Urban appeal: denver's city center remains option for homebuyers.

• Author: Schwab, Robert

Chris Frampton Stands in the wind on the Millennium Bridge, connecting the LoDo end 16th Street Mall to Denver's River-from park on the South Platte. Last year at this time he was in Austin, Texas, selling residential lots on a Jack Nicklaus signature golf course. But Framptons father's business partner, Mark Smith, called him to ask if he would take over selling East West Partners of Denver's condo project, the company's first development of its large property in the Central Platte Valley off Downtown Denver. Frampton took the offer and now says he is selling "the coolest project in the country."

But standing on the $9 million bridge, with a silver mast tilted through the middle of it, Frampton is surrounded by something else he has gotten himself into. From the Highland neighborhood to the northwest, to the Golden Triangle south and east, plans for more than 7,000 residential units -- condos, apartments and town homes -- have been announced by a variety of developers. It's Denver's entry into the hottest national trend in real estate: urban-centered living. At East West Partners and other residential properties near Downtown, wealthy people who own homes in the mountains are now buying or renting second homes in the city to be closer to the concert and sports venues, museums, galleries and restaurants that make a city's national and international reputation.

But Frampton might as well lash himself to that mast. He will have to weather the harsh winds of a down economy before he can expect to make a bigger mark on the 25 acres that East West holds between Union Station and Commons Park and the river. Yet, his units are selling. In the last week of February, Frampton inked a sales contract on one of eight unsold penthouse condos in his three-building Riverfront complex at the west end of the bridge. The furnished unit was listed at $2.45 million, but the actual price remains confidential. That would make 190 of 197 units sold.

The sales don't surprise Anne Warhover, president and CEO of the Downtown Denver Partnership Inc. Denver remains an attractive place to live even during hard times, but Warhover doesn't expect Downtown Denver to escape the effects of the state's economic slowdown.

Downtown is Warhover's bailiwick. Her nonprofit advocacy group is dedicated to promoting the city's central core. She said talk of 7,000 new residential units planned in the developing and redeveloping neighborhoods surrounding downtown -- Highland...