Luxury developers embrace armed mercenaries and the suburban enclave as a model for Denver

LIV EXCLUSIVELY (Skyclub at The Spire); Live where you can impress your friends [...] a lifestyle that is everything grand (The Grand); LIVE LARGE AND LIVE LUX. HAVE YOU EVER DREAMED OF HAVING YOUR OWN PERSONAL BUTLER? (The Veranda at Highpointe); Welcome to the life above (Parq on Speer); Step into a life of grandeur. Live a step above. TOWERING DISTINCTION [...] LIVE ABOVE THE LINE (Country Club Towers); a life without inconvenience (Sugarcube); YOUR LIFE’S CAPITAL [...] A modern sanctuary (Modera Cap Hill)

Perhaps it began in 2007 with the Downtown Area Plan, or during the shale oil boom when Denver joined the likes of Riyadh, Austin, and Bismarck as one of the world's leading petro-capitals. The exact moment is unimportant. Sometime during the last twenty years of construction, a new way of living assembled itself in Denver. You could call it a lifestyle.

Many of the largest developers from Miami, Texas, South Carolina, Virginia, and DC have spent the better part of the 2000’s circling Denver for vacant lots and tax incentives from the Mayor's office. What they hope to import into Colorado is what architect Keller Easterling calls a “spatial product:” building-sized investments, nominally designed to house people, but implicitly designed to park real estate capital. In Denver and most of the United States, spatial products manifest as pricey condos, resorts, and apartments that speak a ‘placeless Esperanto’ of luxury; part home, part financial instrument; always looking a bit out of place and yet, like the architecture of the strip mall, unmistakably familiar.

Their midwives are local governments desperate for a vibrant city. The result? Since 2014, “three of every five apartments built in [...] Denver came with rents that put them in the top one-third of the rental market.” This is the future on offer from Mayor Michael Hancock and the Downtown Denver Partnership (DDP), an association of major corporate donors with outsize influence on city planning. Like a hangover from the 20th century, a conjoined twin of Robert Moses and Ayn Rand has found its voice through the DDP. To them, the soul of the city is “the creators of industry, makers of place. Visionaries - for what’s next.” The exalted “Visionary City Builder,” to whom is owed a great deal, has displaced existing communities in pursuit of a glittering Sahara of corporate headquartering and, for the topic of this essay, apartments for a new kind of affluent resident.

According to a 2018 demographic study of in-migration patterns, on average, that resident is a 27-year-old from out of state, making roughly 70 thousand dollars and significantly more educated than the average Coloradan -- a yuppie. Developers, under the aegis of a consenting city government and the DDP, have capitalized on this high-strung, high-income transplant, both hungry for luxury amenities and apprehensive of urban poverty. In return, Denver’s residential architecture has begun to reflect the preferences and fears of moneyed young professionals.

Vertical Suburbs

Beached cruise ships turned luxury apartment complexes with aspirational names like “EVIVA,” “VERANDA” and “The Grand,” have come to dominate much of Denver’s skyline. Each offers a version of the same experience: fantasies of total wish fulfillment, a life unburdened, maximizing one’s “professional performance,” a fortified membrane to indulge the suburban agoraphobe. Advertising copy for The VERANDA -- Denver’s only luxury apartment complex with a lazy river -- came unexpectedly close to encapsulating the entire phenomena. It puts “the ‘urban’ in the ‘suburban’ ” according to the online brochure. Almost. VERANDA and other structures like it put the suburb in the city. A study by researchers Marcus Moose and Pablo Mendez found that despite the perception of condos and apartments as cosmopolitan urban dwellings, they replicate class (not to mention racial) segregation and modes of private transportation in the same way their dispersed counterparts do. This doesn’t bode well for the future of Denver’s traffic -- have a look at the “parking podiums” sprouting like concrete cysts. But the more immediate concern is that expensive high rises and their ilk aren’t just vertical suburbs, they’re a vertical subspecies of the gated community.

Developers seem to have discerned through market research or some other corporate divination, that the perfect amenity-cocktail to capture a young professional is an enclave club-house workplace resort with lots of parking.

Small electronic machines dispense a synthetic Springtime fragrance. A calculated ambiance of care-free euphoria is piped in through speakers. Lobbies, like travertine sarcophagi, so ruthlessly cleansed of contaminants that dust itself becomes the final intruder, an unwelcome reminder of death. At Denver’s most expensive apartment tower, The Confluence, leasing agents neatly stack copies of Reign on the lobby table, a magazine venerating Colorado’s new aristocracy.