Then the pandemic hit and the city, hoping to help restaurants struggling with social distancing, closed the street in front of her place.

Three years later, it’s still closed — much to Trillo’s chagrin.

She said blocking off the one-block stretch in RiNo may help the bars on the street, but it doesn’t help Heaven.

“If you’re going to come and buy ice cream, you do and leave or stay and eat it and leave,” she said. “But you don’t see them get another scoop of ice cream. When you go to a bar and get a beer, you get a second, third, fourth.”

Of the handful of stretches of road that Denver closed to vehicles during the pandemic, three remain. In addition to the RiNo block, there’s Larimer Square and Glenarm Place between 15th and 17th streets near Denver Pavilions Mall downtown.

The temporary street closure permits for the three are set to expire at the end of the year, but Denver is considering making the closures permanent, and the blocks will continue to be closed into the new year as long as there’s a pending application for permanence in.

The closure of Larimer in RiNo appears to be sparking the most controversy.

Heaven Creamery’s Trillo said she doesn’t need the street for seating; she’s got plenty inside and a patio out back.

“We understand that for other businesses it’s a good thing but we don’t have the exposure that we felt we had before,” she said.

Plus, she said, the block in front of her business hasn’t been physically transformed.

“If this was an amazing and beautiful concept, super attractive for everyone in the city …  I probably would be with it,” Trillo said. “But it’s not like that. There’s nothing special to come and see other than going bar to bar.

“But we’re not fighting too hard because at the same time, you don’t want to be fighting your neighbors.”

The potentially permanent street closure is being spearheaded by the RiNo Business Improvement District, with help from the RiNo Arts District.

Across the street from Heaven Creamery, Kraig Weaver owns The Block Distilling Co. at 2990 Larimer St. He said the closure was “instrumental” for him and other businesses. The distillery has a shipping container on the street that holds a handful of tables.

Without the closure, “We would be another street instead of having something unique that shows a collaborative effort between small businesses, land owners, the city as a whole and the neighborhood — that’s what makes it cool,” Weaver said.

He said he thinks keeping the block closed and investing money to spruce it up would not only be good for the neighborhood, but also help push Denver to become a more walkable and bikeable city. He said pro-closure business owners on the block recently created a nonprofit to fund improvements assuming the application is approved.

Other businesses on the block, such as Odell Brewing and Ratio Beerworks, previously told The Denver Post they also support keeping the block closed. Weaver acknowledged that not everybody is going to support it, but said he thinks closure benefits the entire community.

“Is this for the greater good? Is this overwhelmingly positive with a few small pain points for you personally, or for the community as a whole? What I’ve heard feels more like a personal issue,” he said.

Nancy Kuhn, spokesperson for Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, said if approved, the RiNo BID will be able to renew the street closure permit annually for up to five years. After that, Denver will determine whether or not to permanently close the block.

One block away from the closure, at 3090 Larimer St., is Jerrod Rosen’s business Rye Society. He opened the Jewish deli in 2017, and said the pandemic made business “disappear,” but he now thinks the nearby closure is having a negative effect.

“We are on a block where the main street is Larimer, and people driving through can’t get to us,” Rosen said.

Rosen grew up in Boulder and said he would support something like the Pearl Street Mall, where a few blocks are closed to vehicular traffic, not just one.

“I love those guys down there,” Rosen said, referring to businesses on the closed block. “I have nothing against them and understand why they would want it closed but it seems like it’s to the benefit of a few businesses and not the whole community.”

Tai Beldock, who owns Erico Motorsports at 2855 Walnut St. as well as nearby real estate, said she doesn’t understand why business owners throughout the neighborhood are funding a project that doesn’t help the majority of RiNo.

“We’re paying thousands of dollars for a design that really only benefits three businesses,” Beldock said.

According to Sarah Cawrse, director of urban strategy and design for the RiNo Art District, the RiNo BID has $55,000 in the 2024 budget for Larimer street design, although it’s not yet known if those funds will be needed. Cawrse said the BID also funded “materials and effort needed to collect community feedback” this year.

While the block has roughly 13 businesses on it, only four were using the street for seating last week. Beldock has been advocating against the street closure for a while, and went to Denver City Council in November to ask councilors to vote against the RiNo BID budget, to no avail.

She also thinks the street closure is creating traffic issues in the neighborhood, which will only get worse when two large properties for sale nearby (the corner of 29th and Blake, and 29th and Walnut) get redeveloped.

“When those lots sell, they will go up five stories, become approximately 600 units, bring 1,200 additional people, a whole bunch of cars, and main arteries are blocked because of the street closure,” Beldock said.

Beldock, who’s been in the neighborhood since 1999, said ultimately the block closure doesn’t plan for the future.

“We’re not thinking of the big picture,” she said. “In the end, I get the sense the district is going to move forward, and it’s unfortunate.”

Tom Sprung owns a corner of 30th and Larimer opposite the closure, which houses a few tenants such as Oz Architecture and Arc Document Solutions, as well as his business Sprung Construction. He echoed Beldock’s concerns.

“There’s only three ways in and out – Blake, Walnut and Larimer,” he said. “We’re all about keeping the street active but we want to keep the traffic flowing.”

He said supply trucks for the restaurants on the closed off-block already clog the surrounding streets. And while he’s all for making the neighborhood more pedestrian- and bike- friendly, “you still need people driving for businesses to thrive,” he said.

Beldock and Sprung said they would be happy with some sort of compromise, like closing the block on weekends or leaving one lane open.

“It’s hurting our businesses, on either side, it’s hurting us terribly,” Sprung said.

Read more at our partner, BusinessDen.

Typically, Olander would let the soil rest through the winter months, but in recent years he’s begun experimenting with new varieties of barley that have been specifically adapted to withstand cold temperatures. Growing in the winter means the crops will absorb precipitation through the spring, a vital advantage as weather in the Western U.S. continues to get hotter and drier.

As the proprietor of both Olander Farms and Root Shoot Malting, which supplies Colorado breweries and spirit makers with locally grown and malted grains, Olander has to innovate to sustain his family’s 97-year-old farm. About five years ago, he began taking proactive steps to prepare for what he expects to be the next big challenge: the water crisis.

That looming threat was enough to begin cultivating the winter-friendly Lightning, Thunder and Buck barley without yet having customers for them.

“I can see the writing on the wall just with everything going on with water in Colorado. There’s a possibility of a reduction in our allotment and also the possibility of not having runoff we typically see from snowpack,” Olander said. “That’s why I’m trying to be ahead of the game.”

As the Colorado River continues to dry, local barley growers and maltsters are seeking out creative solutions to sustain their businesses in the face of climate change. Some are embracing nontraditional and drought-resistant grains while others are investing in technology to become more efficient. Their innovations aim to reduce water usage and bring the supply chain for craft beer and spirits closer to home, in hopes of ultimately building a resilient ecosystem that supports farmers, brewers and distillers in Colorado.

In 2022, local farmers grew 4,440,000 bushels of barley, the sixth most in the nation, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. A large portion of that is purchased by Coors Brewing, which contracts with around 800 growers in the Western states and Canada, according to the company’s website.

But Colorado is also home to several craft malthouses that kiln and roast barley for smaller brewers and distillers to use in making beer and liquor. Still, buying local has yet to become the norm since craft malt usually fetches a premium price.

Brewer Eric Larkin has been working with Troubadour Maltings in Fort Collins to procure custom malts since he opened Cohesion Brewing Co. in Denver two years ago. It’s not the cheapest option, but it works because the brewery specializes in specialty Czech-style lagers.

Larkin’s other options would be to import malt from Europe or use European-style malts grown in the U.S. While sourcing local might present unique challenges, the benefits of keeping his dollars in the local economy outweigh any potential downfalls, Larkin said.

“Every crop I get from Troubadour, the malt changes and I have to make adjustments in the brewhouse,” he said, acknowledging it’s easier for a small operation that focuses on a limited portfolio of styles to do that. “Keeping your dollars with local and small producers, the impact it can have really multiplies. It stays a little closer to home. That idea has always been really valuable to me from an economic standpoint and environmental standpoint.”

