Time to find a new job. Time to find a new school for her children. Time to find a place to live she can call her own.

She’s been living at a Motel 6 in Greenwood Village for a month — her husband and son in one room, she and her three daughters in another — after being evicted from an apartment in Aurora less than a year ago.

That puts Webster up against a city-imposed 29-day maximum for anyone visiting a non-extended-stay hotel in the affluent south suburban city of 15,000. If she is made to leave, the 29-year-old mother of four who grew up in Centennial said she’ll be back out on the streets.

What’s worse, the Greenwood Village City Council this month did away with a longtime exception to its hotel stay limit for “families in crisis” who are receiving housing assistance from a governmental or charitable entity. Webster was referred to the Motel 6 in July by the Community Economic Defense Project, a nonprofit born out of the COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project that fights for renters facing removal from their homes.

Her son suffers from anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and ADHD, making the instability of being homeless even more challenging.

“Think about kids with disabilities, think about single mothers struggling to make ends meet,” said Webster, sitting at a table beside the motel’s outdoor pool on a recent afternoon. “Have an understanding that we don’t have it all. It takes time, it takes patience.”

Neza Bharucha, whose husband owns the Motel 6 at 9201 E. Arapahoe Road, said Greenwood Village has shown little patience toward the hundreds of families — many with disabilities — that she has provided temporary refuge to over the last few years. The city, she said, has targeted the motel with extra police patrols while allowing guests at other Greenwood Village hotels to stay more than 29 days at a time regularly.

It has led Bharucha, who along with her hotel duties is a licensed psychiatrist, to a singular conclusion.

“They do not want this group of people in Greenwood Village — people who are unhoused with mental health troubles and those who are in recovery,” she said.

Earlier this month, Bharucha and the Community Economic Defense Project sued the city in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, alleging Greenwood Village is violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. They are asking for economic damages and for a judge to strike down the 29-day limit or grant exceptions to people with disabilities.

“Differential treatment by a governmental entity and its agents on the basis of disability cannot be justified by an arbitrary and irrational reason,” reads the lawsuit, filed by well-known civil rights attorney David Lane. “Defendants have arbitrarily and irrationally applied and enforced the 29-day ordinance on the basis of discrimination against people with ‘mental illness and/or addiction issues,’ which are disabilities as defined by the ADA.”

Greenwood Village spokeswoman Megan Copenhaver said the city won’t comment on the situation because of the active litigation. The Denver Post reached out to Mayor George Lantz and the two councilwomen — Libby Hilton Barnacle and Donna Johnston — who represent the district where the Motel 6 is located.

They either didn’t respond or said they were unable to comment.

“They were not going to stop”

Greenwood Village’s involvement with the 129-room Motel 6 at the busy East Arapahoe Road interchange with Interstate 25 goes back at least a decade. In 2014, city leaders passed their controversial 29-day hotel stay limit.

Amie Mayhew, president and CEO of the Colorado Hotel and Lodging Association, said the only other city in the state she is aware of with a stay-limit in place is Wheat Ridge, which passed a 30-day maximum in 2021.

The rationale at the time of the measure’s passage in Greenwood Village was that conventional hotels and motels are not equipped to operate as long-term living facilities. Potentially dangerous use of hot plates and cooking implements in rooms not wired or designed to handle such items posed a fire hazard.

According to the new lawsuit, the city also said there were more calls for service by police to the Motel 6 and to a couple of other hotels where homeless people would typically stay.

Bharucha, who with her husband has helped run the motel her father bought in 2008 for the last several years (her husband took possession of it in 2021), said she doesn’t allow hot plates or other kitchen appliances in rooms. But she does have sympathy for those who find themselves in a tough spot and she wanted to use a portion of the property to help them.

“I work with this population,” she said of her job treating those with mental health challenges. “I see the problems when they don’t have housing.”

