Greater Downtown Plan

Grand Junction, CO | 2019

Cascadia Partners played a key role Vibrant Together, a plan to guide the work of the City of Grand Junction (CO) Downtown Development Authority. The plan was led by Community Builders in collaboration with the Downtown Development Authority of Grand Junction, the City of Grand Junction, Jim Leggitt Studios, and Swift Engineering. Cascadia Partners performed a market assessment for Downtown Gunnison which identified key economic drivers that will influence demand for private investment in the area. Building on this work, the Cascadia team deployed real estate pro-forma analysis to model potential development scenarios on key opportunity sites in the downtown. The initial analysis was based on the existing zoning standards and financial incentive programs. As part of a multi-day, iterative process that involved multiple stakeholders, Cascadia Partners tested the impact of various zoning and incentive policy changes on the pro-forma performance. Cascadia worked closely with Jim Leggit Studios to create sketches of potential developments which would be possible under the proposed code changes. This work led to a set of code change and policy recommendations for the City to remove barriers to and actively encourage desired development types. Cascadia Partners also prepared a real estate prospectus for a key opportunity site and assisted with outreach to developers.