Spreading the gospel of local grain

The nonprofit Colorado Grain Chain aims to spread that ethos more widely with a variety of projects that connect local producers and makers, and incentivize collaboration. For example, the organization is currently building a digital marketplace where farmers can connect with companies or entrepreneurs seeking to purchase locally-grown grains.

Project manager Lisa Boldt, who also co-owns Primitive Beer in Longmont, sees a unique opportunity to amplify the Grain Chain’s message in the beverage space. That’s why the organization recently offered $4,000 “microgrants” to brewers and distillers who used novel grains in a new product.

Cohesion and WeldWerks Brewing Co. in Greeley received one grant to team up on a special release, Foamies Czech-style pale lager, using custom malts from Troubadour. The beer debuted in August and a second batch is due for release in November.

WildEdge Brewing Collective in Cortez earned a grant to experiment with a Munich wheat from Root Shoot Malting, with which it created a Dunkelweizen-inspired beer called From the Fields. Steamboat Springs’ Routt Distillery, another grant recipient, leveraged a trial batch of barley grown in Montrose by Proximity Malts for its new West Slope Sarvis Gin, which also features locally foraged sarvisberries.

Perhaps the most intriguing microgrant project came from Dune Valley Distillery in Mosca, which will release a vodka made from quinoa in January. The distillery, which opened this summer in the historic Mosca Community Hall and Gymnasium, shares a campus with a local food hub and a potato and quinoa processing plant. It specializes in making potato vodka specifically because of the resources at its disposal, said managing partner Nicholas Chambers.

“The local food approach is that you learn to consume what’s grown right near you,” Chambers said. “We are at literally the center of North American quinoa right here. It’s such a good crop for us because of low water use and it fits with our valley.”

Reducing water usage

One underutilized opportunity Audrey Paugh, marketing and networking specialist at the Grain Chain, sees for beverages is in millet. Colorado is the country’s top producer of proso millet, a gluten-free and drought-tolerant ancient grain. The state is also home to Grouse Malt House, one of the few U.S. maltsters dedicated to gluten-free grains.

Twila Soles founded the company with her late partner in 2013 after years of having celiac disease and being dissatisfied with gluten-free beer options. Malting even gluten-free grains requires a lot of water. Recently, Soles upgraded her system to include a steep tank that uses up to 40% less water than her original equipment.

Soles sources most of her grains within 200 miles of the malting facility in Wellington and has seen her producers weather unpredictable and sometimes devastating growing seasons.

“Using a crop (such as millet) that takes less water to thrive is important now and will be even more important as climate change continues to impact weather patterns,” said Soles, whose biggest Colorado client is the gluten-free Holidaily Brewing Co. “I’m hopeful that the use of more drought-tolerant crops for craft beer grows.”

In Alamosa, Jason Cody knows the value of diversifying crops and revenue streams. Cody saw firsthand the desire for local, craft malts when he opened Colorado Malting Co. in 2008. At one point, Cody had more than 100 breweries waiting for the opportunity to buy his products. The venture saved his family farm, which first began growing barley for Coors in the 1990s.

But business has slowed amid economic pressures and larger companies cashing in on demand for cost-effective malts. So these days he focuses on serving a niche base of distillers and brewers.

Water usage is always top of mind for Cody, who manages the 300-acre farm his ancestors purchased nearly a century ago. In 2018, Cody began making original beers at his Colorado Farm Brewery, which highlights sustainable practices from grain to glass. He grows and malts his own grains, uses an original strain of yeast and recycles all the water from the brewing process to irrigate his farm.

“Every single gallon of water we use in the brewery that goes down the drain, goes out to the center pivot irrigation sprinklers and is injected into the line that the sprinkler is running on,” Cody said.

An added bonus: The brewery’s wastewater repeatedly tests high in nitrogen, sulfur, potassium and other compounds that reinvigorate soil, so he needs fewer fertilizers to keep the ground healthy.

Back in Berthoud, Olander has yet to malt last year’s winter crop, so he doesn’t know what it tastes like or if brewers will be interested in using it. Olander is hopeful Lightning in particular will be an apt pilsner-style product and catch on, but he’s not waiting for feedback to continue his experiment.

Last year, he planted 15 acres of Thunder, 15 acres of Lightning and seven acres of Kernza. This year, he planted 20 acres of Lightning and 10 acres of Buck.

“We decided, let’s roll the dice and go with Lightning,” he said. “Hopefully winter treats everything well and they’ll survive.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

After skyrocketing during the pandemic, used car prices across the board are softening, with the average annual decline running 3.6% in Denver and 5.1% nationally as of October, according to a study from online car shopping site iSeeCars.

For used electric vehicles (EVs), prices are down by about a third nationally in the past year. And if that trend continues, it is only a matter of time until used EVs will not only cost less to power and maintain but also to buy.

“Used electric vehicles are facing a combination of lower prices for new models and consumer reluctance to try a new, more expensive technology when inflation and interest rates are both high,” said Karl Brauer, iSeeCars executive analyst, in an email.

The declines reflect basic economics. Supply has outstripped demand when it comes to EVs, which are now taking three times as long to sell as they did last year. Tesla, the leading maker of electric vehicles, cut the price of its new cars, including a $21,775 decrease for the Model X, $18,596 for the Model S and $14,716 for the Model 3.

That not only deflated the price of used Teslas but forced many other manufacturers to cut their prices.

In Denver, the Chevy Bolt EV suffered the biggest decline, going from an average of $30,169 last October to $20,089 this October. The Nissan Leaf fell from $29,386 to $19,864, while the Tesla Model 3 dropped from $47,958 to $34,167.

Although they have come down sharply, used EV prices remain higher than gasoline-powered alternatives. In October 2022, used EV prices averaged a 60% premium over the rest of the market — $52,821 compared to $32,627. But by this October, the gap was down to 13% — $34,944 versus $30,972.

Brauer suspects that consumers, facing the prospect of job cuts as the economy slows and struggling under the weight of inflation, are less willing to buy EVs than they were just six to 12 months ago.

“These same pressures are also pushing the price of traditional used cars down, but not nearly as much as EVs because gasoline models already cost less than used EVs and consumers are more comfortable with them,” he said.

Brauer said demand for new EVs has hit a plateau at the same time that automakers have been ramping up and pushing out a bunch of new models. Unsold EVs are piling up on dealer lots, which should continue to keep downward pressure on prices.

“It suggests there’s a threshold of market share for EVs that has been hit, making it tough to further increase their sales numbers,” he predicted.

Consumers who have been waiting to buy an EV will find more affordable options, especially with the help of favorable tax credits. Once limited to new car purchases, federal tax credits have expanded to used EVs as well.

New cars and trucks as a whole still command a premium, selling for 8.4% above the MSRP. That premium drops to 7.1% on new EVs. Dealers in Denver have been most willing to bargain on the new Hyundai Ioniq 6, Volkswagen ID.4, and Hyundai Ioniq 5, taking around 9% to 10% off the sticker price.

The big drop in used EV prices shouldn’t be seen as a rejection of cleaner alternatives in general. Of the 10 fastest-selling new cars nationally, seven are hybrids, including the Ford Maverick, Kia Sportage and Toyota Grand Highlander. Used prices in that category are down 9.6%.

Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

“The 7-Eleven at the premises attracts vagrancy and crime,” its landlord alleges.

In September 2021, Seattle-based Unico paid $61.2 million for the five-story office building at 1755 Blake St. 7-Eleven had been a ground-floor tenant for 11 years by that time and had just signed a lease extension to stay there through June 2026, court records show.

Unico says that “problems relating to vagrancy around 7-Eleven’s business” date back to at least 2016, when its prior landlord warned about a need for increased security. 7-Eleven initially refused to pay for that security but relented in 2019, according to Unico.

Two months after Unico bought the building in 2021, there was a gunpoint robbery. Since then, there has been an overdose, a stabbing suspect who fled into the store, and vagrancy. There were four break-ins between Oct. 4 and Nov. 7 of this year alone, Unico says.

On Oct. 16, 7-Eleven’s corporate office sued Unico in Denver District Court, accusing its landlord of wrongly billing it $74,000 for enhanced security. It claims that Unico broke their lease when it charged 7-Eleven for the extra security, which is a landlord responsibility.