Bharucha, 34, has teamed up with several homeless advocacy groups over the last five years, including the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and SAFER, to provide rooms in her motel for those without a home. Her father lived in “charity housing” in India when he fell on hard times and she’s thankful someone was there for him.

“Someone gave him a hand up when he needed it and I want to do that,” she said. “I wouldn’t be here if someone hadn’t done that for him.”

The penalty for a hotel owner caught violating the ordinance is a $499 fine, though Bharucha said the city has neither booted anyone from her motel nor tagged her with a fine. But Greenwood Village has long attempted to impede her efforts to reach out to the homeless and disabled community in other ways, including asking to check the hotel’s guest lists for anyone with active warrants, the federal lawsuit states.

In 2022, a Greenwood Village municipal judge ordered the motel and the nonprofit organizations it worked with to provide documents about the rooms they were renting to clients with disabilities, the lawsuit said. And last year, Greenwood Village served Bharucha with a criminal summons for violating the 29-day limit, according to the suit.

The charge was later dropped.

“I realized they were not going to stop,” Bharucha told The Post in an interview.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether Greenwood Village has enforced the ordinance against any other hotels; when asked, the city told The Post to file a public records request for the information.

At the heart of the case is what the city itself has allegedly said about its ordinance. Bharucha’s lawsuit states that city attorney Tonya Haas Davidson wrote in a 2021 letter to the motel that the city’s families-in-crisis exception wasn’t meant for those “suffering from mental health and/or addiction issues,” but more typically was meant to address victims of natural disaster.

That interpretation of the exception, the lawsuit alleges, forced motel management to “choose between discriminating against its guests with disabilities or seemingly violating the ordinance.”

Maddie Lips, an attorney who worked alongside Lane on the case, said because of the statement from Greenwood Village’s attorney in her letter to the motel, the city “has made this a novel case by being so blatantly open about the discriminatory intent of the 29-day ordinance.”

Making matters worse, according to the lawsuit, business travelers often stay at the city’s other hotels for longer than permitted by city regulation “and have not been subject to enforcement actions by the city.”

“There is no non-discriminatory distinction between a person staying in a hotel for an extended period of time because of business reasons as compared to a person staying for an extended period of time who has disabilities,” the lawsuit reads.

Cesar Jimenez, head of supportive housing for the Community Economic Defense Project, said the organization uses up to 10 rooms at the Greenwood Village Motel 6 to house clients temporarily. They’ve had a contract with Bharucha since February at a cost of $70 a night per room.

“Our main objective is to keep them safe while we find a home and services for them,” Jimenez said. “What Neza has created is a refuge for our clients.”

Homeless numbers up in 2024

Arapahoe County’s homeless population leaped dramatically from 2023 to 2024, according to recently released data from the Metro Denver Homelessness Initiative’s point-in-time survey taken on a single night in January.

The data shows the number of unhoused people in the county up from 442 in 2023 to 650 this year — a faster pace than the 10% growth the metro area as a whole saw in that same period. Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed said alcohol or substance abuse played a key role in their situation, the top contributor to homelessness in Arapahoe County.

Another 23% of respondents pointed to mental health issues or “disabling conditions” as chief reasons for their homelessness.

“We house some of the most vulnerable community members,” the defense project’s Jimenez said. “Our primary objective is to just provide them with temporary safe housing as opposed to them being in shelters or literally homeless.”

To Greenwood Village’s elected leaders, Jimenez said he would just say one thing.

“I would invite them to see the families,” he said. “You yourselves have families — would you want to be in this situation?”

Webster, the displaced mother of four currently living on the third floor of the Motel 6, said she doesn’t know how much longer it will be before she obtains a more permanent housing situation. But that day can’t come soon enough.

“Our kids are stuck in a room pretty much 24/7,” she said. “Nobody wants to be stuck in a hotel with kids.”

