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Newsletter — Issue 41 — Tuesday, August 18, 2026
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This newsletter has been published by Engage Colorado.
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The Drivers Series — Category 4 · Factor 4c
Colorado Showed It Can Improve Its Trajectory — Public Safety and Visible Urban Order
This Engage Colorado Newsletter reflects the personal opinions of Dan Caruso, written with the support of the Caruso Ventures team. The Ensuring Colorado's Innovation Future Coalition did not review and has not endorsed this Engage Colorado Newsletter.
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Category 4c of The Honest Assessment — Public Safety and Visible Urban Order — is the only factor in the twelve-factor framework where Colorado's score has been revised upward. When this assessment was first scored, no factor in the framework carried a weaker forward-looking mark. It has now moved up on both dimensions.
Every prior issue in this series has documented a problem. This one documents a reversal. This is encouraging, and it demonstrates how we — the public sector locking arms with the private sector — can build the momentum to make Colorado the most attractive innovation ecosystem in the world.
As with the broader Innovation Vision and The Honest Assessment, I led the preparation of this section and it reflects only my views.
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What This Factor Measures
Public safety shows up in relocation decisions in more ways than most people expect. Crime statistics are one of them. Just as important is what people see day to day: the encampment outside the office entrance, the shuttered storefront on the main retail corridor, the employee who stops coming downtown, the customer who suggests meeting somewhere else. Encampments, open drug markets, and the perception that the problem is going unaddressed are recruiting and retention liabilities — they affect a company's ability to attract talent, host customers, and sustain the daily quality of life employees expect.
Founders and executives making a location decision ask a simple version of the question: is this a place where my employees feel safe, where my customers want to visit, and where the daily experience of being in the city is getting better or worse? The geographies that cannot answer favorably are losing people.
What separates the Destination Geographies from the Departure Geographies here is not the existence of the problem. San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York did not invent urban disorder, and the Destination Geographies are not immune to it. The difference is the political response — whether leadership is actively, visibly, and effectively addressing the problem, or signaling that current conditions are acceptable.
That is what the forward-looking score measures. A place where disorder is worsening, or where leadership signals that current conditions are tolerable, sends a fundamentally different message than one where the trend is toward restoring order — regardless of where the two stand today.
Colorado has spent this entire assessment on the wrong side of that line. Denver's downtown core through 2023 and 2024 was the example, and Boulder was not far behind. When this factor was first scored, Colorado sat below even the Departure Geographies — worse than the places it is trying not to become, and falling faster than they were.
Colorado has now moved above them, and the direction has flipped from falling to rising. It is one of only two factors in the entire assessment where Colorado's forward direction is better than where it stands today. The Destination Geographies remain far ahead, and they are not standing still.
That is what changed.
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The Scoring
Factor 4c · Public Safety and Visible Urban Order · scores are out of 5 · current → trajectory
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Destination Geographies
Far ahead on visible urban order — and still improving rather than standing still.
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4.0 → ▲ 4.4
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Departure Geographies
Persistent disorder, and a political response signaling that current conditions are acceptable.
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2.0 → ▼ 1.5
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Colorado
The only factor in the framework revised upward — now above the Departure Geographies, with the direction flipped from falling to rising.
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2.5 → ▲ 2.8
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Colorado is 2.5 today and 2.8 on trajectory — one of only two factors in the framework where the forward direction is better than the current standing. It is also the only score in the framework that has been moved up since the assessment was first written.
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What Actually Changed
The disorder that defined Denver's downtown core through 2023 and 2024 has measurably receded. What makes that credible is that the city hired an independent organization to check.
Denver's housing department commissioned the Urban Institute to evaluate All In Mile High, the initiative it launched in 2023. What the evaluation found:
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• Large encampments, those with more than twenty people, are down 98%.
• Street homelessness has fallen from more than 1,400 people in 2023 to 518 — the lowest figure recorded since these counts began.
• Roughly 7,700 people have moved into permanent housing.
• Overall homelessness in Denver declined for the first time in nine years.
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One caveat belongs on the record. The January count night was sub-freezing, which opened cold-weather shelters and pushes the unsheltered number down.
The physical environment moved with it. 16th Street reopened in October 2025 after three and a half years and $175 million of reconstruction, and downtown has kept adding ground-floor businesses through the first quarter of 2026 — the private half of the equation, and the most visible one.