“Tenant is not doing anything to attract vagrants; it is merely operating a legal business,” its lawyers wrote, noting the store’s proximity to transient hangouts like Union Station.

Then, on Dec. 6, Unico countersued 7-Eleven. The property owner wrote that “it has had difficulty leasing space in the building as a result of 7-Eleven’s business practices.”

“Compared to other downtown markets, the LoDo market generally is doing well for leasing, but the building is not experiencing the same level of activity or commitment,” it said.

Unico claims that security guards and day porters are the only solution at 1755 Blake St.

“(Unico) already increased the frequency of power washing to attempt to deter vagrancy. Playing music has proven to be ineffective. 7-Eleven’s offers to install a mist or water drip system to deter vagrancy is not an option in Denver’s climate,” it wrote Dec. 6.

7-Eleven’s spokespeople and attorneys declined to comment on Unico’s countersuit.

Unico’s lawyers are Merc Pittinos, Patrick Hickey and Joseph Mark at Moye White. 7-Eleven’s are Whitney House, Claire Hanson and Darren Kaplan with the law firm Clark Hill.

Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

This story was reported by our partner BusinessDen.

The strike that began Sunday night was set to last through the day Monday, with some of the striking workers rallying outside DIA’s Main Terminal at 10:30 a.m.

Around three dozen of the striking workers showed up to Monday’s rally, walking around the plaza entrance by the Westin Hotel wearing SEIU sweatshirts and holding signs that read “Swissport Cargo Workers On Strike Over Unsafe Working Conditions.”

“It’s a big ask to get people to risk their job in this way, even though it’s legally protected,” said Andrew Guttman, who works as a cargo agent for Swissport. “People are nervous about it. Doing more than one day would’ve been a lot to bite off.”

Cargo workers were expected to be joined by other airport workers, community members and elected officials supporting their fight for safer working conditions, according to a Monday news release from the Service Employees International Union.

While the cargo workers are not part of the union, they reached out to it for help after their Swissport strike notice gained 80 to 90 workers’ signatures.

Swissport handles airfreight and airport ground services at DIA, and the strike only should affect Amazon packages coming in and out of the airport, not commercial flights, Guttman said.

According to Swissport’s website, the company has provided airport ground services and managed an air cargo warehouse at DIA since 2006.

The DIA media relations team confirmed airport operations are expected to remain normal during the strike in an emailed statement to the Denver Post on Monday.

“We want management to take our concerns seriously, so hopefully this is a way to get that to happen,” Guttman said. “If it’s not, we’ll keep working to get them to pay attention. We want to organize this because it matters to us.”

Guttman said the strike is an escalation of petitions that management hasn’t responded to — the first being circulated a year ago in December 2022 and the most recent being filed in August.

The petitions called out faulty and broken equipment, dangerous working temperatures at facilities, heaters not functioning during winter weather, and inadequate safety training.

“We’re trying to get their attention, and we knew we had to go bigger in some way,” Guttman said. “After the second petition was circulated in August, we gave them a deadline of the following month to respond. When that didn’t happen, we had never stopped talking to each other and this strike just felt like the next natural thing.”

Earlier this year, Swissport workers at DIA alleged a warehouse fire broke out after a loading truck struck a floor heating machine that was exposed without any protections in place, according to SEIU’s Monday release.

“I’ve just seen too many of my coworkers get hurt and be put in dangerous situations at work over the past year,” Guttman said. “We’ve delivered petitions, filed multiple OSHA complaints, and Swissport has refused to address the real safety concerns that are putting our lives at risk on the job.”

Denver workers aren’t alone in these issues.

Last December, Swissport workers at the Chicago O’Hare airport also went on strike to call out unfair labor practices. In June, Swissport workers at Boston Logan International Airport, Dulles International Airport, and LaGuardia followed.

In a statement, Swissport officials said the company is “unwavering” in its commitment to following operating permit requirements and labor regulations while “fostering a workplace that values the rights and well-being of our employees while maintaining operational compliance with industry standards.”

“Most of our employees fulfilled their scheduled hours and did not participate in the work stoppage,” Swissport officials said in a statement. “Swissport continues to proactively address any issues or concerns raised by our team, reinforcing our enduring commitment to cultivating a positive and supportive work environment.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

If approved by the City Council, the package of proposed zoning changes will govern future development for hundreds of properties between Sherman and Yosemite streets with an eye toward ensuring ample shopfronts and more space for sidewalk users along Colfax.

The measure comes before the council as the city’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure marches toward a final design for the long-anticipated East Colfax Avenue Bus Rapid Transit network. Crews are expected to begin construction on the first segment of that project — which will install dedicated lanes and more than two dozen loading platforms to accommodate a network of high-frequency, fast-loading buses — next year.

While BRT will change the face of transportation along Colfax, the new zoning rule would change the face of buildings around the bus stops.

The rules — technically known as a design overlay — would not impact the base zoning or building heights allowed on any properties. The most important thing it will do is dictate that at least a portion of the ground floor of new buildings includes active, commercial uses. That could be anything from a pizza parlor to an office space.

New buildings would also have to be set back at least two feet farther from the street if the overlay is adopted, expanding sidewalk space, according to city planning documents. Property owners could leave more space between the fronts of their buildings and the property line, creating space for patios that might entice pedestrians.

The proposed standards won’t run for the entire 5-plus-mile length of the corridor, with gaps provided in some places where bigger residential projects could spring up. The impacted properties are all clustered within two blocks of planned bus rapid transit stops.

“The purpose of the design standards themselves is to promote walkability and small business,” said Councilwoman Amanda Sawyer, one of the measure’s co-sponsors. Her east Denver District 5 is one of four council districts that will see properties rezoned should the bill pass. “We’re trying to find the right balance. We want businesses in places everyone walks to and rides to and we want housing, particularly affordable housing.”

There are a few uses that would not meet the criteria for nonresidential active uses facing Colfax, essentially banning them near future BRT stops. Those include storage facilities, car washes, auto shops and drive-thrus that would have entrances and exits on Colfax itself, according to city documents.

“It’s past time that Colfax prioritized people over stuff,” said Councilman Chris Hinds, the bill’s other co-sponsor who represents the city’s central District 10.

Long-term plans drafted over the last two to three years for the city’s east and east central neighborhoods both call for design standards that emphasize active uses like storefronts on busy street corridors while discouraging car-oriented development.

Hinds sees the design overlay, already in place on portions of Tennyson Street and Santa Fe Drive, as Denver living its values on Colfax.

The overlay plan cruised through the council’s Land Use, Transportation & Infrastructure Committee in October. But there was some heartburn among members of the Denver Planning Board when they reviewed it this fall.

The design overlay was created by District 1 Councilwoman Amanda Sandoval’s office to address concerns about the wave of redevelopment sweeping over Tennyson Street between 38th and 46th avenues. Sandoval and others were concerned about blocks of new apartment and condo buildings popping up, crowding the sidewalk and choking out the small business feel of the corridor, a historic node on the city’s long-gone streetcar network.

The overlay has since been adopted for a portion of Santa Fe Drive, another corridor of Denver that is rapidly densifying as developers seek to cash in on one of the priciest housing and rental markets in the country.

The Planning Board voted 5-2 to recommend the City Council apply an overlay to East Colfax but not before discussing whether it was the right fit for the storied avenue. Unlike Tennyson and Santa Fe, north-south streets where properties are generally deeper and backed by alleys that allow for deliveries and other services, Colfax is an east-west avenue and lots are much shallower and without alleys. That means new standards that increase setbacks from the street could make it harder to design a workable building.

“I think Colfax is unique enough with the BRT to deserve a little more attention than just implementing something that was started elsewhere. I think the conditions are very different here,” said Gosia Kung, one of the two members who voted against recommending the council approve the rezonings. “It’s a problem that we are expanding the right of way. We’re pushing buildings away.”

Andy Baldyga spoke at that Planning Board meeting. An architect and former member of the board, Baldyga is now the vice president of the Colfax Ave Business Improvement District, which covers Colfax from roughly Sherman to Josephine streets.