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“I think it was important for us to double down on our commitment to Denver. Everyone’s looking for greener pastures,” said Redaptive CEO Arvin Vohra. “But the fundamental reality of Denver is that we’re a sustainability-forward city, and we’re a place that has a phenomenal talent base. It makes sense for us to continue to stick to that.”

Redaptive is bucking a trend of companies leaving the downtown Denver business district or downsizing their office space since offices shut down during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. A slow return to the office and people splitting their work weeks between home and office have sent vacancy rates to their highest point in at least a couple of decades. 

The overall office vacancy rate rose to 33.8% in the second quarter of this year, up from 31.8% in the first quarter, according to the Denver office of the real estate firm JLL. The total vacancy rate metro-wide was 24.8%.

This is the highest vacancy rate on record, based on statistics dating to 1999, said T.J. Jaroszewski, director of Mountain Region Research at JLL. He said vacancies might have been higher in the mid-1980s during the region’s oil and gas bust.

“But, there’s no real way to know. Most professionals and shops consider this period to be the highest vacancy rate on record,” Jaroszewski said.

The percentage of vacant office space was at roughly 15% or lower from 2011 to 2020, a report by real estate firm CBRE shows.

Nationwide, the office vacancy rate reached a record-high 20.5% in the second quarter, according to a report by Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate services firm.

Along with hybrid work situations, what real estate agents call a “flight to quality,” or seeking newer buildings with more amenities, is a factor in the emptying out of parts of downtown. Real estate agents talk about a tale of two cities when looking at office vacancy rates in LoDo — 19.5% — compared with 37.8% for the east side of downtown.

When TIAA announced plans to close its Denver office at 1670 Broadway by July 2026 and move to Frisco, Texas, company officials mentioned lower costs at the new site and the opportunity for “a stronger workplace culture in a newer building.”

Most of the Denver positions at TIAA will be relocated to Texas, resulting in the loss of about 1,000 local jobs.

“Those two areas could not be more different when it comes to tenant demand,” Guy Lachman of JLL said, referring to LoDo and the east side, or Uptown, where TIAA is.

Cherry Creek, a real estate submarket, continues to report single-digit vacancy rates for office space.

“Cherry Creek is kind of an anomaly, not only in Denver but I think across the country,” said Lachman, a vice president on JLL’s tenant representation team in Denver.

Cherry Creek’s vacancy rate for Class A office buildings, more modern and desirable space, is about 5%, Lachman said. The Cherry Creek area, east of downtown and north of the Cherry Creek Shopping Center, is also “a very small micro market when it comes to Class A space,” he added.

And it’s not always about the building itself, Lachman said. “I think that the flight to quality is quality location more so than quality building.”

Lachman said the Block 162 building at 675 15th St. is “a very nice” building, but is about 40% vacant. “The tenants I’ve taken through there just say that they don’t like the area very much.”

Other new or soon-to-open office buildings considered to be trophy spaces have few tenants, Lachman added. High construction costs for tenants to build out a space and waits for permits are dampening demand, he said.

Safety continues to be a concern for people as well, Lachman said.

“Anyone who works downtown can probably tell you that they see various forms of crime and violence from time to time,” Lachman said. “Last week, I walked by a building that had its windows shot out.”

Police and firefighters were at the scene, he said.

Retail outlets and restaurants, which real estate agents say are important attractions for office workers, struggled to stay open during the pandemic and see the ongoing reconstruction of the 16th Street Mall, a pedestrian shopping area downtown, as a hindrance to recovery.

Chef Lon Symensma and business partner Christopher Davis-Massey permanently closed Bistro LeRoux, 1510 16th St. Mall in July. “The last thing anyone wants in downtown Denver’s construction site with no foot traffic is a fancy French restaurant,” Symensma told The Denver Post in a July 31 story.

Lachman said parking downtown is another hurdle for employers trying to convince workers to spend more time in the office. Expecting younger workers to shell out $200 to $300 a month “just to park your car to go to an office building where you don’t want to be is a very hard sell,” he said.

