I recently returned for a visit to Denver’s Cherry Creek North district and, amid widespread concerns about an economic downturn, was pleasantly surprised by how the neighborhood continues to serve as an epicenter of growth and human flourishing.
Construction cranes dotted the landscape as the sounds of jackhammers and the scent of fresh concrete filled the air. Many older buildings have disappeared, replaced by new offices, residences, restaurants, hotels, and storefronts. Commercial and residential real estate capital is evident, particularly in the adjoining Cherry Creek West area, where new development plans are in motion.
I have watched the evolution of this area for years—not merely as a visitor frequenting coffeehouses and retailers in the district, but as an independent journalist and writer who worked from a local coworking space during the pandemic and, for a time, served on the Cherry Creek Chamber Ambassador Board. I experienced the neighborhood both from its sidewalks and from inside the rooms, where entrepreneurs and business leaders envisioned the future of the Cherry Creek community asset brand.
Those experiences made Cherry Creek North more than an affluent Denver shopping district to me. It became a living question: What happens when a community develops enough local coherence to coordinate itself while remaining open enough for enterprise to remain dynamic and unpredictable?
That question matters to anarchists, free-market capitalists, and advocates of self-government because Cherry Creek North is neither a libertarian utopia nor a triumph of municipal planning. It is a hybrid—and that imperfection is precisely what makes it instructive.
Eying the Visible Energy of Economic Development
I have lived in and moved through enough American cities to recognize when a district possesses vibrant energy. By way of example, Chicago taught me the muscular power of commerce, with neighborhoods continually remaking themselves before official institutions fully understood what was happening. Evanston, the North Shore Chicago suburb I still consider to be one of my favorite towns, showed me what walkability and human scale can contribute to civic life.
San Diego, Las Vegas, Denver, and now Fort Collins—all places I have called home—reveal different relationships among money, movement, density, and belonging. Because I have lived car-free since 2012, I experience urban policy at the level of the body. A zoning code may appear abstract inside a council chamber. On foot, its consequences become tangible: doors and blank walls, distance and danger, surprise and invitation.
Cherry Creek North invites movement. It rewards curiosity. A pedestrian can move from coffeehouses to high-end clothing stores, from bookstores and banks to lunch and a business meeting, without experiencing the district as a collection of isolated compounds.
That rich urban texture did not emerge from a single visionary drawing the finished neighborhood from above. It arose organically from thousands of decentralized decisions: where to lease, what to build, what to sell, how much capital to risk, and whether customers would come.
The district now contains hundreds of businesses. The 2025–2026 State of Cherry Creek report recorded a Cherry Creek North office vacancy rate of just 1.3 percent in 2025; downtown Denver’s office vacancy was reported near 29 percent. l believe that all of this signified that firms and customers deeply value the commercial, retail, and housing assets that this small district has assembled.
The Knowledge No Planner Can Possess
Austrian-born British economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek asserted that the knowledge needed to coordinate a complex economy does not exist in one place where an expert can collect it. It is dispersed among people who know their own circumstances, much of it tacitly.
The restaurateur knows which corner comes alive after five. The retailer knows which customers browse but do not buy. The property owner knows whether a dated building can survive another lease cycle. The entrepreneur at the coworking table knows which idea is ready to become an invoice.
Hayek believed markets were essentially communication systems that digested dispersed information more efficiently than anything deliberately designed. Cherry Creek North makes that proposition visibly evident. No committee decided in advance the exact tenant mix that would work in 2026. Investors took risks, customers voted with dollars, and unsuccessful concepts yielded space to new experiments.
The Taoist Case for Governing Less
Long before Hayek wrote about dispersed knowledge, Lao Tzu warned rulers about the damage done by excessive interference. In Chapter 57 of the Tao Te Ching, they sage says, in one familiar paraphrase, “I take no action and the people are transformed of themselves.” Wu wei in Taoist parlance does not mean lying down when economic slowdowns are evident. It means refusing government initiatives that fight the natural flow of economic growth.
This is where I believe Taoism and free-market thinking converge most productively—not through some strained claim that Lao Tzu secretly endorsed modern capitalism, but through a shared humility about the limits of control.
Government rarely possesses the knowledge, timing, or sensitivity required to choreograph economic life. Every discretionary review, parking mandate, height restriction, zoning constraint, permitting delay, and politically negotiated concession rests on the assumption that officials can anticipate which experiments a city will need. The visible cost is measured in money and time. The deeper cost is the enterprise we never see because an entrepreneur quietly decides that the process is not worth enduring.
Taoism advises leaders to cultivate favorable conditions and then stop grasping at outcomes. Friedrich Hayek offered a strikingly similar image in his Nobel lecture: the policymaker should behave more like a gardener nurturing an environment than a craftsperson forcing society into a predetermined shape.
Scott Beyer and the Market Urbanist Challenge
My friend Scott Beyer, founder of the Market Urbanism Report and author of the book Market Urbanism: A Vision for Free-Market Cities, applies this insight to urban policy. His provocation is straightforward: cities would become denser, more adaptive, and more affordable if people were freer to build in response to demand.
Beyer’s critique begins with zoning that prohibits rather than protects. American cities reserve vast areas for narrow uses, restrict height and density, require parking regardless of demand, and turn routine construction into a political contest. Scarcity then appears “natural” even when law manufactured it.