Baldyga lives within a block of Coflax and is excited by the prospect of improving transit services along a road that carries one of the Regional Transportation District’s highest ridership bus lines already. But he, too, has concerns about how an east-west avenue will fare under design standards created for north-south streets.

“Colfax can stitch neighborhoods together and become a uniting element. There are strong neighborhoods on the north and south; great density, great housing stock, people want to live there,” Baldyga said. “I think what the city needs to do is look at all the east-west corridors and develop new standards that incentivize new development in a way that works for east-west streets.”

Hinds, Sawyer and their partners in the planning department did consider tweaks as a nod to these differences. Skinny properties, those under 37.5 feet in width, are exempted from the commercial use requirement, Sawyer said.

Exemptions for shallow properties along Colfax, those that are less than 70 feet deep, were also considered, but the group determined those properties would also struggle to fit new projects into the existing zoning code. Instead, the overlay was extended at least 100 feet to the north and south of Colfax to make sure that developers who assemble multiple properties for a new project would also be subject to the new rules.

BRT itself will completely reshape East Colfax. The high-frequency transit service will be made possible by converting two general-purpose lanes between Broadway and Yosemite Street into dedicated, center-running bus lanes, said Jonathan Stewart, the project’s director within the city’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, or DOTI.

It is worth noting that Aurora is the city’s partner in the project and once the BRT lanes cross into that city’s territory east of Yosemite the buses will share lanes with traffic, Stewart said. The eastern terminus of the BRT line will be near the R Line rail station just before Colfax meets Interstate 225.

Design work is well underway for the project ahead of an anticipated fall 2024 groundbreaking on the first segment between Broadway and Williams Street. City transportation officials have pinned 2027 as the projected start of revenue-generating operations on the new mass transit service.

DOTI was not directly involved in the design standards discussions, Stewart said, but the department is soliciting feedback from business improvement districts along the avenue about what the streetscape should look like between the curbs and the front doors of shops, restaurants, and other businesses.

“It’s part of the larger effort of the city, trying to plan more holistically,” he said of working alongside the planning department. “We’re both wanting to enact the people’s will transforming this into more of a Main Street-type corridor.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

The lawsuit accuses Tri-State, a wholesale power provider, of breach of contract. The electric cooperative is among Colorado rural electric associations that have explored leaving Tri-State due to disputes over rates, the push for more renewable energy and the desire to generate more of their energy locally.

The La Plata Electric Association and Brighton-based United Power, Tri-State’s largest member, have gone to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to get what they view as fair terms for ending their contracts. LPEA said in its lawsuit, filed in La Plata County District Court, that Tri-State has dealt in bad faith by failing to offer a fair and just exit plan and stringing it along in talks about an agreement to allow it to produce more of its own electricity.

The cooperative saw the ability to generate more of its own power from local projects as an alternative to ending its contract with Tri-State. The cooperative said the local projects would benefit the local economy.

“LPEA, out of options and without any active dialogue to modify its power supply, was left with the single option of filing this lawsuit to vindicate its rights,” the association said in the complaint.

The cooperative said it could show that Tri-State’s alleged breaches of contract “have caused LPEA to suffer millions of dollars in damages.”

Tri-State said in a statement Friday that LPEA’s lawsuit is an attack on its fellow Tri-State cooperative members, “which continue to work collaboratively to advance greater contract and power supply flexibility.”

Tri-State will vigorously defend itself and its members from the lawsuit, the company said.

The electric cooperative has tried for years to work collaboratively with Tri-State to provide its members more local control over their power supply and power costs, Ted Compton, LPEA board chairman, said in a statement.

“We regret having to take legal action to get the engagement and collaboration we are seeking,” Compton said.

Tri-State, based in Westminster, provides wholesale power to 42 electric associations in Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska and Wyoming. The associations are members of Tri-State.

Some of Tri-State’s members have complained about the rates and what they considered over reliance on coal. They’ve chafed under the 5% cap on the amount of power individual cooperatives can generate or buy from other sources.

The Kit Carson Electric Cooperative in Taos, N.M., paid $37 million in 2016 to break its contract with Tri-State. The Delta-Montrose Electric Association in Montrose paid $62.5 million in 2020 to leave Tri-State.

Tri-State has told United Power that it will take $1.6 billion to break its contract, which won’t expire until 2050. United Power has asked FERC to reject that amount. In the meantime, United Power plans to leave Tri-State on May 1, 2024, and has signed an agreement to buy electricity from another company.

United Power filed a lawsuit in Adams County District Court in 2020 to challenge Tri-State’s addition of other types of members so the utility could be regulated by federal rather than Colorado regulators. The lawsuit by LPEA alleges Tri-State pursued “a sneaky and underhanded course of action to deprive the Colorado Public Utilities Commission of jurisdiction.”

United Power and Tri-State said in a news release Friday that they will file an agreement to settle the lawsuit in Adams County District Court.

Tri-State said that LPEA’s lawsuit comes as the power supplier has filed a new electric resource plan that accelerates its move to clean energy and bolsters its system’s reliability. The plan would increase Tri-State’s amount of renewable energy resources and close two coal plants, including one in Craig by Jan. 1, 2028.

“LPEA has positioned themselves far outside the interests of both our members that are working for greater contract flexibility, and all those advancing a reliable and affordable clean energy transition,” Tri-State CEO Duane Highley said.

She was one of the first people who moved into a former hotel in Houston that served as a center to help homeless people navigate their way to more stability. She credits the transitional housing facility and programs launched as part of “The Way Home,” the large Texas city’s nationally recognized homelessness-reduction strategy, for the fact that she now lives in an apartment she loves, alongside her adopted dog, Violet. It’s also where she decided to tackle her alcoholism, getting sober.

“You don’t ever want to be in those shoes under a bridge — going through a hurricane, going through the cold, going through the winds, going through hot weather, you name it,” recalled Eddins, 63, of her life in 2021, while sitting on her living room couch. “It’s a nightmare. It really is.”

New Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has invoked Houston as “the best model in the country” and an inspiration for his own plan to move the city’s homeless population off the streets in much larger numbers than his predecessors achieved, starting with 1,000 people by the end of this month. To better assess just how well Houston’s system has worked, The Denver Post visited the city and spoke with the leaders responsible for its 11-year-old strategy — as well as both people who have been helped and those who are still waiting for a hand up.

The Post found that while broad elements of Houston’s plan are similar to Johnston’s emerging playbook, there are key differences in the approaches and the timelines. Houston’s focus is on getting people into permanent housing while Denver largely is relying, at least for now, on temporary options.

Metro Houston’s leaders built the political will, along with reprioritizing the city and federal money long poured into homelessness, to pursue a uniform strategy with the area’s nonprofit providers. The city has weathered sometimes-fierce neighborhood pushback against new homeless housing, but The Way Home has been lauded by homeless advocates as a data-driven prototype for success.

Houston’s system places some hurdles in front of people who are homeless before they can get into permanent housing, and the system isn’t perfect: Street homelessness is still part of the landscape, especially among people who struggle with addiction or mental health problems.

But as city leaders from across the country try to build momentum for real change, they’ve looked for lessons from Houston’s reduction of unsheltered homelessness by about 63% in a decade.

“You can design a better process, and Houston did,” said former Mayor Annise Parker, who began leading the strategy shift in 2011.

On a warm early October afternoon, downtown Houston, the center of the nation’s fourth most populous city, wasn’t devoid of homeless people, but visible signs were far less apparent in the bustling core than they are in Denver. Tents were set up in a couple of places and small clusters of people were living under highway overpasses, but those largely were occurring a good distance from retail storefronts and businesses.

In and near downtown Denver, entire blocks this year have had tents and personal belongings scattered along the sidewalks, sometimes in front of businesses or apartment buildings — though the city has cleared several under Johnston’s House 1,000 initiative, with their residents relocated to hotels temporarily.

Houston’s progress has hit some snags. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey’s destruction pushed more people into homelessness. And during and after the pandemic, the economic pressures facing most cities, including rising rents — even in relatively affordable Houston — resulted in more people living outside after the city had achieved its lowest level of street homelessness.

In the last two years, through October, the city “decommissioned” more than 113 encampments where a combined 700 or so people lived, said Marc Eichenbaum, the special assistant for homeless initiatives to current Mayor Sylvester Turner.