Lachman said office vacancies will likely continue to rise over the rest of 2024.

“I think there were leases signed pre-pandemic that will be expiring in the next 12 to 24 months that will not be backfilled,” Lachman said. “I think many tenants that will remain in the office will either renew or downsize.”

Redaptive said it’s on an upward trajectory and that Denver is the place it wants to be. The company was based in San Francisco in 2019 when it opened an office in Denver. In 2023, it moved its headquarters to the Mile High City.

When Redaptive relocated to Denver, it employed 17 people. “Now, we’re just shy of 100,” Vohra said.

The company’s portfolio has expanded to between 5,500 and 6,000 locations across 47 states that it manages, Vohra said. Redaptive works with several Fortune 500 businesses on making their commercial and industrial facilities more energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable. The company also measures the outcomes.

“Redaptive expressed clear confidence in Denver by establishing its headquarters here in 2023 and subsequently signing a lease at McGregor Square,” Ryan Link, part of the CBRE team representing the company, said in a statement.

The new location “perfectly represents the live-work-play environment attractive to many companies,” Link said.

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Now, this city on the western edge of the metro area is setting up a one-time $100,000 relief fund for smoke and vape shops, along with gas stations and convenience stores, to soften the financial hit they’ve taken since Golden’s prohibition went into effect on Jan. 1.

The City Council earlier this month directed staff to create a competitive grant program to which businesses can apply for funds. No single store can receive more than $10,000 and the money must be allocated before the end of the year. About 30 businesses in Golden are affected by the city’s prohibition.

“The City Council is trying to say they’ve heard the concerns of local businesses and they want to be responsive to local businesses that were impacted by an ordinance they weren’t anticipating,” said Rick Muriby, Golden’s community development director.

While several Colorado municipalities have passed similar flavored tobacco sales bans in recent years to combat youth consumption of nicotine products, including Boulder, Aspen, Glenwood Springs and Edgewater, Golden appears to be the first willing to backfill revenues lost to a law it passed.

Muriby said the $100,000 figure wasn’t based on sales data from businesses in the city, but was a figure the council and city manager “felt was a reasonable amount for the city to spend.” And while Golden wants to ensure its businesses remain healthy, he said, it has no intention of taking a second look at its flavored nicotine ban.

“They’re letting (the shops) know they are valued but that it’s more important to enact this law to protect kids,” he said of the City Council.

In fact, Golden’s elected leaders imposed guardrails on the reimbursement program. Businesses applying for funds must document only losses above and beyond those caused directly by the ban, or as Golden Mayor Laura Weinberg put it at a recent study session, “the spillover effect” of buying chips, a soda or a lottery ticket that no longer happens because people have taken their business elsewhere.

“I’m not comfortable compensating people for not selling poison to our children,” Councilman Rob Reed said at an Aug. 13 study session, emphasizing his resistance to making dollar-for-dollar reimbursements for lost tobacco sales.

Multiple attempts by The Denver Post this week to get members of the Golden City Council, including the mayor, to comment on the grant program were unsuccessful.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has determined that “no tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, are safe, especially for children, teens and young adults” and that the addictive nicotine they contain “can harm the parts of an adolescent’s brain that control attention, learning, mood and impulse control.”

The agency says the use of flavored e-cigarettes or vapes, with alluring flavors like cotton candy and pink lemonade, is favored by youths over any other tobacco product. When Golden passed its ban in July 2023, the city’s ordinance noted that e-cigarettes and other flavored offerings are essentially “starter tobacco products for youth.”

The Post reached the owners of several businesses in Golden that once sold flavored tobacco products but they declined to be interviewed on the record. Grier Bailey, executive director of the Colorado Wyoming Petroleum Marketers Association and Convenience Store Association, said bans unnecessarily harm stores that already operate on slim margins.

