Progress and futility: U.S. 36 corridor stuck between Boulder and a hard place.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: WHO OWNS COLORADO

Anybody who has been around the Front Range awhile will recall the days when the landscape from U.S. 36 from Denver to Boulder was where the fruited plain met the purple mountains majesty.

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It was "one of the most beautiful interurban roads in the United States," former Gov. Dick Lamm told Rocky Mountain News reporter Guy Kelly in 1993. "It wasn't a drive, it was a religious experience. ... The soul would soar when you'd drive to Boulder."

All that changed, starting in the early 1990s with Superior, Colo.'s Rock Creek, the 1,570-acre residential development that turned the town from a hamlet with a gas station and general store into a bedroom community. A few years later came Interlocken in Broomfield, then Flatlron Crossing mall, also in Broomfield, and Westminster Promenade, an entertainment district. In Louisville, mostly tucked behind a hill, was StorageTek and later Sun Microsystems. The acreage since has been razed by Conoco Phillips Co. in order to be morphed by 2013 into a 432-acre corporate learning and global technology center.

Even before all this construction, Lamm was not pleased. "It's not only environmentally obnoxious but economically stupid to fill up this beautiful roadway," he said.

True, not everybody loves what has become of the U.S. 36 corridor. But what haunts the thousands of residents and hundreds of businesses along the highway today is not so much lost vistas as the sputtering of the economic engine that drove development there in the first place. (U.S. 36 stretches from Estes Park to Champaign, III., but for the purpose of this article we'll focus on the Westminster-Broomfield-Louisville area.)

The fault lies not in the northwest metro area, but in ... everything.

"The market is incredibly slow overall," says Mary Sullivan, Denver-based senior vice president with CB Richard Ellis' Investment Properties Institutional Group. "There are no sales."

How about leasing? "The northwest corridor has overall vacancies of about 26 percent. They have direct vacancy rates of about 16 percent, but they also have a 285,000-square-foot building under construction, and with the sublease space there you've got about 1.857 million square feet that is available," Sullivan adds. "And you don't have positive absorption for the year. It's not as bad as the southeast market, but ..."

But here's the kicker. Despite the nasty numbers, despite the credit crunch, despite the anxiety, northwest corridor developers and officials are resolutely positive, almost buoyant...