What enabled those moves was the opening of the city’s navigation center, first piloted at a hotel — where Eddins passed through — and then, at the start of this year, moved to a converted former school with 100 beds spread in dorm-style bedrooms. Eichenbaum said federal pandemic aid helped pay for the nearly $7 million facility, which serves as a place for residents to stay while providers find them more permanent housing options. The nonprofit group Harmony House operates it.

Photos of past guests line the walls in the hallway, many of their faces beaming. That’s how Eddins said she felt when she walked into the first navigation center in late 2021, after leaving the bridge.

“I felt like I was in heaven. It’s like your feet are lifted up off the ground,” she said.

From crisis point to maximizing “the life boat”

A dozen years ago, Houston’s homeless population was at a crisis point, ranking as the sixth largest in the country. The annual point-in-time count for the Houston region found an estimated 8,538 people, or 1 in every 300 residents, were homeless — more than half of them unsheltered.

The next year, in 2012, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development named Houston a priority community for addressing homelessness. The designation brought federal funding and technical assistance, along with a mandate to follow a research-supported strategy called “housing first.”

That meant getting people who were chronically homeless and living on the streets a place to live as quickly as possible, ahead of all other concerns. Support services such as addiction treatment or mental health counseling — if the tenants wanted them — would follow. The model, which has its critics, is based on the concept that people can’t meaningfully change their lives if they don’t first have a safe, stable place to live.

It didn’t take much to get Parker on board. She’d already seen the fruits of a federally backed program that Houston participated in, successfully moving 101 homeless veterans into housing in 100 days — an initiative the city would later scale up.

Parker, the mayor from 2010 to 2016, says not every aspect of Denver’s developing homelessness strategy under Johnston can look like Houston’s, though Johnston also is aiming for a housing-first approach. But Parker believes every U.S. city can significantly reduce its homeless population by learning from the sustained improvements in Houston.

“In dealing with housing and homelessness, we’re all passengers in the Titanic,” Parker said, analogizing the sinking ship to cities’ attempts to get everyone housed in the face of larger societal forces. Among those are an insufficient supply of affordable housing; too little access to mental, behavioral health and substance use treatment; and inadequate supports for young adults leaving the foster care system.

“What I was able to do in Houston is maximize the use of the lifeboat,” Parker said.

And she had a lot of help. All the players from local governments and nonprofit groups came together to assess what was working and what wasn’t in metro Houston’s past approaches. That included service providers having to “put some of their egos aside” and altering their programs’ approaches, said Mike Nichols, CEO of the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County.

The coalition was appointed by a steering committee as the lead coordinating agency. Having a nonprofit lead came with advantages, Nichols said, such as being able to raise money from private donors, recruiting volunteers who could donate their professional services, and advocating for housing solutions on multiple fronts. Nonprofits also can pivot quickly during crises, such as the pandemic, without as much political interference.

“This is a model for solving social problems,” Nichols said of Houston’s homeless response system. But, he added, “this doesn’t happen overnight.”

Parker said she took advantage of the powers given to her office to push initiatives. She said she tried to follow the data and to ensure everyone understood the plan — and if providers wanted a piece of the city’s allotment in federal funding, they had to follow it.

“At that point, I just brute-forced it and used up a lot of political capital,” she said.

Programs see success — along with challenges

With more programs now in place, Houston’s The Way Home includes rapid rehousing options for people who need short-term assistance, often due to economic conditions, and who don’t have a disability preventing them from working. And it provides permanent supportive housing for the “chronically homeless.”

It’s this latter group that’s targeted for the most help, but they also face high hurdles. Not just anyone can get in line for an apartment. And once there, a small portion of their income contributes to the rent. In Eddins’ case, she pays a portion of her Social Security money.

To be considered chronically homeless under federal funding guidelines, a person must be able to prove that they’ve experienced homelessness for at least a year continuously, or for a combined 12 months over the course of three years, and also have a disabling condition.

Outreach workers from several participating agencies and partners use a standardized assessment to rank each client’s needs. The goal of the system, according to the coalition, is to ensure that “any door is the right door” — meaning that a person goes through the same intake process, and has access to the same housing or other help, no matter which provider they come in contact with.

The Way Home also offers programs aimed at shoring up families facing housing instability to prevent them from becoming homeless.

Before a bus took Eddins from the small bridge encampment to the navigation center two years ago, she’d spent nearly four months living under the structure, she said. She has had medical problems since she was young, and after her parents died, she lost the home she had shared with them and spent years living in various temporary accommodations.

She ended up under the bridge in 2021 after being discharged from a hospital following treatment for a problem with her bladder, she said.

Four other people were living on Eddins’ side of the bridge at the time. One person had left before outreach workers could take him to the navigation center, while another left the center and went back to living on the streets, according to The Way Home’s data-tracking system. The other two, like Eddins, moved into permanent housing and remain housed.

“I’m extremely proud of myself,” Eddins said of her newfound stability in an apartment, one that’s full of plants that spill out onto the balcony.

She and the others are among the success stories the homeless coalition cites for The Way Home’s continuum of programs. In 2022, about 81% of the people who were placed in permanent housing remained housed after a year. In rapid rehousing programs, the data shows, 83% of people who were placed had not returned to homelessness within two years, and at least two-thirds of them ended up in permanent housing after their time-limited stay ended.

Getting people enrolled requires significant legwork. For several hours on an October day, Fernando Torres and Otha Rice drove around to various parts of the city, trying to track down specific people they’d been assigned through their outreach work with an organization called Avenue 360.

As they made their way through the city, Torres reached in his pocket, grabbed his phone and texted a man he’d been working with for months on getting his documentation ready to get into permanent housing. But he couldn’t reach him. He tried to call him — no luck there, either.

So the outreach workers drove to an encampment known as “The Grove,” where at least 100 tents were scattered across a grassy area downtown, just blocks from Minute Maid Park, the Houston Astros’ stadium.

With a photo of the client in hand, they struck out.

Later, Torres was able to find another person he was helping to verify his 12 months of homelessness so the man could get on the list for permanent housing. The man met Torres at a convenience store, where the clerk attested that she had known the man to be homeless for at least three months. It was progress.

They drove the man back near the street where he was staying. The white outreach van, labeled “Street Outreach Mobile Unit” with a red, blue and yellow wrap depicting houses, made multiple stops that day, including at an underpass where the workers searched for a client. The outreach workers also met new people living on the streets or under bridges, listened to their stories and figured out whether they could connect them to programs for help.

Addressing homelessness and its complexities is a challenge for many cities, and Rice said part of the problem is that “people are dealing with it like it’s a political issue, and it’s not. It’s a humanitarian issue.”

Navigating through local resistance

But Houston’s mayors have run into plenty of local politics as The Way Home has developed. Local resistance has also been a challenge at times for nonprofit leaders whose organizations build affordable and supportive housing.

Most recently, the opening of the city’s navigation center in Houston’s low-income Fifth Ward neighborhood was delayed because of neighborhood pushback.

“People don’t want this in our community — we’re up against enough,” resident Sandra Edwards told the City Council last year, according to the Houston Chronicle. The people in the low-income neighborhood were already struggling, she said.

City leaders put a pause on the project as they called community meetings and promised improvement projects in the neighborhood as part of the development package. They also promised that any services available to formerly homeless people in the center also would be offered to community members in the area.

That reduced some of the opposition, but others stood firm. The center opened early this year.

“Even after educating folks, there are going to those folks who will never change their mind,” said Eichenbaum, Mayor Turner’s special assistant for homeless initiatives. “And so then it takes political will to say, ‘I’m going to go in a direction that not everybody is 100% supportive of so I can get everybody the results that they want.’ ”

In Denver, Johnston has weathered neighborhood opposition to plans for a series of temporary micro-communities of tiny homes or other shelters. His House 1,000 plan also is making use of former hotels.

Denver’s position now, with Johnston declaring homelessness an emergency, shows how progress can recede over time as new challenges arise — in this case, the city’s skyrocketing rents as people flocked to Denver in the 2010s.