“It’s nice, it shows recognition that these business owners have been hurt,” Bailey said of Golden’s revenue replacement program. “But as a one-time grant, this doesn’t make up for future years of losses.”

Bans, he said, don’t work because most youth who vape or smoke get their products from friends or older siblings. Adults who enjoy a wide range of flavors on the market, Bailey said, are denied what they should be free to buy.

And so they go elsewhere, taking their appetite for flavored tobacco — as well as myriad grab-and-go snack and beverage items sold at gas stations and convenience stores — outside Golden, Bailey said. No other community touching Golden has a similar ban in place.

“For a gas station customer, there are a lot of stations around — why would you go to one that doesn’t have what you want?” he said. “When jurisdictions do this, it doesn’t do anything but shift business to other places”

That was the reason given by former Denver Mayor Michael Hancock nearly three years ago for his veto of a bill the City Council had just passed banning flavored nicotine product sales in the city.

“I believe in passing and implementing effective policies,” Hancock told The Post at the time. “I didn’t see that this bill singling Denver out would do anything to keep nicotine and vaping products from our young people.”

In 2022, the state legislature considered — but didn’t pass — a bill that would have banned flavored vape juice and other products in that category statewide. Statutory counties, like Jefferson County, don’t have the authority to specifically regulate flavored tobacco products, Alexandra Bolivar, spokeswoman for Jefferson County Public Health, wrote in an email.

A bill introduced this spring that would have granted that authority to Colorado county governments died in committee in March.

“Jefferson County could consider a similar policy to Golden’s if there are changes to state statute allowing counties to do so,” Alexandra Bolivar, spokeswoman for Jefferson County Public Health, wrote in an email.

In the meantime, Golden’s mayor said the city needs to balance the need to promote public health among local youth with the idea that businesses subject to the strong arm of the law aren’t left floundering as they try to win back customers who have gone elsewhere.

“This would be a recognition that we want those small businesses to still be in our community,” Weinberg said.

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WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve officials have said they’re increasingly confident that they’ve nearly tamed inflation. Now, it’s the health of the job market that’s starting to draw their concern.

With inflation cooling toward its 2% target, the pace of hiring slowing and the unemployment rate edging up, the Fed is poised to cut its benchmark interest rate next month from its 23-year high. How fast it may cut rates after that, though, will be determined mainly by whether employers keep hiring. A lower Fed benchmark rate would eventually lead to lower rates for auto loans, mortgages and other forms of consumer borrowing.

Chair Jerome Powell will likely provide some hints about how the Fed sees the economy and what its next steps may be in a high-profile speech Friday in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, at the Fed’s annual conference of central bankers. It’s a platform that Powell and his predecessors have often used to signal changes in their thinking or approach.

Powell will likely indicate that the Fed has grown more confident that inflation is headed back to the 2% target, which it has long said would be necessary before rate cuts would begin.

Economists generally agree that the Fed is getting closer to conquering high inflation, which brought financial pain to millions of households beginning three years ago as the economy rebounded from the pandemic recession. Few economists, though, think Powell or any other Fed official is prepared to declare “mission accomplished.”

“I don’t think that the Fed has to fear inflation,” said Tom Porcelli, U.S. chief economist at PGIM Fixed Income. “At this point, it’s right that the Fed is now more focused on labor versus inflation. Their policy is calibrated for inflation that is much higher than this.”

Still, how fast the Fed cuts rates in the coming months will depend on what the economic data shows. After the government reported this month that hiring in July was much less than expected and that the jobless rate reached 4.3%, the highest in three years, stock prices plunged for two days on fears that the U.S. might fall into a recession. Some economists began speculating about a half-point Fed rate cut in September and perhaps another identical cut in November.

But healthier economic reports last week, including another decline in inflation and a robust gain in retail sales, have largely dispelled those concerns. Wall Street traders now expect three quarter-point Fed cuts in September, November and December, though in December it’s nearly a coin-toss between a quarter- and a half-point cut. Mortgage rates have already started to decline in anticipation of a rate reduction.

