Downtown Denver Office-To-Residential Conversion Activity Heating Up With $56M Boost

Denver’s office-to-residential conversion pipeline is among the most active in the country, setting up the city's downtown for a needed reduction in vacant office space while bumping up the number of housing units in a tight market.

The projects are being helped along by funding from the Downtown Denver Development Authority, which seeks to revitalize the central business district nearly six years after the pandemic struck, turning the office market in Denver and elsewhere on its head.

“We've really got to find a way to get new housing downtown and to make it financially feasible to turn these unused, vacant office spaces into new residential units,” said Laura Swartz, communications director for the Denver Department of Finance, which works with the DDDA.

Five downtown conversion projects totaling 520 residential units have received almost $56M in funding from the Denver Downtown Development Authority, the city of Denver and the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority this year. 

Developers of at least four other conversions with more than 1,250 units have applied or plan to apply for funding from the development authority. RentCafe reported that Denver ranks No. 5 nationally for the number of planned office-to-residential units. 

Total office vacancy downtown is roughly 29% so far in Q4, according to a November Downtown Denver Partnership report.

In 2024, voters authorized the authority to allocate $570M for downtown revitalization efforts. The authority’s four funding priorities are housing, business support, activation and public spaces.

Though some conversions were already in progress, the funding activated a slew of projects, Swartz said.

It can be notoriously expensive to adapt office buildings to meet modern residential codes and navigate conversion regulations. The DDDA hopes to provide the “gap financing” to make projects feasible, Swartz said.

Guidelines from the DDDA say loans should cover around 20% of a project’s cost.

So far, the authority has awarded $166M of available funding, with $46M going to office conversions. Swartz said the DDDA originally planned to have two rounds of funding in 2025, but, because of demand, it had four cycles.

The historic Petroleum building at 110 16th St. received $14M to support 178 units; the Symes building at 820 16th St. received $17M and will bring 116 units; and the University building at 910 16th St. received $14.5M for 120 units that will serve households making between 30% and 80% of the area median income. 

The Colorado Housing and Finance Authority also awarded the University building almost $5M in tax credits. 

A fifth project, the conversion of the Dry Goods building at 702 16th St., received $5.5M from the Denver Department of Housing Stability. The project includes 106 units for households making between 30% and 80% of AMI.

Projects that have applied or plan to apply for DDDA funding include the Lincoln Crossing Tower II, 475 17th Ave., High Fidelity Plaza and the Denver Energy Center, according to the Denver Business Journal.

Swartz said the next round of funding will likely be announced in early 2026. 

In 2023, the city released a study identifying 22 buildings as good candidates for adaptive reuse, and the DDP organized a task force, which concluded its work in 2024, to identify challenges for office conversions.

The city also launched the Adaptive Reuse Pilot Program, which provides a coordinator to help downtown projects through the review and permitting process. Most recently, adaptive reuse was called out as a priority in the 2025 Downtown Area Plan adopted by the city council in November.

“I think that all kind of led up to the momentum that we're seeing in the market for these projects to get going,” DDP Senior Vice President of Planning and Community Impact Andrew Iltis said.

Conversions are also made easier by Denver having a chunk of office buildings constructed in the 1960s, '70s and '80s that are aging out of modern office needs and have plates that can be easily adapted, Iltis said. 

The DDP set goals to convert 7M SF of unused office space downtown and add 4,000 more housing units in the downtown core.

Four proposed projects — conversions of the University, Symes and Petroleum buildings and the Denver Energy Center — would account for 1.3M SF of converted office space of that goal, Iltis said. 

Downtown currently has about 40,000 residential units, he said.

“The longer-term vision for downtown is building in more resilience with a downtown that has more residential and has more housing density,” Iltis said. “When you get a critical mass of residents, it starts to build a true neighborhood.”

Though downtown’s recovery numbers are increasing, they haven't gotten back to prepandemic levels of visitors or employees. The weekday return-to-office rate is 61% per the DDP’s November report.

Swartz said the conversions support other revitalization efforts and existing uses downtown by bringing the needed population to the area.

“We have all sorts of these great, strong uses downtown, and the more people who live there and are there 24/7, the more you can turn that into a thriving 24/7 neighborhood that is not as dependent on one particular use,” she said.

Asher Luzzatto, president of The Luzzatto Co., which is converting the High Fidelity Plaza and the Denver Energy Center, said he believes the DDDA’s investment is crucial to a speedy downtown recovery.

The High Fidelity Plaza and Denver Energy Center are “almost perfectly suited” for conversion thanks to the buildings’ plate sizes and locations, he said.

Luzzatto is planning to turn the two buildings at 621 and 633 17th St., known as High Fidelity Plaza, into 700 residential units with 100K SF of commercial space, including coworking space and a childcare facility, according to the Denver Business Journal.

Similarly, one of the two buildings at the Denver Energy Center, located at 1625 and 1675 Broadway St., will be converted to 350 residential units.

“I think the public will see in a few years that every dollar that was invested in bringing residents to downtown and revitalizing retail and restaurant businesses is going to come back many-fold, because it's going to create a vibrancy where there will be follow-up investment and development for years to come,” Luzzatto said.