Officials and providers in Houston recalled viewing Denver’s data-driven approach to homelessness as a model more than 15 years ago. Joy Horak-Brown, the executive director of an affordable housing development nonprofit called New Hope Housing, said she visited Denver in 2007 and remembered stopping by old apartments above retail spaces that had been made available to the homeless.

Now it’s Denver and its neighbors that are sending delegations to Houston.

Over the last three years, Denver’s homeless population increased by more than 48.5%, according to the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative. The city’s 2023 point-in-time count, which occurred over a single day in January — and which advocates say likely misses people — reported 1,423 unsheltered people in Denver, with another 4,395 in various forms of shelter. Metro-wide, the respective totals were 2,763 and 6,302.

Johnston, who took office in July, has pledged to end street homelessness in Denver by the end of his term in 2027. But while temporary solutions are rolling out, few details have been fleshed out publicly for later plans for permanent housing.

Getting people into permanent housing

Houston officials have commended Johnston’s ambitions, but they say both temporary and permanent housing should be in place to maximize the impact.

“The Catch-22 is that building temporary facilities is on the assumption that you have long-term housing for them to exit and go into,” Eichenbaum said. “… Putting people into a temporary facility takes lots of resources, time and money — and you’re not getting any reductions in homelessness” without the permanent housing.

In an interview, Johnston countered that Denver was making progress on that front, securing 500 housing vouchers through a partnership program for people who will transition out of the micro-communities. The city also is developing plans to provide more rapid rehousing — paying at least some portion of a person’s rent for three or four months to help them recover financially until they can become self-sufficient.

“Those are the times you need the most services,” Johnston said. “It’s once you’ve applied for that job, gotten it worked for three or four weeks, saved some money, reconnected to your family, gotten some help for your mental health needs — now you’re ready to actually go out to your own unit.”

Still, he acknowledged that in higher-rent Denver, finding permanent housing for people who leave shelters will be the biggest challenge.

In Houston, some of The Way Home’s programs are aimed at spurring more permanent housing — including new apartment complexes — while others enlist existing apartments and homes scattered across the area.

The coalition and its partners established the “Landlord Engagement Team” in 2019 to work with rental owners and property managers. The coalition pays market-rate rents, with the cost covered by vouchers and a portion of a tenant’s income.

About 70% of the properties signed up are multi-family buildings or communities, and the other 30% have individual landlords, according to the agency’s data. There are still too few available rental units to meet the demand in a tight market, but officials say it’s an important part of Houston’s response.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when college campuses closed, Jamil Hasan found himself in a predicament: He was losing money on vacant apartment units that he previously had no trouble filling. About 80% of the more than 70 apartment units he and his wife had acquired and renovated near Texas universities sat empty, a situation that persisted as college students returned to classes remotely.

Then Hasan learned about the coalition’s landlord program.

“My model was a perfect fit,” he said. Now most of his properties, which are split-level homes divided into apartments, have a mix of formerly homeless tenants and students.

Denver’s mayor has a similar idea in the works. His administration last month announced a $400,000 partnership with a nonprofit called Housing Connector that uses Zillow and other tools to find apartments in the city that are open. Plans call for the organization to reach out to landlords and negotiate lease rates and contracts for those willing to house formerly homeless people.

Cara Conrad, one of Hasan’s tenants in Houston, said the housing program changed her life. She’d been homeless for more than three years — a trajectory she attributed to multiple factors, including being sexually assaulted as a child, addiction problems, time spent in jail, medical challenges and family losses.

She got help, and in July she was able to get a housing voucher.

“It’s still emotional,” Conrad said. “I’m really proud of myself. … I had to go through a lot to get to where I am right now.”

Conrad said she’s not going to do anything that would jeopardize it and put her back on the streets. Talking about her apartment and the new stability she’s found, she mentioned her favorite spot: her bedroom closet.

The first thing she did when she moved in, she said, was hang up a shirt — taking satisfaction that she finally had found a safe place for her belongings.

Ross soon cut the music and started talking, assuring his fans that he would livestream Jake Paul’s coming boxing match, even though it would violate copyright laws. “I’ll pay the fines,” he promised. Later, he streamed himself playing online slot machines and blackjack on a gambling site, Stake. Once, he streamed pornography. He has hosted Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, and Andrew Tate, an online influencer known for his misogyny who faces human-trafficking charges. As Ross streams, his viewers post a torrent of messages in his channel’s chat feature — some celebrating him, some abusing him with slurs.

Welcome to life on Kick, the Wild West of livestreaming — where seemingly any kind of content goes. Since it went live late last year, the upstart platform has made waves in the world of livestreaming, long dominated by Twitch, which is owned by Amazon. Today, Kick has 21 million accounts, nearly twice as many as just four months ago. It has carved out a niche as the latest home for the fringes of young male viewers who spend significant time online.

Kick, an Australian company, has flourished thanks to an unusual business model. It offers eyebrow-raising multimillion dollar contracts to top streamers and takes just 5% of all streamers’ earnings, compared with a 50-50 split on Twitch, helping lure away both top Twitch stars and rank-and-file content creators who say they’ve seen a bump in earnings. But the site itself is something of a loss leader for Stake, the online casino backed by the same ownership and frequently promoted on Kick. By offering them sizable endorsement deals with Stake, Kick has also attracted mainstream stars like the rapper Drake.

Until recently, Kick employed a laissez-faire approach to content moderation, which attracted controversial characters like Ross, who was banned from Twitch earlier this year. Other streamers have filmed themselves committing apparent crimes, like trespassing and sexual assault.

To some streamers and viewers, Kick represents a welcome freedom from what they see as the draconian rules and corporate greed on Twitch, which is more closely moderated and in recent years has taken a greater cut of its streamers’ earnings. To others, Kick allows harmful views to thrive.

Kick has faced the same scrutiny as other fledgling social media sites, forcing it to get serious about what kind of content it does and does not allow. A further crackdown on pornography, for instance, was imposed after Ross’ stream this spring. Other features, like a report button, were added only recently, and critics have said the site remains lax about enforcing restrictions.

“I think people are realizing the more controversial they are, the more shock factor involved in their content, the more viewers they get, and it can sometimes be a dangerous mix in that regard,” Kick CEO Ed Craven, 28, said in an interview. “So we are very quickly having to adapt what we consider to be aboveboard and where we have to say ‘no.’”

The question is: Does Kick actually want to shed its irreverent image, or is it merely paying lip service to regulation in the face of public pressure?

Place Your Bets

Craven quickly rose in the Australian technology world as the co-founder of Easygo and other online gambling companies he started with Bijan Tehrani.

Stake, which Craven started in 2017 out of Curaçao, is one of the world’s largest crypto casinos — sites where people can use various cryptocurrencies to gamble on games like blackjack and slots.

Last year, Stake’s success landed Craven near the top of The Australia Financial Review’s Young Rich List, which proclaimed him Australia’s “youngest ever self-made billionaire.” This year, the site estimated his wealth was $3.11 billion.

During a video interview in October, Craven wore AirPods and a dark T-shirt, his uniform of choice. He was part casual, relaxed broadcaster, part serious executive. Craven said he himself was an “avid livestreamer” who frequented Justin.tv, the early version of Twitch, when he was a teenager. He often donates money to Kick streamers — which makes up a not-insignificant amount of some streamers’ earnings — while watching their broadcasts the same way any other fan might.

“Pretty much everyone heavily involved with Kick has grown up with livestreaming,” he said. “It’s been a large part of our lives over the last decade or so.”

The idea for Kick originated, at least in part, from Stake’s promotional efforts.

In 2021, Stake began offering star Twitch streamers like Félix Lengyel, known as xQc, and Tyler Niknam, aka Trainwreck, contracts of more than $1 million a month to broadcast themselves gambling on its site — sometimes also providing the funds the streamers were using — leading to a surge of interest in gambling content on Twitch. When Drake announced a partnership with Stake the next year and began betting hundreds of thousands of dollars while streaming on a Twitch channel called StakeDrake, it only added to the mania.

Twitch’s advertisers didn’t like it, so the company last year banned the streaming of online slots and other games on sites that were unlicensed in the United States or other countries that have consumer protections, a list that included Stake.com. It said it did so to prevent “predatory behavior.” Twitch said gambling viewership on its site had dropped 75% since then.

