Office-to-Housing Conversion in Greater Downtown Denver

Of 310 commercial and public buildings at least 60 feet tall in Greater Downtown Denver, none pencil for residential conversion, with or without a grant from the RESIDE Act, at default assumptions.

CO-1 · Greater Downtown Denver, Colorado · Screened from City and County of Denver open GIS data · Last updated 2026-09-13 · Cite or download the data

Buildings screened

310

≥ 60 ft, commercial or public use

Pencil unsubsidized

no grant required

Unlocked by RESIDE

at default assumptions

Worth a study

284

suitability score ≥ 50

Median gap per home

$152K

score ≥ 50, not already pencilling

Never pencil

310

at default assumptions

Loading building data…

Every assumption in the model is a slider. Change conversion cost, unit size, circulation efficiency or completed value in the Assumptions tab and all 310 buildings re-score and re-rank live. The full analysis continues below.

Denver’s study named 16 buildings. This screen rates all 16 at least worth a feasibility study, as it does 284 of the 310 it screens.

In August 2023 the City and County of Denver and the architecture firm Gensler rated 21 downtown office buildings good candidates for conversion to housing and published the top 16 by address. This model measures the floor plates of the city outlines those addresses fall in, and rates all 16 at least worth a professional feasibility study — a bar 284 of the 310 buildings in this screen clear, so the agreement says more about the buildings this screen covers than about how either list was chosen.

The 16 buildings Denver’s 2023 adaptive-reuse study ranked highest, as screened by this model on 2026-09-13.
Study building	Score	Rating	Homes	Daylit	Depth	Notes
910 16th St.modeled as 900 16th St	96	Strong candidate	170	96%	32 ft	City outline also covers 14 other addresses; its figures may include neighbouring buildings
1775 Sherman St.	83	Strong candidate	444	88%	52 ft	—
1401 17th St.	69	Worth a feasibility study	266	79%	60 ft	—
1675 Broadway	68	Worth a feasibility study	333	80%	62 ft	—
1625 Broadway	69	Worth a feasibility study	358	80%	61 ft	—
1660 Lincoln St.	71	Strong candidate	431	82%	59 ft	—
225 E 16th Ave.	88	Strong candidate	180	89%	49 ft	—
370 17th St.	57	Worth a feasibility study	1,140	71%	62 ft	—
1801 Broadway	77	Strong candidate	232	84%	56 ft	—
1900 Grant St.	86	Strong candidate	158	86%	47 ft	—
1776 N Lincoln St.modeled as 1700 N Broadway	56	Worth a feasibility study	2,073	68%	59 ft	City outline also covers 5 other addresses; its figures may include neighbouring buildings
821 17th St.	87	Strong candidate	361	98%	51 ft	City outline also covers 5 other addresses; its figures may include neighbouring buildings
621 17th St.	84	Strong candidate	1,169	84%	41 ft	—
700 17th St.modeled as 701 16th St	68	Worth a feasibility study	392	81%	63 ft	One merged outline in the city’s data with 1605–1615 California St. City outline also covers 12 other addresses; its figures may include neighbouring buildings
303 W. Colfax Ave.modeled as 1359 Court Pl	90	Strong candidate	138	87%	28 ft	City outline also covers 1 other address; its figures may include neighbouring buildings
1605–1615 California St.modeled as 701 16th St	68	Worth a feasibility study	392	81%	63 ft	One merged outline in the city’s data with 700 17th St. City outline also covers 12 other addresses; its figures may include neighbouring buildings

The study estimated its top 16 could add over five thousand homes. Counting only daylit floor area, at 750 sq ft per home and an 80% circulation factor, this model finds room for 4,711 homes in the 10 study buildings whose city outline is recorded under the study’s own address and not flagged as merged. The other 6 study addresses fall inside outlines that may also cover neighbouring buildings, so their figures are left out of that total. The study’s own unit-size assumptions are not in its published summary, so the two totals are not directly comparable.

