffiti remnants, the Source is almost always packed with millennials. The place is hot. Although hot might be an understatement. “The word that’s used most frequently in describing the last two years of Denver’s real estate market is unprecedented,” says Anthony Rael, chairman of the market trends committee for the Denver Metro Association of Realtors.
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Quality of Life
Excellent weather, nearby skiing and craft beer attract outdoorsy types.
Civic Leadership
Even as the economy struggled, Denver doubled down on public transit.
Entrepreneurship
Denver is a great city to start a business, from cannabis to high tech.
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Rael’s stats show that the median price for detached single-family homes increased 30 percent from March 2012 to March 2016. The condo market is even stronger, posting 37 percent growth during the same period. “We have seen boom-and-bust cycles here,” he says. “But the last 18 to 24 months? We’ve never seen anything like it.”
Tom Clark, CEO of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp., expects 2016 to be the best year ever for the city’s economy overall. “We’ve got the lowest unemployment on record, the highest wages and our economy has never been more diverse,” he says.
Denver’s growth is a function of that diversity. The key sectors driving the economy: aerospace, finance, telecom, software, clean energy and brewing (craft beer is big here). Most of these businesses are in the so-called innovation space—in other words, new technologies building new companies which ultimately pay higher wages to educated workers.
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