The next month, Niknam, Tehrani and Craven started Kick, which has 195 employees based in Australia, Serbia and the United States.

Streamers have flocked to the site; Kick said that it had 158,510 active streamers in October, and that viewership has climbed to 104 million hours in October from 12.5 million hours watched at the beginning of the year. Some Kick streamers say they have seen better growth and earnings than on rival sites like YouTube or Twitch.

Andrei Zanescu, an assistant professor at Concordia University in Canada who is the co-author of a forthcoming book about Twitch, said it was unsurprising that Kick was offering such generous terms to its creators, because Stake was probably seeing an influx of traffic as Kick streamers broadcast themselves gambling on Stake.

Slot machine livestreams and gambling advertisements for Stake are commonplace on Kick, and the 54.8 million hours of gambling content that viewers watched in the third quarter of this year made up nearly 20% of total Kick content, according to the data firm Streams Charts.

Kick “can absolutely afford to run at a loss as long as it takes, as long as overall the business venture is generating profit for them,” Zanescu added.

But Craven said that was not the goal. He acknowledged that Kick, which is losing money, offered “marketing value” for Stake and that the two sites had some of the same shareholders, but said that they were “completely separate entities” with distinct management and operations teams.

An Unruly Mix

Kick’s homepage is typically an overwhelming swirl of youthful testosterone.

Recently, several thousand people watched Nick Kolcheff, who goes by Nickmercs, shoot at cartoon enemies in Apex Legends, a battle royale game. Other viewers watched a British livestreamer named Sam Pepper walk down a street in Brazil, commenting on his interactions with street vendors and making lewd comments about the women who popped up on his broadcast.

Some streamers chatted with their viewers as they watched slot machine reels spin in the background on Stake and other gambling sites. As AverageGuy, a British streamer, watched his slot machine spin, one commenter wrote: “No moral compass showcasing this to younger viewers.”

The streamer pointed out that people had to click a button affirming they were at least 18 to watch his stream — one safeguard Kick has put into effect to guard against influencing underage viewers to gamble, though it relies on an honor system. “I’m quite happy to educate people,” AverageGuy said, calling the critic a “moron.”

Online gambling is heavily regulated in the United States and illegal in many states, though it can be possible to evade regional restrictions through virtual private networks that mask a user’s location. A representative for Craven said that even users with VPNs were unable to gamble on Stake in the United States because the site checks people’s photo identifications as an additional safeguard. (A recent lawsuit accusing the company’s founders of stealing the idea for the site claimed that Stake was aware of and encouraged efforts by Americans to gamble using VPNs. The lawsuit was dismissed over jurisdictional issues.)

To dodge U.S. restrictions, American streamers who broadcast themselves gambling have typically done so while outside the country. Though sports betting has proliferated after a 2018 Supreme Court decision, online gambling remains illegal in many states, particularly for users under 18, who are considered more likely to become addicted if exposed to gambling early.

But in recent years, a “parallel ecosystem” of sites and products that are less regulated have sprung up, said Keith Whyte, the executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, an advocacy group. Such products include loot boxes in video games, online slot machines that offer some free chips and websites that advertise or direct users to gambling sites, like Kick.

“These are very deliberate schemes to get around gambling laws and to be able to profit on youth gambling,” Whyte said. “We think it’s extremely predatory.”

Craven said Kick had “strong trust and safety controls” to block children and people in places where laws barred residents from accessing gambling content.

Dealing with a global patchwork of regulations had been an unexpectedly large obstacle, Craven said. In June, Kick was blocked by internet service providers in Greece for its gambling content.

He said that Kick resolved its issues in October with Greece’s regulatory body and that the country’s internet service providers would remove Kick from their blacklists in the coming weeks.

Competitors

The big names have set up shop on Kick. Lengyel drew headlines when he signed a two-year contract with Kick worth up to $100 million. Kaitlyn Siragusa, known as Amouranth, one of the most popular women on Twitch with 6.4 million followers; Kolcheff, who has 6.7 million followers; and chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, who has 1.9 million Twitch followers, have also signed lucrative Kick deals.

Kick’s pilfering of creators — some of whom also still broadcast on Twitch — has put pressure on Twitch to improve its relationship with streamers. But Kick is still dwarfed by Twitch, which averages 35 million daily viewers and 7 million streamers who go live each month. And despite Kick’s more favorable revenue split, Twitch offers more ways to earn money, including a cut of advertising dollars.

“As of right now, Kick isn’t the most brand-friendly platform, so if you want to do deals, you need to still be active on other platforms,” said Mike Lee, the head of gaming talent at United Talent Agency, citing some of Kick’s questionable content.

In its community guidelines, updated in October, Kick warns viewers that the site can get “rowdy” and that some of its streamers may not be for everyone.

“We value the importance of constructive dialogue over knee-jerk reactions often associated with ‘cancel culture,’” the site says. “Still, we also firmly recognize that free speech should not be a shield for hate speech.”

Some of Kick’s edgier livestreams have generated publicity and more viewership for the platform, such as when Ross advertised an forthcoming interview, alongside Tate, with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The guest turned out to be a Kim impersonator, but the stream still drew 330,000 viewers. (Ross did not respond to a request for comment.)

Other streams have landed the site in hot water. A tipping point came in September, when a pair of streamers, Paul Denino and Pepper, paid a man in Australia to hire an escort for a sexual encounter, which Denino then livestreamed on his Kick channel. When the woman realized the two livestreamers were watching the broadcast from another room in the apartment, she walked out. Denino and Pepper were detained by the police, then released without being charged. The police said “no offenses had been committed.”

Pepper did not respond to a request for comment. Denino said the police action was the result of a viewer of the livestream making false claims to the police about him, and was unrelated to the situation with the escort.

Craven, the CEO, left several laughing emojis in the chat tool accompanying the livestream as the action was unfolding, and even donated $500 to Denino during the broadcast, according to screenshots and video clips of the stream.

The incident prompted a flood of social media criticism, and some creators said they were considering leaving the platform. In response, Kick updated its community guidelines and added a button allowing its users to report inappropriate behavior.

Craven said that he regretted the situation, and that he and Kick were still learning. He said he didn’t want Kick to be known solely for “edgy content,” and said the site had established new guidelines on whether staff members should be present in the chat during “high risk” livestreams.

Nakamura, the chess player, said he saw Kick going through the same growing pains as other social media platforms in their early days — including Twitch.

“Twitch, when it started, was very much the Wild West,” he said. Of Kick, he said: “They’re trying to clean up certain parts of it. At the end of the day, it takes time.”

Still, efforts by other competitors to break into the livestreaming industry have petered out. Mixer, a livestreaming service purchased by Microsoft in 2016, signed top creators like Ninja and generated headlines for a few years before shutting down in 2020 after failing to compete with YouTube, Twitch or Facebook Gaming.

At TwitchCon, the company’s annual gathering where fans interact with the site’s content creators — held in Las Vegas this year — Twitch executives said they were unbothered by Kick’s meteoric rise.

Dan Clancy, Twitch’s chief executive and a former Google executive, said he was focused on growing the livestreaming industry as a whole, and wasn’t worried about where streamers chose to broadcast. He said he had learned a phrase at Google that was applicable: “Focus on growing the pie, don’t focus on your slice of the pie.”

As Clancy walked down the Vegas Strip one evening of TwitchCon, a streamer broadcasting on Kick beckoned him onto his video. “I got some bad news,” the streamer told him. “We’re live on Kick.”

“Hey, that’s your choice, you know?” Clancy replied. “Whatever you decide.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.

The group worked in SL1001, a bland building with a blue glass facade betraying no sign that dozens of lawyers inside were toiling to protect the interests of one of the world’s most influential companies. For weeks they had been prepping for a meeting of powerful executives to discuss the safety of Google’s products. The deck was done. But that afternoon Walker told his team the agenda had changed, and they would have to spend the next few days preparing new slides and graphs.