Of the 194 buildings this screen rates strong candidates, 185 are not on the published list; the highest-scoring are 1955 Arapahoe St, 1776 N Grant St, 918 17th St, 2300 Welton St, 1950 N Logan St, 1865 Larimer St, 2131 Lawrence St and 300 E 17th Ave. Only 16 of the study’s 21 good candidates were published, so a few of these may be among the five left unnamed.

Good floor plates are not the same as buildings that pencil. At $236K per home — the average price per Denver apartment unit sold in the second quarter of 2026 — none of the 310 buildings screened here pencil for conversion, with or without a RESIDE Act grant, at default assumptions.

Why floor plates decide which buildings are worth studying

Floor-plate geometry decides whether an office floor can hold apartments at all. In Greater Downtown Denver most screened buildings clear that bar; what stops them is cost, covered below.

3001 N Fox St — 88% of the building’s floor area sits within daylight reach of a facade; the drawing shows its typical floor, where the share is 80%. The hatched area is windowless core: 11,347 sq ft per typical floor that must be renovated but can never be rented as an apartment. Deepest interior point: 77 ft from the nearest window.

Building codes limit how far a habitable room can sit from a window — roughly 25 to 35 feet. This model erodes each real building footprint inward by 35 feet, the generous end of that range. What survives the erosion is windowless dead core. What remains is the daylit band where apartments can legally go.

Across the 310 buildings screened here, the median has 86% of its floor area within daylight reach and a deepest interior point 53 feet from the nearest window. 15 of them are past the 80-foot threshold where conversion requires carving a light well through the building — at which point it effectively never pencils.

Conversion cost is charged on gross floor area while revenue is earned only on the daylit band. That is not an accounting trick — it is the real economics. You must gut, re-plumb and sprinkler the windowless core, but you can never rent an apartment in it. Deep floor plates are penalized twice, which is precisely why they fail in practice.

This is why a subsidy program alone does not produce conversions, and why a list of vacant buildings is not a pipeline. Information was never the bottleneck — cities have published vacancy reports for years. The bottleneck is that establishing which specific buildings are physically convertible is expensive expert work.

Why no building in Greater Downtown Denver is unlocked by the RESIDE Act

A building is unlocked when it fails on financing alone and the modeled grant closes the difference. At default assumptions, no building screened here that does not already pencil has a gap small enough.

Of the 310 buildings screened, 284 have a conversion suitability score of at least 50 and do not pencil on their own. Across those buildings the median financing gap before any subsidy is $152K per home, while the modeled RESIDE award is capped at $60K per home. The grant covers part of the gap; it does not close it.

Profiled in detail — the highest-scoring buildings in the survey: 1955 Arapahoe St, 1776 N Grant St, 918 17th St, 2300 Welton St, 900 16th St, 1950 N Logan St, 1865 Larimer St, 2131 Lawrence St, 300 E 17th Ave, 1615 N Pennsylvania St, 500 E 19th Ave, 2321 Arapahoe St, 1600 17th St, 1651 N Logan St, 1234 N Elati St, 721 19th St, 2180 Stout St, 280 E 20th Ave, 2100 Blake St, 1250 Welton St, 724 17th St, 801 15th St, 1215 19th St, 440 14th St and 2350 Cleveland Pl.

All 310 screened buildings are in the survey above, where the completed-value and cost sliders show what would have to change.

What Denver is already doing

Denver is already paying to convert downtown offices, and what it pays per home shows how far a capped federal grant has to stretch here.

In 2025 the Denver Downtown Development Authority, the City of Denver and the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority committed almost $56 million to downtown office-to-residential conversions totalling 520 homes, Bisnow reported. They include the Petroleum Building at 110 16th St. (178 homes), the Symes Building at 820 16th St. (116), the University Building at 910 16th St. (120) and the Dry Goods Building at 702 16th St. (106). The University Building is one of the 16 the city’s own study ranked highest.

