Econ Blog: Recovery Slow, Steady

State regulators say that a local Indian restaurant with one location used “half-truths and lies” to sell investors on its grandiose plans for a nationwide expansion before spending the $380,000 that shareholders invested on rent, operating costs and Ponzi-like payments. Through a pair of lawsuits it filed April 16, the Colorado Division of Securities is seeking to recover lost investor cash from The Bombay Group and securities broker Michael Bissonnette.

No, TikTok will not suddenly disappear from your phone. Nor will you go to jail if you continue using it after it is banned. After years of attempts to ban the Chinese-owned app, including by former President Donald Trump, a measure to outlaw the popular video-sharing app has won congressional approval and is on its way to President Biden for his signature.

Communities across the US are finding clever ways to crack down on the short-term housing market, making more homes available for residents. This story was originally published by Reasons to Be Cheerful.

When Denver International Airport announced in 2015 that it was looking for a local company to build and operate a brewery inside the attached Westin hotel, it was big news. Not only would an onsite brewery highlight Colorado’s exploding craft beer scene, but it would also give DIA some cachet as one of the first and only airports to have a brewery physically located on its property. “It’s a chance to be unique and do something that someone else hasn’t done,” DIA’s then-senior vice president for concessions Neil Maxfield told Westword at the time, adding that the winning brewery would be required to make a signature IPA that would be served only at the airport. But that was one of the last times airport officials had anything frothy to say about the brewery, which has proven to be anything but a party.

Apartment rents and vacancy rates in metro Denver stayed mostly flat as the market absorbed an unexpectedly large number of new units in the first quarter. Developers delivered 5,144 apartments in the first three months. And despite reports from the U. S. Census Bureau of slowing migration to Colorado, tenants absorbed 5,034 of those units, according to the 2024 First Quarter Vacancy & Rent Report for Metro Denver from the Apartment Association of Metro Denver. The Denver market has delivered 27,000 apartments in the past two years, outstripping the historical average of 10,000 deliveries over two years. Over the last four years, one of the most robust stretches on record, developers have delivered 2,900 units a quarter. Even by recent standards, the first quarter was robust. “It was a really good quarter,” said Cary Bruteig, founder of Apartment Insights and author of the report. The absorption of so many units in what typically isn’t a busy season for leasing had Bruteig complimenting landlords on their marketing efforts and questioning the accuracy of reports that fewer people are relocating to the region. Some of that new supply reflects conversions of old hotel rooms in Denver into studio apartments to house people experiencing homelessness.

New rules imposed by Denver and Colorado that require large buildings to reduce pollution will be too expensive and are at odds with federal regulations, groups representing owners and developers of office towers, hotels and apartment complexes allege in a lawsuit filed this week. The Colorado Apartment Association, the Apartment Association of Metro Denver, the Colorado Hotel and Lodging Association and NAIOP — an association representing commercial real estate developers — said the green-energy rules preempt a federal regulation that governs the quality and performance of new heating and cooling systems and other appliances in large apartment complexes, hotels and commercial office and retail buildings. The groups, in their lawsuit filed Monday in U.