In fact, the entire agenda of the company had changed — all in nine days. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, had decided to ready a slate of products based on artificial intelligence — immediately. He turned to Walker, the same lawyer he was trusting to defend the company in a profit-threatening antitrust case in Washington, D.C. Walker knew he would need to persuade the Advanced Technology Review Council, as Google called the group of executives, to throw off their customary caution and do as they were told.

It was an edict, and edicts didn’t happen very often at Google. But Google was staring at a real crisis. Its business model was potentially at risk.

What had set off Pichai and the rest of Silicon Valley was ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence program that had been released on Nov. 30, 2022, by an upstart called OpenAI. It had captured the imagination of millions of people who had thought AI was science fiction until they started playing with the thing. It was a sensation. It was also a problem.

Google had been developing its own AI technology that did many of the same things. Pichai was focused on ChatGPT’s flaws — that it got stuff wrong, that sometimes it turned into a biased pig. What amazed him was that OpenAI had gone ahead and released it anyway, and that consumers loved it. If OpenAI could do that, why couldn’t Google?

For tech company bosses, the decision of when and how to turn AI into a (hopefully) profitable business was a more simple risk-reward calculus. But to win, you had to have a product.

By Monday morning, Dec. 12, the team at SL1001 had a new agenda with a deck labeled “Privileged and Confidential/Need to Know.” Most attendees tuned in over videoconference. Walker started the meeting by announcing that Google was moving ahead with a chatbot and AI capabilities that would be added to cloud, search and other products.

“What are your concerns? Let’s get in line,” Walker said, according to Jen Gennai, the director of responsible innovation.

Eventually a compromise was reached. They would limit the rollout, Gennai said. And they would avoid calling anything a product. For Google, it would be an experiment. That way it didn’t have to be perfect. (A Google spokesperson said the ATRC did not have the power to decide how the products would be released.)

What played out at Google was repeated at other tech giants after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022. They all had technology in various stages of development that relied on neural networks — AI systems that recognized sounds, generated images and chatted like a human. That technology had been pioneered by Geoffrey Hinton, an academic who had worked briefly with Microsoft and was now at Google. But the tech companies had been slowed by fears of rogue chatbots, and economic and legal mayhem.

Once ChatGPT was unleashed, none of that mattered as much, according to interviews with more than 80 executives and researchers, as well as corporate documents and audio recordings. The instinct to be first or biggest or richest — or all three — took over. The leaders of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies set a new course and pulled their employees along with them.

Over 12 months, Silicon Valley was transformed. Turning artificial intelligence into actual products that individuals and companies could use became the priority. Worries about safety and whether machines would turn on their creators were not ignored, but they were shunted aside — at least for the moment.

“Speed is even more important than ever,” Sam Schillace, a top executive, wrote Microsoft employees. It would be, he added, an “absolutely fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later.”

The strange thing was that the leaders of OpenAI never thought ChatGPT would shake up Silicon Valley. In early November 2022, a few weeks before it was released to the world, it didn’t really exist as a product. Most of the 375 employees working in their new offices, a former mayonnaise factory, were focused on a more powerful version of technology, called GPT-4, that could answer almost any question using information gleaned from an enormous collection of data scraped from seemingly everywhere.

In mid-November 2022, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; Greg Brockman, its president; and others met in a top-floor conference room to discuss the problems with their breakthrough tech yet again. Suddenly Altman made the decision — they would release the old, less-powerful technology.

On Nov. 29, the night before the launch, Brockman hosted drinks for the team. He didn’t think ChatGPT would attract a lot of attention, he said. His prediction: “no more than one tweet thread with 5k likes.”

Brockman was wrong. On the morning of Nov. 30, Altman tweeted about OpenAI’s new product, and the company posted a jargon-heavy blog item. And then, ChatGPT took off. Almost immediately, sign-ups overwhelmed the company’s servers. Engineers rushed in and out of a messy space near the office kitchen, huddling over laptops to pull computing power from other projects. In five days, more than 1 million people had used ChatGPT. Within a few weeks, that number would top 100 million. Though nobody was quite sure why, it was a hit. Network news programs tried to explain how it worked. A late-night comedy show even used it to write (sort of funny) jokes.

Mark Zuckerberg’s head was elsewhere. He had spent the entire year reorienting the company around the metaverse and was focused on virtual and augmented reality.

But ChatGPT would demand his attention. His top AI scientist, Yann LeCun, arrived in the Bay Area from New York about six weeks later for a routine management meeting at Meta, according to a person familiar with the meeting.

In Paris, LeCun’s scientists had developed an AI-powered bot that they wanted to release as open-source technology. Open source meant that anyone could tinker with its code. They called it Genesis. But when they sought permission to release it, Meta’s legal and policy teams pushed back, according to five people familiar with the discussion.

Caution versus speed was furiously debated among the executive team in early 2023 as Zuckerberg considered Meta’s course in the wake of ChatGPT.

Zuckerberg wanted to push out a project fast. Genesis was changed to LLaMA, short for “Large Language Model Meta AI,” and released to 4,000 researchers outside the company. Soon Meta received over 100,000 requests for access to the code.

But within days of LLaMA’s release, someone put the code on 4chan, the fringe online message board. Meta had lost control of its chatbot, raising the possibility that the worst fears of its legal and policy teams would come true. Researchers at Stanford University showed that the Meta system could easily do things like generate racist material.

On June 6, Zuckerberg received a letter about LLaMA from Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Richard Blumental, D-Conn. “Hawley and Blumental demand answers from Meta,” said a news release.

The letter called Meta’s approach risky and vulnerable to abuse and compared it unfavorably with ChatGPT. Why, the senators seemed to want to know, couldn’t Meta be more like OpenAI?

At the end of the summer of 2022, Microsoft’s offices weren’t yet back to their pre-pandemic bustle. But on Sept. 13, Satya Nadella summoned his top executives to a meeting at Building 34, Microsoft’s executive nerve center. It was two months before Altman made the decision to release ChatGPT.

Nadella took the lectern to tell his lieutenants that everything was about to change. This was an executive order from a leader who typically favored consensus. “We are pivoting the whole company on this technology,” Eric Horvitz, the chief scientist, later remembered him saying. “This is a central advancement in the history of computing, and we are going to be on that wave at the front of it.”

It all had to stay secret for the time being. Three “tented projects” were set up in early October to get the big pivot started. They were devoted to cybersecurity, the Bing search engine, Microsoft Word and related software.

Microsoft invited journalists to its Redmond, Washington, campus on Feb. 7 to introduce a chatbot in Bing to the world. They were instructed not to tell anybody they were going to a Microsoft event, and the topic wasn’t disclosed.

But somehow, Google found out. On Feb. 6, to get out ahead of Microsoft, it put up a blog post by Pichai announcing that Google would be introducing its own chatbot, Bard. It didn’t say exactly when.

By the morning of Feb. 8, the day after Microsoft announced the chatbot, its shares were up 5%. But for Google, the rushed announcement became an embarrassment. Researchers spotted errors in Google’s blog post. An accompanying GIF simulated Bard saying that the Webb telescope had captured the first pictures of an exoplanet, a planet outside the solar system. In fact, a telescope at the European Southern Observatory in northern Chile got the first image of an exoplanet in 2004. Bard had gotten it wrong, and Google was ribbed in the news media and on social media.

It was, as Pichai later said in an interview, “unfortunate.” Google’s stock dropped almost 8%, wiping out more than $100 billion in value.

Hinton, Google’s best-known scientist, had always poked fun at doomers, rationalists and effective altruists who worried that AI would end humankind in the near future. He had developed much of the science behind artificial intelligence as a professor at the University of Toronto and became a wealthy man after joining Google in 2013. He is often called the godfather of AI.

But the new chatbots changed everything for him. The science had moved more quickly than he had expected. Microsoft’s introduction of its chatbot convinced him that Google would have no choice but to try to catch up. And the corporate race shaping up between tech giants seemed dangerous.

“If you think of Google as a company whose aim is to make profits,” Hinton said in April, “they can’t just let Bing take over from Google search. They’ve got to compete with that. When Microsoft decided to release a chatbot as the interface for Bing, that was the end of the holiday period.”

For the first time in more than 50 years, he stepped away from research. And then in April, he called Pichai and said goodbye.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Get more business news by signing up for our Economy Now newsletter.