That is about $107K per home from those three public bodies. The RESIDE award modeled here is capped at $60K per home. Among the 284 buildings on this page that score at least 50 and do not already pencil, this model’s median financing gap before any grant is $152K per home.

Downtown Denver’s office vacancy rate stood at 29.2% in early 2026, according to the Downtown Denver Partnership, only slightly higher than a year earlier. That figure describes downtown; the study area on this page also takes in Five Points and North Capitol Hill.

Colorado's 1st Congressional District, which covers nearly all of Denver, is represented by Diana DeGette, in office since 1997. She lost the Democratic primary to Melat Kiros on June 30, 2026, so the district's member of Congress is likely to change in January 2027.

What the RESIDE Act actually funds

The RESIDE Act is law, but its funding is contingent and its money goes to cities rather than developers. Both facts are widely misreported.

The Revitalizing Empty Structures Into Desirable Environments Act was introduced as H.R. 5591 in the 119th Congress and enacted as Section 210 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, signed into law on July 11, 2026. It directs HUD to run a Blighted Building to Housing Conversion Program awarding competitive grants to convert vacant commercial and industrial buildings into affordable housing, with priority for Opportunity Zones and economically distressed areas.

The program has no dedicated appropriation. HUD may use up to $100 million of the amount by which annual HOME Investment Partnerships appropriations exceed $1.35 billion, in each of fiscal years 2027 through 2031. In a year Congress funds HOME at or below $1.35 billion, the program receives nothing at all. The $100 million figure widely quoted for this program is a contingent ceiling, not an expected annual sum.

Individual awards are capped at $10.0M, and eligible applicants are states and localities that are eligible HOME grantees — not private developers or building owners. That changes what this tool is for. It is not a developer’s capital stack; it is a worksheet for the grant application a city would file, and for the question of which buildings would justify the ask.

Because HUD has not published a Notice of Funding Availability, the award formula used here — 30% of eligible conversion cost, capped at $60K per home and $10.0M per award — is modeled on how comparable HUD gap-financing programs are structured. The $10.0M per-award cap is statutory. The rest is an assumption, and 165 of the 310 buildings here hit that statutory ceiling.

How this was computed, and what it cannot tell you

Every figure on this page is reproducible from public data. Stating the limits is part of the method, not a disclaimer attached to it.

Building outlines, aerial-survey heights, street addresses and zoning come from the City and County of Denver’s open data catalog. Footprints are projected to a local tangent plane in feet, eroded inward by 35 feet to separate daylit band from dead core, and the largest circle that fits inside each footprint gives the distance from the deepest interior point to the nearest facade. Unit yield is the daylit band times a 80% circulation factor divided by a 750 sq ft average home, across every floor above the ground floor. Cost is a base of $260/sq ft plus itemized change-of-occupancy triggers — plumbing risers, operable windows, egress stairs, sprinklers — weighed against completed value, then against the modeled grant.

For Greater Downtown Denver the model replaces 2 defaults with local figures. Completed value per home is $236K: the average price per apartment unit sold in Denver in the second quarter of 2026 (CBRE, 2026-07-21). The seismic retrofit allowance is $0 per sq ft: Denver's existing-building code requires seismic upgrades on a change of occupancy only when a building moves to a higher risk category, and office and apartment buildings are both Risk Category II (UpCodes, 2026-09-13).

The geometry math is validated against shapes with known analytic answers, and computed floor areas agree with the city’s own recorded areas to within 0.01%, which confirms the coordinate projection. The browser model that powers the interactive survey above is checked against the Python engine on every build; both must agree on units, cost, grant, gap, tier and score for all 310 buildings.

