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Denver at night

Denver

Mile High and Poised to Soar

Denver is no stranger to booms and busts. Its cityscape changed dramatically as its economic fortunes dipped and soared, from Denver ’s earliest days as a mining town to its present as a hub of technology, telecommunications, and tourism. Each economic boom fueled the razing of old buildings and the building of new. The Denver Urban Renewal Authority leveled much of the city’s oldest neighborhood, Auraria, in the 1970s and demolished 30 blocks of the Central Business District.

denver bus stio

Historic preservation laws have made such demolition mostly a thing of the past. But economic fortunes still have a dramatic impact on the city’s building and housing profile. The oil bust of the 1980s saw Denver lose population, but the city rebounded in the 1990s with a large increase in population and rapid development in the suburbs. Immigration, primarily from Mexico, and an influx of young, mobile Americans boosted Denver’s metro population by one million and gave the city a new age and ethnic profile; residents in their 20s and early 30s now make up Denver’s largest age groups, while the foreign-born population has nearly tripled in the last decade.

With 62 percent of the city’s foreign-born residents arriving in the United States only in the last 10 years, Denver faces the challenge of integrating new immigrants into the economic and cultural life of the city. At the same time it faces the challenge of falling employment, having lost 40,000 jobs between 2000 and 2002. Racial and ethnic minorities lag behind their white counterparts in educational levels; Denver is one of a handful of U.S. cities in which the percentage of adults who have completed high school dropped between 1990 and 2000, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.