On Monday, July 21, Mayor Mike Johnston will offer his annual State of the City speech. In the meantime, I have one word for the current state of the Mile High City: deflated. It’s not because the pace of people moving here has slowed lately. People are still coming to Colorado; they’re just not coming as fast as they used to. This isn’t even like July 2022, when Denver (and just about everywhere else) was still so down two years into the pandemic that I wondered if Denver had lost its mojo. Had our Rocky Mountain High flatlined? This past winter, I suggested ten things that Johnston could do to bring back downtown. It was still suffering from the battering of COVID, homelessness and the influx of migrants that had added to the challenges of ending unsheltered homelessness, a promise he’d made when he ran for mayor. And then, in January, with the encampments cleared and things looking up, there were the stabbings on the still-uncompleted 16th Street Mall. It was enough to break the ...