Downtown Denver passersby are accustomed to seeing “for lease” signs tacked onto windows across the city, especially those that advertise ground-floor space. That’s partly because several Denver zoning regulations require new developments to feature ground-floor retail. 

These spaces are meant to be leased by retailers and restaurants. Sometimes, they are used as a building amenity, such as a gym or community space. But Denver building owners, developers and architects are considering new strategies to activate ground-floor vacancies, ones that go beyond restaurants and retailers and include artist-in-residence programs or reduced rent.

“We always talk about amenitizing the retail in the space for the rest of the building, for the rest of the ecosystem. But in the current market here, it’s challenging to run a business, to run a restaurant,” Belay Development principal Brock Fleming said at Bisnow’s Denver State of the Market on Sept. 24, adding that these challenges have caused a lot of empty ground-floor space. 

Retail vacancies sit at 5% across the Denver metro and 6.4% in central Denver, according to Marcus & Millichap’s third-quarter Denver retail market report released in early September.

Although local vacancies are on par with the national rate of 6%, Denver retailers gave up 162K SF in the first half of the year. The Denver area was the only major Mountain West metro with net space relinquishments in the first half of 2026, according to Marcus & Millichap. 

“When these spaces are sitting vacant, they don’t do any good,” Fleming said at the Bisnow event, held at The Curtis in downtown Denver. “So for the community and for the owners, figuring out a way to activate them is super important.”

Filling ground-level vacancies can also help turn Denver’s central business district from a formal business area into a neighborhood, SAR+ principal Dan Craig said.

Landlords should treat ground-level space as a building amenity and a reason people want to be in that building, E2M Venture founder and CEO Marc Perusse said.

To fill vacancies, two downtown Denver buildings launched artist residency programs. 

Apartment building Flora RiNo launched its program earlier this year, giving artists, writers, designers, filmmakers, chefs and other creatives a rent-free studio or gallery space and a rent-free, fully furnished apartment. In exchange, the artists are asked to participate in the community, lead workshops or host an exhibition.

The program creates activity in what would be a vacant space and opens the building to the public, including people who didn’t know the apartments were there, Fleming said.

“It’s definitely increased some activity for us on the commercial side, interest there, and our residents love it and are loving the community that it builds,” Fleming said. “We think it’s something that has an opportunity to be expanded.”

An office tower in Denver’s Golden Triangle neighborhood launched a similar program in late September. The artist residency program at 1290 Broadway gives artists about 3,800 SF on the first level to create art for six months. 

“[Forty-nine percent] of occupiers say amenities and services would make them renew; 50% would relocate for better ones,” according to a statement from program operator CBRE.

Another option to fill ground-floor vacancies is offering tenants discounted or percentage rent. 

The lobby of an office tower at 410 17th St. is occupied by Little Owl, which pays percentage rent because the coffee shop is a building amenity, Perusse said, noting that E2M Ventures co-owns the building with Cress Capital.

“Their rent at the end of the day isn’t a big number, but I can guarantee you we would not have tenants in that building that are in there today if that coffee shop didn’t exist,” Perusse said. 

Giving a tenant free base or discounted rent for a period of time might be hard in the short term, but it can create long-term value to the building, the business and the community, said developer Asher Luzzatto, who owns the Denver Energy Center at 1625 and 1675 Broadway and two office towers at 621 and 633 17th St.

“If we look at ourselves as sort of VCs or incubators, we can start to incubate businesses ourselves,” Luzzatto said. “We don’t have to wait for the city to do it.”

Activating ground-floor retail spaces and opening those areas to the community was an early part of the planning process for Luzzatto’s office-to-residential conversion projects along Broadway and 17th Street. 

At the 17th Street project, he plans to have a bodega, cafe, bakery and daycare in addition to an atrium that’s free and open to the public.

Luzzatto said he views himself as a steward rather than a landlord.

“If you’re a landlord, you’re maximizing current value,” he said. “As a steward, you’re maximizing long-term value, trusting that you might be sacrificing something in the near term, but over the long term, you’re building something, and that can relate to the ground-floor activation, too.” 

While these ideas sound great in theory, not all building owners are willing or able to underwrite ground-floor spaces at reduced or free rates.

“There’s a barrier right now with a lot of landlords who underwrote some sort of value associated with that space,” Perusse said. “And a lot of times, their lender will have restrictions in terms of what lease rate they can lease a space at.”

Several downtown Denver buildings are also going into receivership. Having a receiver involved can make offering space rent-free or at a discount that much more complicated.

“I think you’ve got to shift the perspective in terms of: It’s not, ‘what is the tenant doing for me,’ from how much rent they’re paying me,” Perusse said. “It’s what are they doing for me as it relates to the overall experience this building is providing to the greater community.” 

Another factor to consider is not every downtown ground-floor space is going to be filled with a restaurant, cafe or retailer, said Josh Brooks, co-director of Sasaki’s Denver office and Downtown Area Plan architect.

“I think what we in Denver need to do — and the area plan starts to suggest some of these things — is reframe what it means to be the first 40 feet of a building,” Brooks said. “I think the idea that every square inch needs to be commercial retail presence is just bullshit.”

Instead, he suggests residential stoops like those in Boston and New York City. 

Simplifying Denver’s regulatory environment around how companies can use public space can also help the city activate ground-floor spaces. For example, a cafe shouldn’t need a permit to put a couple of chairs outside, Brooks said.