6 westword.com WESTWORD APRIL 2-8, 2026 | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Towering Ambition COULD ASHER LUZZATTO SAVE DOWNTOWN DENVER? BY BRENDAN JOEL KELLEY Negotiations had dragged on for months, and almost upended Asher Luzzatto’s vision. Luzzatto had spent a good part of 2025 trying to extend a ground lease on a 6,650-square-foot parcel beneath one of his two towers at 621 and 633 17th Street, downtown Denver offi ce towers he’d pur- chased for a bargain $3.2 million last spring. But without the lease extension, no lender would touch the project. The ground under 633 17th belongs to Rhoda Krasner, the octogenarian matriarch who also owns Lakeside Amusement Park, and Krasner wasn’t budging. Her position was that prior owners had undervalued the property in a 2015 assessment and that she’d been shorted on rent for a decade. This wasn’t Luzzatto’s doing; he says he was car- rying the “perceived wrongs” of owners who came before him. For long stretches, Krasner’s side went dark. There were moments when Luzzatto considered building only at 621 and aban- doning 633 entirely. He calls that “the easy way out.” But the deal closed in the early morning hours of the last possible day, ahead of a deadline to fi le paperwork with the Denver Downtown Develop- ment Authority (DDDA). “The last week was basically around the clock,” Luzzatto says.The Luzzatto family and the Krasner family are now bound to each other for 99 years, the length of the new ground lease. But Asher Luzzatto is hoping to get his 17th Street project going much, much sooner than that. And the city is counting on it. The Towers Thirty-eight-year-old Asher Luzzatto is the president of The Luzzatto Company, an L.A.- based real estate fi rm founded by his father, Marc Luzzatto. Over the past year, the company has accumulated a signifi cant real estate position in downtown Denver: four offi ce towers total- ing roughly 1.75 million square feet. That’s about 5.5 percent of downtown’s entire offi ce inven- tory, roughly the footprint of Empower Field. The two 17th Street towers – one built in 1957, at the time the tallest building in Denver, the other in 1974 – went for a total of $3.2 million. In September, Luzzatto added the Denver Energy Center’s two towers at 1625 and 1675 Broadway for $5.25 million. The Energy Center last sold in 2013 for $176 million; JPMorgan Chase foreclosed on it in 2022. Luzzatto is buying into a downtown that’s hemorrhaging value: Offi ce vacancy in the core business district sits near 40 percent, roughly triple pre-pandemic levels. More than a billion dollars in offi ce building value has vanished since COVID, according to a BusinessDen analysis, and some of the lowest-tier buildings are completely empty. The math is punishing: Buildings that sold for hundreds of millions a decade ago are now trading at 80 percent discounts, or not trading at all. The plan for the 17th Street towers, now branded High Fidelity Plaza, is to convert the offi ce space into 712 apartments while also creating a children’s museum, bodega, wine bar, cafe, bookstore, daycare center, art gallery, coworking space and rooftop pool. The total cost is projected at $315 million, and Luzzatto wanted roughly $63 million in DDDA gap fi nancing for High Fidelity. He plans to apply for a separate loan for the Energy Center, where he wants to add another 360 units. On March 25, the DDDA board voted unanimously to approve the $63 million loan, its largest to date. The loan still needs sign- off from Denver City Council, but with that vote, Luzzato cleared a critical funding hurdle. Nothing at this scale has been done before in Denver. Arguably, it hasn’t been done at this scale anywhere outside New York. “Somebody’s got to do it fi rst,” Luzzatto says. “Somebody’s got to do it in a market outside of New York, because every city in the country is facing the exact same issues with their downtown cores.” The DDDA is a city-affi liated body that collects property tax revenues in the downtown area and reinvests them in develop- ment projects. It was created in 2008 to fund the redevelopment of Union Station, and for years operated as a little-known taxing authority covering a small foot- print around the station. In 2024, at Mayor Mike Johnston’s urging, property owners and residents in the district voted to expand its boundaries to include most of downtown and authorized $570 million in bonds. No new taxes were levied for the expansion; the bonds are repaid with the increased tax revenue that new develop- ments generate. Since last August, the DDDA has ap- proved more than $242 million in funding for a range of projects: $30 million for Civic Center Park improvements; $23 million to acquire parking lots behind the Denver Pa- vilions for future mixed-use development; $38 million to purchase and improve the Pavilions itself; $7 million to convert the McNichols Building into a restaurant and retail space; and various amounts for other downtown projects. The fi rst to be approved was $7 million for the Downtown Safety Action Plan, a dedicated police unit and outreach program; that was renewed at the same March 25 meeting where Luzzatto’s ask got the nod. His wasn’t the fi rst offi ce-to-residential conversion proposal. The DDDA had ap- proved funding for three smaller projects before Luzzatto’s High Fidelity: $14 mil- lion for the historic Petroleum Building at 110 16th Street (178 NEWS continued on page 8 KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS Asher Luzzatto of the Luzzatto Company. MONIKA SWIDERSKI COURTESY THE LUZZATTO COMPANY