What this tool does not know

It screens geometry from footprints. It cannot see interior cores, columns, ceiling heights, post-tension slabs or mechanical systems.
It does not know which buildings are vacant. Downtown Denver’s office vacancy rate was 29.2% in early 2026; this screen does not assert that any specific building is empty.
Story count is derived from aerial-survey height ÷ floor-to-floor, not read from plans.
It does not model the statute’s prioritization of Opportunity Zones and economically distressed areas, or the terms of Denver’s own conversion financing.
HUD has not published an award formula, so every per-project grant here is modeled rather than known.
A high score means worth a professional feasibility study — never “convertible.”
Heights come from the city’s aerial survey of roof outlines, not from LiDAR or building plans.
Towers recorded as several roof pieces are modeled in height bands. The depth score uses the typical floor, so a deep podium weighs on a building’s economics but does not by itself fail the slimmer tower above it.
Completed value per home is the average sale price of existing Denver apartments, which may understate what newly converted homes are worth.

Questions

Can empty office buildings in downtown Denver be converted into housing?

Of 310 commercial and public buildings at least 60 feet tall in Greater Downtown Denver, this model rates 284 at least worth a professional feasibility study. At default assumptions none pencil, with or without a RESIDE Act grant. Many floor plates are workable; the gap between conversion cost and what a Denver apartment sells for is the harder problem.

Why do most office-to-residential conversions fail?

Usually floor-plate geometry. Apartments need light and air, and building codes limit how far a habitable room can sit from a window — roughly 25 to 35 feet. Office floors were built deep on purpose, so the middle of the plate is windowless core that can never legally become a bedroom. In this survey the median building has 86% of its floor area within daylight reach and a deepest interior point 53 feet from the nearest window. 15 of the 310 buildings are past the 80-foot threshold where conversion requires carving a light well, at which point it effectively never pencils. In Greater Downtown Denver, though, most floor plates clear that bar; the gap between conversion cost and completed value is what keeps them from penciling.

Which downtown Denver office buildings did the city's 2023 study pick, and does this model agree?

Denver's 2023 adaptive-reuse study, prepared with the architecture firm Gensler, rated 21 downtown buildings good candidates and published the top 16 by address: 910 16th St., 1775 Sherman St., 1401 17th St., 1675 Broadway, 1625 Broadway, 1660 Lincoln St., 225 E 16th Ave., 370 17th St., 1801 Broadway, 1900 Grant St., 1776 N Lincoln St., 821 17th St., 621 17th St., 700 17th St., 303 W. Colfax Ave. and 1605–1615 California St. This model screens all 16 and rates all 16 at least worth a feasibility study. It rates 284 of the 310 buildings it screens the same way, so the agreement says little about how either list was chosen.

What is the RESIDE Act and is it law?

The RESIDE Act — Revitalizing Empty Structures Into Desirable Environments — was introduced as H.R. 5591 in the 119th Congress and enacted as Section 210 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, signed into law on July 11, 2026. It directs HUD to run a Blighted Building to Housing Conversion Program making competitive grants to convert vacant commercial and industrial buildings into affordable housing, with priority for Opportunity Zones and economically distressed areas.

How much money does the RESIDE Act actually provide?

Less reliably than the headline suggests. The program has no dedicated appropriation. HUD may use up to $100 million of the amount by which annual HOME Investment Partnerships appropriations exceed $1.35 billion, in each of fiscal years 2027 through 2031. In any year Congress funds HOME at or below $1.35 billion, the program receives nothing. Individual competitive awards are capped at $10 million.

Who applies for a RESIDE Act grant — the developer or the city?

The city. Eligible applicants are states and localities that are eligible HOME grantees, not private developers or building owners. That makes this tool a municipal grant-application worksheet rather than a developer's pro-forma: it estimates what Denver could credibly ask HUD for, and which buildings would justify the ask.

How much public money has Denver committed per home to office conversions?

In 2025 Denver's Downtown Development Authority, the city and the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority committed almost $56 million to conversion projects totalling 520 homes, about $107K per home. The RESIDE award modeled here is capped at $60K per home, so on its own it would cover part of that, not all of it.

Does this tool know which Denver buildings are actually vacant?

No. Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate stood at 29.2% in early 2026, according to the Downtown Denver Partnership, but this screen does not assert that any specific building is empty. Ownership, lease status and tenancy are outside what public outline and zoning data can show.

How accurate is this analysis?

It is a screen, not a feasibility study. The geometry is computed from real city footprints and aerial-survey heights, and the floor-plate math is validated against shapes with known analytic answers; computed floor areas agree with the city's own recorded areas to within 0.01%. But the model cannot see interior columns, existing cores, ceiling heights, post-tension slabs, or mechanical systems, and story counts are inferred from height rather than read from plans. A high score means a building is worth a professional feasibility study — never that it is convertible.

Cite or reuse this analysis

Everything on this page is free to quote, republish and build on, with credit. The scored dataset behind it is one download.

Suggested citation

RESIDE Act Feasibility Engine, “Office-to-Housing Conversion in Greater Downtown Denver,” resideact.org/denver, updated 2026-09-13.

Download the scored dataset (GeoJSON)Read the method

The text and dataset are licensed under CC BY 4.0: copy, adapt and republish them, commercially or not, with credit and a link back. Footprints, heights and zoning come from the City and County of Denver, whose own terms still apply to that source data. See the terms of use.

Sources

In August 2023 the City and County of Denver and the architecture firm Gensler rated 21 downtown office buildings good candidates for conversion to housing, published the top 16 by address, and estimated those 16 could add over five thousand homes. Mile High CRE, “Study Identifies 21 Downtown Denver Office Buildings as Good Candidates for Conversion” — verified 2026-09-13.
In 2025 the Denver Downtown Development Authority, the City of Denver and the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority committed almost $56M to downtown office-to-residential conversion projects totalling 520 homes, including the Petroleum, Symes, University and Dry Goods buildings. Bisnow, “Downtown Denver Office-To-Residential Conversion Activity Heating Up With $56M Boost” — verified 2026-09-13.
Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate stood at 29.2% in early 2026, only slightly higher than in 2025. Downtown Denver Partnership, “March 2026 High Frequency Update: Downtown Denver Achieves Highest Post-Pandemic Return-to-Office Rate” — verified 2026-09-13.
The RESIDE Act is Section 210 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which was signed into law on July 11, 2026. Bipartisan Policy Center, “Inside the Deal: What's in the Final 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act” — verified 2026-09-12.
HUD may use up to $100M of the amount by which annual HOME appropriations exceed $1.35B, in FY2027 through FY2031, to award competitive grants of up to $10M each to states and localities. Congressional Research Service, “ROAD to Housing Act of 2025 (R48732)” — verified 2026-09-12.
The RESIDE Act was introduced as H.R. 5591 in the 119th Congress. Congress.gov, “H.R.5591 — RESIDE Act” — verified 2026-09-12.
Melat Kiros defeated Rep. Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary for Colorado's 1st Congressional District on June 30, 2026. Colorado Public Radio, “Melat Kiros defeats longtime incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Denver’s congressional primary” — verified 2026-09-13.
Building outlines with heights, street addresses, statistical neighborhood boundaries and zoning come from the City and County of Denver's open data catalog. City and County of Denver, “Denver Open Data Catalog: Building Outlines 2022, Addresses, Statistical Neighborhoods, Zoning” — verified 2026-09-13.
Completed value per home is $236K: the average price per apartment unit sold in Denver in the second quarter of 2026. CBRE, “Denver Multifamily Figures Q2 2026” — verified 2026-07-21.
The seismic retrofit allowance is $0 per sq ft: Denver's existing-building code requires seismic upgrades on a change of occupancy only when a building moves to a higher risk category, and office and apartment buildings are both Risk Category II. UpCodes, “Denver Existing Building Code 2024, Chapter 10, Section 1006.3” — verified 2026-09-13.

The scored dataset behind this page is available as GeoJSON. Findings generated 2026-09-13 from City and County of Denver Open Data (Building Outlines 2022, Addresses, Statistical Neighborhoods; Zoning MapServer).