Leaving Denver is not an option for Marilee Utter.
When she was offered the job in 2011 as the newly created title of executive vice president District/National Councils for the Urban Land Institute, she accepted on the condition that she would remain in Denver.
“I would never leave Denver,” Utter said.
She certainly has left her mark on the Mile High City.
She played key roles in the development of the Denver Dry Building along the 16th Street Mall and the development of the former train yards in the Central Platte Valley into today’s vibrant, mixed-use community.
During her tenure in Denver, which started in the early 1980s, she has worked in the private sector and the public sector.
Utter, who recently returned to her role as president of her consulting firm, is a nationally known expert in two of the hottest trends in commercial real estate planning ⎯ transit oriented development and public-private partnerships.
Utter had been involved with the ULI long before she began working with the 40,000-member, global group in 2011.
“I had been a very involved and passionate member of ULI since 1986,” Utter said.
“When this opportunity came along, it was based in ULI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. They wanted me to move to Washington, but that was a deal breaker.”
She ended up spending five years working for ULI, “exactly to the day.”
While technically based in Denver, Utter basically lived on jet planes.
“ULI is a global organization,” Utter said.
“I was basically flying every week,” she said.
She visited all 75 ULI offices around the globe, travelling to Europe, Asia and even Africa, as well as hitting all of its offices in the U.S. and Canada.
“It was a wonderful experience,” said the 67-year-old Utter.
“I loved visiting all of these different cities and trying to figure out what the secret sauce is in terms of the best development options possible.”
One thing she learned is that cities were more similar than different, as far as problems and solutions.
“Just about everything I learned is transferrable to Denver and other cities,” Utter said.
She recalled once visiting management committee members in London.
“London is this amazing, sophisticated city and I was meeting with these very impressive individuals in London,” she said.
She wanted them to hone in on core issues.
“That is easy: transportation, affordable housing and the airport,” she was told.
“I laughed because you could go to any American city, or Shanghai, Hong Kong or Paris and everyone is going to say transportation, affordable housing.”
Although Denver is an exception because of the highly rated Denver International Airport, airports typically are big issues in many cities, she noted.
“Big issues are always transportation, which really is infrastructure, affordable housing and in some cities, the most pressing issues might be water or the quality of the air,” Utter said.
“The point is there are a lot of transferrable problems and solutions,” Utter said.
“There is a lot of focus on being green and sustainable and dealing with climate change, no matter where you are,” she said.
Globally, there also is a big push on wellness and healthy living, she noted.
Utter wasn’t always in development.
She came to Denver in 1982 as a banker, after earning degrees in mathematics and French at the Colorado Women’s College. She had learned French while living in Switzerland. She also earned a MBA from UCLA.
She grew up in California, but moved around a lot as a child. In fact, she graduated from Golden High School, after transferring from a school in Rapid City, South Dakota.
“High school was not the highlight of my life. But after moving to Colorado from South Dakota, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”
As an undergraduate at the Colorado Women’s College, she met an Air Force Academy cadet and fell in love.
“I moved to different locations, as we was. Harry was stationed in Sacramento and then he was stationed in Colorado Springs.”
In Colorado Springs, she taught math, as it was more difficult to find a job as a French teacher, she said.
In 1978, they were living in California and she joined First Interstate Bank of California as an assistant vice president of commercial lending.
Four years later, the moved to Denver for “lifestyle” reasons.
“We were sick of LA living,” Utter recalled. “We were always very outdoorsy, loving things like camping and hiking, and we were avid skiers.”
She transferred to First Interstate Bank of Denver as a vice president of mortgage banking and residential construction. The bank later became part of Wells Fargo.
In 1986, Mayor Federico Peña tapped her to join his administration to be in charge of real estate and asset management for the city.
“The city really needed to analyze all of its real estate holdings and after six months I took over the land office, too, and so I really ran the real estate operation for Denver,” she said.
Denver’s economy had been hit hard by overbuilding predicated on $65 barrel of oil prices, which at one point dipped below $10.
Many people were fleeing Denver for parts of the country that had better job prospects.
“The city really became the biggest developer in town,” Utter said.
“We were looking at big developments to jump-start the economy: a new airport, ballparks, an aquarium, land for an amusement park, upgrades to the Center for Performing Arts.”
