Michael Hancock looks at the city he has led for more than six years and sees a thriving Denver that has rebounded from the Great Recession, gained national cachet as a millennial magnet and tackled, as best as it can, the challenges that come with a booming population.

He’s eyeing a likely bid for a third term as mayor — an election that is 18 months away, in May 2019. But as time ticks on, Hancock, 48, is finding himself more and more on the defensive.

Last month, outrage greeted a near-downtown coffee shop’s joking sign about gentrification — and it quickly pivoted toward Hancock, as demonstrators sent darts in the direction of city leaders they see as too friendly to developers.

Then there’s the newly created $15 million-a-year affordable housing fund that Hancock has had to defend against criticism that it’s too small for Denver’s needs.

He has also found himself the target of “Ditch the Ditch” activists who are trying to derail the state’s $1.2 billion Interstate 70 expansion project, which Hancock supports, as well as parks lovers who are fighting city stormwater drainage projects on golf courses.

And despite efforts to reform the city’s jails and policing policies, Denver continues to draw criticism as it has paid out more than $19 million in sheriff and police settlements since 2014, largely for jail abuse and use-of-force cases involving minorities.

Two years ago, Hancock waltzed to a second term without an organized opponent. Increasingly, political observers and experts say, it’s looking like he won’t have that luxury in 2019.

For that, the blame largely falls on a prevailing feeling among some residents that Hancock has not responded adequately to the downsides of Denver’s bull-in-a-china-shop economic boom.

“He’s riding high. Denver’s hot. People want to be here,” said Susan Barnes-Gelt, a former City Council member who has been strongly critical of Hancock. “I would say it’s the other side of that same coin that are his greatest vulnerabilities: Real people can’t afford to live here. Rents are high. Among people I talk to who really are not politically attuned, the single biggest thing they’re angry and frustrated about is traffic.”

Denver, which has absorbed a net increase of 83,000 residents since Hancock took office in 2011, was projected to surpass 700,000 this year.

As unrelenting development has disrupted several neighborhoods, a counter-narrative to the Denver success story is uniting Hancock’s critics and has spurred them to organize — though without, so far, recruiting a galvanizing opponent to take him on.

Social-justice activists who are forming a still-unnamed coalition say they want a mayor who pushes back against developers and is willing to take stronger stands in favor of those who are shouldering the burdens of the city’s boom.

As Candi CdeBaca, a community organizer and anti-highway expansion activist in Elyria-Swansea, put it: “We need somebody willing to push the envelope. No more staying safe.”

Hancock, too, expects a stronger challenge

In a recent interview in his office, Hancock expressed confidence that voters would share his optimism about Denver’s direction and trust in the plans he has set in motion. Those include a $937 million bond package that won overwhelming voter support just a month ago. The largest piece, $431 million, is for transportation and mobility projects.

But Hancock also is annoyed at the frequent charge that he’s too friendly to the developers who have contributed heavily to his campaigns: “It drives me crazy when people say that,” he said, calling Denver’s boom — and the city’s inability to control it — a matter of simple market economics.

In many ways, he added, development activity helped rescue the city after a recession that necessitated hiring freezes and budget cutbacks in his early years.

“I’m proud of how we’ve been able to recover and thrive since the recession,” he said. (Read his full response to the development question here.)

Still, Hancock knows he would be more vulnerable to a strong challenge in a bid for the final term allowed to him by the city charter.

“You make decisions. You lead. You upset people,” he said. “I expect it. Anytime you look at mayors who run for their third or final term, it’s usually more challenging than the second.”

In his most recent filing, Hancock reported ending 2016 with $263,000 in his campaign fund, and he has raised more this year.

Longtime Denver political observers say the best chance for a challenger to put up a fight is to try to weave the city’s varying threads of discontent into a campaign fronted by a charismatic candidate — one who can present a compelling alternative to Hancock.

That may be easier in theory than practice.

Just one candidate, pizza and marijuana entrepreneur Kayvan Khalatbari, has begun raising money to take on Hancock. He registered in February and has been steadily building support. Another candidate who ran an unfunded campaign in 2015, Marcus Giavanni, also has filed. Rumors have swirled about council members and community advocates who are considering runs. None has confirmed his or her intentions yet, and for current office-holders, taking on an incumbent would be fraught with risks.

Even if a strong challenger (or more than one) emerges, political analysts Floyd Ciruli and Eric Sondermann both give Hancock favorable odds in May 2019, given Denver’s strong economy. A wild card is that in Denver’s nonpartisan elections, the presence of multiple candidates drawing substantial support could force him into a runoff.