Boulder moved the same way, more narrowly and more contentiously. The city now pre-posts the upper Boulder Creek path, allowing same-day removal in place of the standard 72-hour notice. Its January count found 381 homeless residents citywide, only 58 of them unsheltered.
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What Holds the Score Below 3.0
Though the recovery is real, it is also incomplete and uneven. That is why this factor sits closer to the middle of the scale than the top.
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• Gun violence is the one public safety goal Denver's own leadership concedes is off track. The city recorded among its lowest homicide totals on record in 2025, but firearm homicides were flat through the first quarter of 2026, and the reductions in violent crime have not reached every neighborhood. A citywide average is not what an employee experiences walking to a particular garage after dark.
• Downtown foot traffic tells a more mixed story than the encampment numbers do. Pedestrian activity ran between the mid-eighties and mid-nineties as a share of 2019 levels through early 2026 — real recovery, but a structural shortfall six years on. And the office buildings above those sidewalks have not recovered at all. Downtown office visits are still down by roughly half against 2019, and downtown office vacancy remains near a record, essentially flat quarter over quarter.
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That gap is the thing to watch. Street-level order has improved faster than the economic activity it was meant to support. Colorado has stopped the slide on visible urban order. It has not demonstrated it can return to where it was.
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What Still Has to Change
Colorado has to keep improving — a great deal more than it has — and the improvement has to last long enough that people building companies here can count on it.
Start with how far there is to go. Colorado has moved above the Departure Geographies on this factor. That is the floor, not the goal. This series has documented why companies are leaving San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Chicago; being somewhat better than those places is not a competitive position. The Destination Geographies are far ahead on visible urban order and still improving. On current standing, Colorado remains closer to the states losing people than to the states winning them — and the gap is not closing, because the Destination Geographies are not standing still.
What further progress looks like is not mysterious:
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• Meet the goal Denver's own leadership set and missed. Gun violence is the one public safety objective the city concedes is off track. Hitting it would do more for how Colorado is perceived on this factor than any other single action available.
• Turn street-level order into downtown vitality. Cleaner sidewalks have not yet produced fuller buildings. Downtown vacancy sits near a record and is barely moving. Until order translates into occupancy, the recovery is half-built.
• Extend it past two cities. Denver and Boulder are where the evidence is. A Colorado score carried by the Front Range's two most-watched downtowns is not a Colorado recovery.
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Then make it stick. Founders and investors do not price a short-term improvement. They price whether it will still be true when they need it to be.
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• It has to survive a change in leadership. Public safety and visible urban order have to remain a governing priority through changes in administration, budget cycles, and council composition. Improvement resting on one mayor's initiative is improvement that capital allocators discount.
• Boulder's shift has to solidify and be more pronounced. The city moved over council resistance, not with it. What a decision-maker watches is whether Boulder will really commit itself to public safety and visible urban order.
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A 2.8 trajectory says Colorado is moving in the right direction. It does not say Colorado is moving fast enough. Both have to change: the pace has to increase, and the commitment has to outlast the people who made it.
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What This Means for Colorado — On Public Safety and Visible Urban Order
A fair reaction to all of this is: good, a step in the right direction, and still a long way from where Colorado needs to be. That reaction is reasonable. On this factor Colorado remains closer to the states losing people than to the states winning them, and the Destination Geographies are pulling further ahead rather than standing still.
But it is a win. Denver's leadership changed course, Boulder's council allowed something it had previously refused, and downtown added eighteen new ground-floor businesses in the first quarter of this year alone. Public and private moving in the same direction produced measurable results in under three years. That gives Colorado something tangible to build on.
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What Comes Next
4c is the final factor in the framework, and the last piece of the diagnostic arc.
The series now turns to solutions — to the Innovation Vision for Colorado, what it would take to execute, and who has to act.
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If We Work Together, We Can Reverse This Trend
The diagnosis is complete. Twelve factors, four categories, and a clear account of why founders and investors are choosing other states — and, in 4c, one account of what changes when Colorado decides to act.
If Colorado takes the appropriate steps, Colorado can be the most attractive innovation ecosystem in the world — and every Coloradan will share in the economic and cultural prosperity that results from being the world's leading geography for innovation. This is the Innovation Vision for Colorado.
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