The River North Art District, a magnet for the young, artistic and entrepreneurial, is facing serious distress, with hundreds of thousands of feet of vacant retail and a past year of low absorption.

The RiNo Business Improvement District and landlords are working to reverse that trend. But with rising rents, shifting foot traffic and creatives leaving for more affordable markets, the question remains: Will it be enough?

“At a high level, retail likes to be around retail,” Edens Managing Director Thomas Picarsic told Bisnow in an interview.

Edens owns several properties in RiNo, including Denver Central Market. Its strategy centers on connectivity, knitting together individual retail spaces to create a sense of place. That means leasing ground-floor spaces and making sure those businesses feed off one another.

“When you just have 6K SF or 7K SF of ground-floor retail sitting in a building by itself, it doesn’t create connectivity,” Picarsic said. “You might not even have sidewalks on the next street. How do you knit that whole neighborhood together?”

The broader central submarket that contains RiNo has struggled to retain retail tenants. It was one of five metro Denver submarkets with negative absorption in the past year, as tenants vacated 43K SF in 2024, according to Hoff & Leigh’s fourth-quarter retail report.

RiNo itself has seen net positive absorption of 20K SF in the last 12 months, according to a Newmark analysis of CoStar data.

The district’s 8.1% availability rate was more than double the metrowide availability rate of 3.9% as of the fourth quarter, according to Newmark.

The central submarket has 966K SF of vacant retail, trailing only the northwest and west markets, which each have just over 1M SF available.

Edens has ramped up activities at its properties, hosting 100-plus events in 2024, from movie nights to large-scale partnerships, like a Denver Center for the Performing Arts collaboration that brought 22,000 visitors to RiNo, Picarsic said.

The goal is to increase dwell time and create an ecosystem where businesses reinforce one another.

Breweries, once a pillar of RiNo’s creative and cultural scene, have been among the hardest hit businesses.

Citing rising rents and declining foot traffic, 14er Brewing and Beer Garden closed in late 2024, the latest in a string of brewery closures in the district. Winemaker Infinite Monkey Theorem also closed around the same time.

“The rapid pace of development and new buildings going up is kind of insane,” River North Brewery owner Matt Hess previously told Bisnow. “Along with all of that development, prices go up, rents go up, and that is going to come with a change in the people in the neighborhood."

That is what Alye Sharp, executive director of programs and partnerships for RiNo BID, is seeing across the district.

“We’re unfortunately seeing a lot of businesses, artists and creatives either closing or moving to places like Kansas City or Buffalo,” Sharp said in a January interview.

It is a familiar cycle: Creative industries help make a neighborhood attractive, leading to increased development, which in turn raises costs and pushes out many of the businesses that made the area desirable in the first place.

Over just the past five years, Denver’s median household income has jumped by $20K, according to the Hoff & Leigh report. The unemployment rate has risen slightly since 2023, hovering around 4%. Job growth is flat.

Still, other submarkets aren’t facing this issue as acutely. Tenants absorbed 306K SF over the past year in northeast Denver, while the south submarket had 112K SF of absorption, suggesting demand remains strong in those areas even as RiNo struggles.

Even beleaguered downtown had 17K SF more move-ins than move-outs in 2024.

But RiNo BID isn’t letting these shifts happen without a fight.

One of the district’s biggest initiatives is No Vacancy, a program designed to activate vacant storefronts by pairing developers with local artists and creative businesses.

“We worked with Alye on kicking off No Vacancy,” Picarsic said. “It’s an artist community. This is part of RiNo’s history.”

Edens and other landlords hand over the keys to empty spaces, allowing artists and entrepreneurs to move in temporarily at low or no cost. The idea is to fill empty storefronts with energy, giving new businesses a foothold while preventing vacancies from dragging down the area.

Development has slowed, with only 23K SF of retail space under construction, though all of that is preleased. Cherry Creek, meanwhile, has 78K SF of fully preleased retail inventory in the pipeline. And year-over-year retail rent growth in RiNo is still a pain point at 3%, according to Newmark. That compares to a metrowide increase of 3.6%.

RiNo is making moves, but the key question is whether these efforts can outpace the pressures forcing businesses to leave.

RiNo BID is also hosting roundtables connecting developers, property owners, and retailers, trying to build a more collaborative approach to retail leasing.

“We’re looking at lessons learned from other markets that have been through this,” Sharp said. “I’ve never seen gentrification at this speed, so it’s been a battle.”