By 2025, Denver airport area may emerge as economic hub

DENVER (AP) — Julie Bender walks to the panoramic window in the Denver International Airport Business Partnership's conference room and looks east over what may be the least appealing vista in the city.

It's mostly blank, flat land, dotted with a few buildings all the way to the horizon. The view is anything but dull to Bender, who begins pointing at spots in the distance.

Just below is the redevelopment area where Denver's old Stapleton Airport was located. To the south is the blossoming Fitzsimons medical campus and a revitalized Buckley Air Force Base.

Bender twists her neck to gaze northward. There's another Stapleton development. Farther on is where Kroenke Sports Enterprises — owners of the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche and the Pepsi Center — will build a new professional soccer stadium and retail center in Commerce City.

Beyond that are thousands of new homes under construction in mega subdivisions. And beyond that the city of Brighton is building a new shopping, business and residential center on its eastern side.

Bender points to the jagged, white caps of Denver International Airport, just visible in the distance.

That's why all this is happening, she says.

Ten years ago Denver city leaders opened the new airport on middle-of-nowhere farmland — 53 square miles of blankness that was itself miles from anything.

And everything else has followed.

"It has really shifted the development pattern of the metro area to the north," said Bender, the president of the DIA Business Partnership.

"The airport has helped to catalyze these other developments. Without the airport, the projects may have happened, but they wouldn't have happened so quickly."

"Quickly" is the key word for the emerging boom surrounding the airport in Denver's northeastern quadrant. Over the next 20 years, the DIA Business Partnership district — about 300 square miles around the airport — is expected to see the most growth along the Front Range.

One quarter of all metro-area growth will occur around the airport. The rate of job growth within the district will be more than double that of job growth outside it, according to figures from the partnership.

By 2025, Bender said, DIA and the surrounding business district will contribute nearly $85 billion to Denver's economy, up substantially from the $15.3 billion it contributes now.

What will emerge in the next 20 years, Bender said, is a new power center in Denver, one with as much sway and size as downtown or the Denver Tech Center. And DIA will be the centerpiece.

"In effect," she said, "it becomes a new downtown."