A half-point Fed rate cut in September would become more likely if there were signs of a further slowdown in hiring, some officials have said. The next jobs report will be issued on Sept. 6, after the Jackson Hole conference but before the Fed’s next meeting in mid-September.

Raphael Bostic, president of the Fed’s Atlanta branch, said in an interview Monday with The Associated Press that “evidence of accelerating weakness in labor markets may warrant a more rapid move, either in terms of the increments of movement or the speed at which we try to get back” to a level of rates that no longer restricts the economy.

Even if hiring stays solid, the Fed is set to cut rates this year given the steady progress that’s been made on inflation, economists say. Last week, the government said consumer prices rose just 2.9% in July from a year ago, the smallest such increase in more than three years.

Bostic noted that the economy has changed from just a couple of months ago, when he was suggesting that a rate cut might not be necessary until the final three months of the year.

“I’ve got more confidence that we are likely to get to our target for inflation,” he said. “And we’ve seen labor markets weaken considerably relative to where they were” last year. “We might need to shift our policy stance sooner than I would have thought before.”

Both Bostic and Austan Goolsbee, president of the Fed’s Chicago branch, say that with inflation falling, inflation-adjusted interest rates — which are what many businesses and investors pay most attention to — are rising even as inflation has slowed. When the Fed first set its key rate at its current 5.3%, inflation — excluding volatile energy and food costs — was 4.7%. Now, it’s just 3.2%.

“Our policies are getting tighter with every moment in that type of situation,” Bostic said. “We have to be concerned” that rates are so high they could cause an economic slowdown.

Still, Bostic said that for now, the job market and the economy appear mostly healthy, and he still expects a “soft landing,” whereby inflation falls back to the Fed’s 2% target without a recession occurring.

With the economy’s outlook unclear and the Fed focusing heavily on what future data shows, there may be only so much Powell will be able to say Friday about the central bank’s next steps.

Given the Fed’s focus on how the economic data comes in, “it will be difficult for Powell to pre-commit to a particular trajectory at Jackson Hole,” Matthew Luzzetti, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank, said in a research note.

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The number of unemployed individuals in the state rose by 1,800 from June to 126,300 in July. Colorado’s unemployment rate remains below the U.S. rate of 4.3%. The size of the state’s labor force rose by 5,500 workers last month.

Employers in the state added 4,800 non-farm jobs last month, with 2,500 of those coming in the private sector and 2,300 in the public sector. That is more than triple the 1,500 net new jobs added between May and June.

Broomfield-based economist Gary Horvath described July’s gains as “bland and broad-based,” but called them a positive given the slowdown happening in hiring nationwide.

“On a positive note, 14 of 19 sectors tracked in the analysis of Colorado employment recorded increases in July, suggesting that companies are likely to be hiring on a limited basis rather than firing. For July, the change in employment was modest. More importantly, it was broad-based,” Horvath said in an email.

The biggest private sector gains came in trade, transportation and utilities, up by 4,100 jobs. Manufacturing had the biggest loss with 1,000 jobs shed in July.

Over the past year, the state has added 43,200 jobs, with 24,800 coming in the private sector and governments adding 18,400 jobs. The biggest contributors to annual job growth have been educational and health services, up 11,600 jobs, and professional and business services, up 7,400.

Construction has suffered the biggest annual decline at 4,200 jobs, followed by the information sector with a loss of 2,800 jobs.

Colorado’s annual rate of job growth is 1.5%, just under the U.S. rate of 1.6%, according to the report.

Drivers traveling on the stretch of U.S. 50 between Delta and Montrose don’t have many reasons to pull over. But in the summer, one family-owned farm boasts an eye-popping roadside attraction that’s well worth a pitstop.

DeVries Produce in Olathe plants 10 to 50 acres of sunflowers each year and allows the public to come snap a shot among the blooms. When on the edge of the plots, the sunflowers tower tall and seemingly extend forever into the horizon. Yes, they are just dying to be on your Instagram.