His alternative is not the absence of every rule. It is simple, predictable, by-right standards aimed at genuine external harms. Noise, pollution, obstruction, and measurable nuisance can be addressed directly. That differs from forbidding apartments because incumbent homeowners dislike change or requiring approval from people who profit when supply remains scarce.
This distinction should interest anarchists. The modern city often disguises coercion as procedure. A neutral-looking rule can transfer power to incumbent owners, connected developers, or officials who trade exceptions for compliance. Public-choice economics asks us to examine government actors as people responding to incentives—not as disembodied guardians of an agreed public interest.
The 2014 Zoning Change That Let Cherry Creek Move
Cherry Creek North’s growth did not begin with deregulation in the pure sense, but the district’s 2014 zoning reform moved in a pro-growth direction. Denver adopted new Cherry Creek North zone districts that fueled greater density in key locations, and encouraged redevelopment.
The reform did not dictate which companies should win. It expanded the field on which private actors could act while clarifying building form. Predictability lowers political risk. Density lets valuable land support more homes, offices, shops, and exchange. Street-level activation allowed for the alignment of buildings, public spaces, and infrastructure with pedestrian traffic.
For the strictest anarchist, this arrangement contains too much state. The Cherry Creek North Business Improvement District is a public organization financed principally through assessments on commercial property, not a voluntary association. The design review and zoning framework constrain owners. Its results do not prove mandatory collective governance superior to private covenants, nuisance remedies, or voluntary coordination.
Yet ideological honesty cuts both ways. The district also undermines the claim that growth must be centrally programmed. The BID does not construct the private projects, choose every tenant, or guarantee investors against failure. It tends to the streetscape, markets the district, coordinates certain shared concerns, and works within a defined territory.
Matt Joblon of BMC Investments called Cherry Creek North a “mini self-governing entity.” I believe that this phrase accurately captures the useful experiment taking place in the district: decision-making pushed closer to the people bearing the costs and receiving the benefits.
What I Learned Inside Cherry Creek’s Business Community
Serving as a Cherry Creek Chamber ambassador changed the way I understood economic development. From the outside, prosperity can look like architecture—glass, stone, cranes, clean sidewalks. From inside a business network, it looks like a relationship.
It is the introduction made before an event begins. The small merchants competing amid polished brands. The founder of an entrepreneurial venture working from a shared desk at a co-working spot. The business grant offered without a government program and the reputation a business leader earns, one kept promise at a time.
My earlier life in healthcare administration taught me how institutions thicken. Rules accumulate because each once answered a fear, failure, or political demand. Eventually, the system forgets the problem but preserves the procedure.
The economist Milton Friedman argued that economic freedom disperses power. In urban development, that means allowing many owners, builders, lenders, merchants, and customers to test competing visions. The alternative is not neutral expertise. It’s concentrated permission.
Creative Destruction Is Not a Design Flaw
One of my favorite economists, Joseph Schumpeter, called capitalism a “perennial gale of creative destruction.” Cherry Creek North is living through it amid thoroughfares disrupted by construction and legacy buildings being knocked down.
Local businesses face rent pressure. Affluence can become sterility if every quirky, low-margin use yields to a luxury chain.
The pro-growth answer is to remove barriers to more kinds of building: smaller units, denser housing, adaptive reuse, fewer parking mandates, easier home enterprise, simpler permits, and by-right construction. If only large developers survive approval, regulation produces the corporate sameness its defenders oppose.
Self-Government Requires Room for Other People’s Choices
The hardest lesson of self-government is that liberty must include decisions we would not make ourselves.
I may prefer the independent local coffeehouse to the global brand, the idiosyncratic old building to the immaculate new tower, the modest storefront to the luxury boutique. Preference, however, is not jurisdiction. An anarchist ethic worthy of the name cannot condemn state control in Washington while demanding neighborhood control over every parcel down the street.
At its best, Cherry Creek North demonstrates a layered order: clear property rights, open exchange, localized coordination, and enough institutional restraint for entrepreneurial discovery. At its worst, it could become an exclusive enclave whose scarcity is protected by the same regulatory machinery that restricts housing across prosperous American neighborhoods. Both possibilities are real.
The Way Forward Is Less Permission and More Experiment
When I walk Cherry Creek North now, I do not see a finished success story. Believe me, Taoism has cured me of that.
I see tension: wealth and exclusion, beauty and disruption, coordination and coercion, luxury and entrepreneurial hunger. I see cranes rising while economists describe a slower Colorado economy. I see evidence that a small district can develop its own momentum when investors trust the place enough to make long bets.
Most of all, I see a flourishing housing and business district that’s not being delivered by stakeholders as a finished product. It is emerging from people who notice, risk, exchange, adapt, fail, and try again. Institutions can clarify rules and tend shared spaces—or suffocate enterprise by confusing oversight with authorship.
Lao Tzu’s political wisdom was not a policy manual. It was a warning against the intoxication of control. Hayek explained why that warning makes economic sense. Schumpeter showed us the restless entrepreneur who enters the space restraint creates. Beyer brings the argument to the city block, where zoning decides whether a human idea may take physical form.
Cherry Creek North’s most valuable export is not luxury retail or Class A office space. It is a practical question for every city that claims to want prosperity:
What might people build if government stopped insisting on knowing the answer first?