Anti-establishment undercurrent could be factor

Both analysts noted an undercurrent of anti-establishment angst that has asserted itself in unpredictable ways, from the election of a couple of outsider candidates to city positions two years ago to President Donald Trump’s win last year.

Ciruli’s advice to Hancock: “You should spend the next 18 months with laser-like focus on the public anxiety regarding growth.”

The activists behind the emerging coalition want to challenge city decisions on development, homelessness, criminal justice and other issues. They see an opening to take on Hancock, and they also might challenge some council members.

Discussions intensified as participants seized upon a protest Thanksgiving weekend outside Ink Coffee in Five Points. Days earlier, outrage spread on social media over an image of a sandwich board commissioned by Ink that read, “Happily gentrifying the neighborhood since 2014.”

Lisa Calderón of the Colorado Latino Forum and teenage activist Tay Anderson are among the driving forces of this new coalition. CdeBaca, who plans to run against council president Albus Brooks in 2019, also was on hand. So was Khalatbari.

What do they want to see in an alternative to Hancock?

Tony Pigford, the dean of students at a new charter school and another coalition organizer, says it comes down to the need for a leader who is truly progressive and doesn’t reflexively support business interests.

“We’re a community of activists — we’re regular Denver folks who want equity, peace and justice for everybody,” Pigford said. “We’re tired of seeing the Denver jail being the place where the most mentally ill folks get treatment. We’re tired of seeing people pushed out of their homes and homelessness criminalized. We’re tired of seeing our schools segregated — if not more segregated” than they were decades ago.

LaMone Noles is a North Park Hill resident who has fought against the city’s $298 million drainage plan in northeast Denver, which includes a controversial stormwater detention project that will take down hundreds of trees on City Park Golf Course.

She says she wants a mayor who shows greater respect for open space. She also wants a mayor who’s willing to push process-savvy developers to meet with neighborhood groups about their plans before they can outmaneuver any potential opposition.

“I was hopeful when he was elected his first go-around,” said Noles, president of the group City Park Friends and Neighbors. “I voted for him. He was a new face, and he was younger than most politicians were. I felt like he had a pretty good connection to what the community needed.

“But as he went into his second term — even before then, with issues concerning (park) land swaps and zoning changes — it became more evident that community was really not his focus. And so there was a big disconnect. It just gets worse every day.”

Khalatbari, 34, ran unsuccessfully for an at-large council seat in 2015. He has spent this year building support for his mayoral campaign, focusing on affordable housing, renters’ rights, social and criminal justice, environmental practices and what he considers the potential for cronyism in the city’s exploration of public-private partnership deals.

He said he recently spent a night sleeping with homeless people. Four times, he said, police officers — enforcing ordinances that include the city’s controversial camping ban — urged the group to move along.

“It is harassment to an insane degree,” Khalatbari said. “I don’t know how many people I saw just cry.”

“Hancock is not going to debate himself”

Khalatbari thinks there’s a thirst for new city leaders. But what if he’s overestimating the discontent?

“At the very least, I ran to make sure there’s a dialogue on these issues,” Khalatbari said. “Because if there’s not, Michael Hancock is not going to debate himself. He’s going to walk right into re-election.”

Hancock, for his part, says he’s ready to mount strong defenses of his record.

“Interestingly enough,” he said, “any mayor who follows me — if this was to be my last term — will have the same issues in terms of growth, in terms of housing, in terms of addressing mobility. Although we have placed quite a bit of resources in both housing and mobility that will, I think, keep the city busy for the next 10 to 15 years.”

The last time a challenger defeated an incumbent mayor was in 1983, when fresh-faced Federico Peña beat 15-year stalwart Mayor Bill McNichols, a member of the city’s old guard. In fact, McNichols didn’t even make the runoff.

Both Peña and his successor, Wellington Webb, had to sweat re-election challenges, facing runoffs for their second terms. But Webb went on to win a third term easily.

Sondermann, who worked for Peña in 1983, said voters then were motivated in part by a generational change.

“I remember thinking to myself and commenting that we happened to catch lightning in a bottle,” he said. In 2019, he suggested, “it would take that similar type of charismatic candidate catching lightning in a bottle and putting together a combination of dissatisfied constituencies — but doing it not as an angry, old, curmudgeonly man who’s pining for the good old days.

“That’s not going to sell. It still needs to be fresh and new.”