When Peña decided not to seek re-election, “we were all out on the street, because we were political appointees,” Utter s
She quickly landed on her feet by creating Citiventure Associates, a consulting firm in 1991.
She became the owner representative for New York developer Jonathan Rose, who wanted to develop the historic, 350,000-square-foot Denver Dry Building on the 16th Street Mall and David Syre, head of Trillium Corp., of Bellingham, Washington, which had bought 165 acres of the old railroad yards in the Central Platte Valley. It had paid $1.75 per sf for the property.
“I had two great clients,” Utter said.
“But Trillium got busy and wanted me to head a full-time team in Denver and Jonathan met Chuck Perry,” and they went on to redevelop the old Elitch Gardens in Northwest Denver into an award-winning, mixed-use community.
She worked with Trillium from 1993 to 1997.
Before selling much of the land to East West Partners, Trillium sold 65 acres to allow Elitch’s to move downtown.
“Trillium sold that land for $2 per sf and kicked in $1 million to help clean up the site,” Utter said.
“Honestly, at that price and the additional $1 million, Trillium probably lost money on the deal,” she said.
At the time, Elitch’s move was heralded as the only time in the country in more than 20 years that a major amusement park had opened in a downtown. Elitch’s bucked a trend of amusement parks leaving cities and moving to the suburbs.
Later, Trillium sold some land to the city for a park for $5 per sf.
“At the time, we projected that land in the Central Platte Valley would sell for $20 psf in 2000,” Utter said.
Instead, the Central Platte Valley became some of the hottest real estate in Denver, exceeding everybody’s expectations.
“In 2000, land sold for $250 per sf,” in the Central Platte Valley, she said. Since then, land sales have topped $450 per sf in the area and today there is virtually no more vacant parcels to purchase.
While land prices soared to unimagined heights, Trillium’s vision for the Platte Valley was on remarkably on target.
“I was just looking at an image of what the valley might look from an architect-artist we had hired,” she said.
The rendering was what the valley might look like if you were standing at the Tattered Cover bookstore and could see yet-to-be-built buildings.
Utter said the rendering is not that different from what was built was not luck.
“The zoning was in place, so we knew things like the height of buildings that would be built,” she said.
After leaving Trillium in 1997, she returned to Citiventure once again.
She landed the City of Englewood as a client and was instrumental into turning the failed Cinderalla City mall into of the first transit-oriented developments in the metro area,
In 2000, Cal Marsella, the chief of the Regional Transportation District, to serve as a TOD specialist, recruited her.
“Cal thought it was very important to establish a TOD structure to work with the governments and public and private sectors, especially with what was going on with T-Rex (light rail) along the southeast corridor,” Utter said.
She spent two years with the RTD and then tapped into a growing and related trend, public-private partnerships, by co-found P3West LLC.
She was the managing partner of P3West until joining ULI in 2011.
Now that she is back at Citiventure, she plans to put together all that she has learned.
“I have a broader perspective than I have ever had before,” Utter said.
She expects much of her work to have a national scope, rather than global, although she wouldn’t be surprised if she does a fair amount of work in Canada.
“If a city needs to revitalize a corridor or makes its downtown more vibrant, I can tell show them how to do that,” she said.
She recently returned to Denver after serving on a ULI advisory panel in Arizona.
In Denver, she is the vice chair for the Metropolitan State University of Denver Foundation board.
“I am very passionate about MSU,” Utter said.
“MSU is a very nimble, exciting organization,” she said.
She also is the co-chair for the Executive Leadership Team for the Executive Leadership Team to “help determine a comprehensive vision” for the Denver Performing Arts Complex and Boettcher Concert Hall.
“I’m really excited about helping to bring the Performing Arts Complex to the next level,” she said.
When not working, she still enjoys decades of living in downtown Denver and everything outdoors.
Her husband is retired and they both remain avid skiers.
“Our big thing is that once a year we spend a week heli-skiing in Canada,” she said.
Her husband is a volunteer ski instructor for the handicapped in Winter Park, where they have a cabin.
“We still live in LoDo after all of these years,” Utter said.
Every morning, when not travelling for work, she walks through LoDo on a path that takes her past the REI building at Confluence Park.
“I truly love downtown and never get tired of it. I just love downtown Denver. It’s an exciting, fun place to live and work. I will never leave.”
