The Denver Gazette

Boulder is one step away from becoming the new home for the internationally recognized Sundance Film Festival. The Sundance Institute, the nonprofit responsible for running the independent film event, announced Thursday that Boulder made the list of top three finalists to potentially host the festival beginning in 2027. Colorado officials including Gov. Jared Polis placed a bid for Boulder to host Sundance in June as event organizers put out a request for host cities as they consider leaving the festival's 40-year home in Park City, Utah. 

The number of homes for sale in the Denver metro area have reached highs not seen since 2013. At the beginning of 2024, the region saw a surge of new listings flood the market. There were nearly 11,000 homes for sale at the end of August, up 56% from last year, according to the Denver Metro Association of Realtors® Market Trends report released Thursday. Despite the most available options Denver has had in a decade, buyers aren’t biting.

Denver's newest downtown hotel, The Populus, announced an opening date of Sept. 18. The Populus aims to be the first carbon positive hotel in the nation, and its first program highlights that mission with "One Night, One Tree" with the National Forest Foundation, according to a news release. The hotel will plant one tree for every night's stay sold, "representing up to 20,000 newly planted trees in 2024." The hotel is being developed by Denver-based Urban Villages — who have also worked on downtown's Larimer Square and the Sugar Block — and will be managed by Aparium Hotel Group.

A luxurious “French château” which was prominently featured in two national commercials starring Coach Deion Sanders, shattered sales numbers in Castle Pines, having recently sold for an estimated $6.5 million, according to listing agency LIV Sotheby’s International Realty (LIV SIR). LIV Sotheby’s International Realty’s states that the sale marks highest priced sale in the neighborhood in over a decade, as well as the second highest priced sale in the city of Castle Rock. The highest priced sale in Castle Rock was a recreational ranch on 132 acres represented by LIV SIR broker Elaine Stucy in 2024, closing at $7.8 million, according to the agency.

In a Park Hill wine bar on Sunday, dozens of people sat together for nearly an hour in silence reading their books. Trellis Wine Bar’s tables were sprinkled with official “Silent Book Club” stickers and ear plugs as people read a Sarah J. Maas fantasy novel, a nonfiction deep dive into the popularity of Korean dramas or a classic like Cormac McCarthy’s "The Road." While anyone could sit at home on their couch doing the same thing, this group aims to make reading in silence a communal activity. While most book clubs meet to discuss one novel, Silent Book Club encourages members to “BYOB” or bring your own book. Silent Book Club began as an idea in San Francisco more than a decade ago and grew to have more than 1,000 chapters run by volunteers across the world.

The original location of Elway’s steakhouse in Cherry Creek is closing at the end of this month, the restaurant announced Thursday. Open for 20 years, Elway’s is closing because of the major redevelopment project on the Cherry Creek Shopping Center property, according to a message the restaurant posted on its website. Its last day will be August 31. “Our plan is to continue to work with our development partners to determine a post-construction location,” the announcement said.

Air travel in Denver has been soaring through 2024. During the first half of the year, Denver International Airport - City & County of Denver Dept of Aviation set new passenger-traffic records every single month. In total, the airport saw nearly 40 million passengers from January through June, airport officials announced Friday. That's up 9.2% from the same period in 2023, a year that smashed DIA’s records, putting the airport on track for another year of bests.

More than 300 jobs are available at Denver International Airport - City & County of Denver Dept of Aviation at an in-person job fair scheduled for Tuesday, Aug. 13 on the plaza between the Westin Hotel and the Jeppesen Terminal near the south security checkpoint. The event runs from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Full-time, part-time, hourly and salaried positions are available at airport employers including airlines, concessions, rental companies and the City and County of Denver.

Tattered Cover, Denver’s storied independent bookstore for half a century, is set to be owned by the largest corporate bookstore chain in the U.S. A federal judge on Tuesday approved the sale of Tattered Cover to Barnes & Noble, Inc. for more than $1.8 million in cash to pay off the store’s debts, kickstarting the process of closing the sale. The deal marked Barnes & Noble’s first indie bookstore acquisition in the U.S. and the end of Tattered Cover’s history as an independently-owned store.

Over the last year, the metro Denver area saw a historic number of new apartments coming onto the market. The region had nearly 7,400 new units delivered within the second quarter of 2024 and 19,000 over 12 months, according to the Apartment Association of Metro Denver’s second quarter report released Thursday. It’s about the size of building a new small town within a year, said Drew Hamrick, the association’s senior vice president for government affairs and general counsel. And it’s the highest number of new apartments added in the region since the organization began its data report 44 years ago. But this wave of new construction isn’t expected to last.