Farmer Randy Friend said the attraction started by accident eight years ago when he first planted sunflowers to provide bird seed to a local coop. But because they sometimes grow right on the highway – Friend rotates crops throughout farm plots – people couldn’t help but notice.

Now the sunflowers are a marketing tool for the DeVries Produce roadside stand, which sells homegrown fruits and veggies alongside Colorado favorites like Palisade peaches and locally made cheeses, jams and honey. The family has operated the shop since the 1940s.

“We grow (sunflowers) for many reasons, but mainly as an attraction to our roadside store,” Friend said. “Nothing is free to grow, so we have to get creative to remain profitable.”

Plus, it’s a fun addition to the farm’s lineup of community events, such as its fall pumpkin patch and corn maze, he added.

Friend said the blooms usually last about three weeks, until early September. Visitors are advised to check in at the produce stand before heading west off U.S. 50 to where the sunflowers are growing this year.

Anyone interested in doing a professional photo shoot will be required to pay a $25 fee. But if you just have your cellphone, access is free. Just be sure to purchase a bag of produce on your way out as a thank you and to ensure the farm — and its sunflower fields — can be sustained for years to come.

DeVries Produce is located at 60542 Gunnison Road in Olathe. The stand is open every day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call 970-323-6559 or visit devriesproduce.com.

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Prices for a basket of consumer goods and services in the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood area rose 1.9% between July 2023 and July 2024, compared to a 2.6% annual gain in May and a 2.8% gain in March, according to an update Wednesday from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Metro Denver’s Consumer Price Index gain is a full percentage point below the 2.9% annual rate measured nationally in July. But in a worrisome sign, prices shot up 0.62% between May and July, nearly four times the 0.15% gain measured nationally.

“In many ways, July’s result was the most ‘normal’ inflation reading we have seen since the pandemic began, and could have easily been produced in 2019,” said Douglas Porter, chief economist with BMO, in a commentary.

Falling gasoline prices, down 12.1% on the year, used car prices, down 9.7%, and apparel costs, down 4.5%, put downward pressure on inflation in metro Denver. Grocery store prices were flat, with decreases in cereals, baked goods, vegetables and fruits, offsetting gains in dairy products and meat.

Despite that, the cost of eating out rose 5.7%, reflecting higher labor and lease expenses at restaurants. Shelter costs also continue to outpace overall inflation, rising 3% the past year and 1.2% in the past two months. The flare-up in rents, if sustained, could fuel inflation in the months ahead given the heavy weight shelter costs hold in the index.

Inflation on the whole, however, is moderating enough to provide the Federal Reserve maneuvering room to declare victory and start cutting rates, said Selma Hepp, chief economist with CoreLogic, in emailed comments.

“This means for the average American that the Fed will likely cut interest rates next month, which will slightly bring down the cost of borrowing – a good step for auto and home sales, in particular,” Hepp said.

Even though the pace of inflation is moderating, its impacts are here to stay. Colorado consumers have seen prices rise 20% since 2020, resulting in the typical household spending $34,194 more cumulatively since 2020, according to estimates from the Common Sense Institute.

Some of America’s largest companies, from Amazon to Disney to Yum Brands, say their customers are increasingly seeking cheaper alternative products and services, searching for bargains or just avoiding items they deem too expensive. Consumers aren’t cutting back enough to cause an economic downturn. Rather, economists say, they appear to be returning to pre-pandemic norms, when most companies felt they couldn’t raise prices very much without losing business.

“While inflation is down, prices are still high, and I think consumers have gotten to the point where they’re just not accepting it,” Tom Barkin, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, said last week at a conference of business economists. “And that’s what you want: The solution to high prices is high prices.”

A more price-sensitive consumer helps explain why inflation has appeared to be steadily falling toward the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, ending a period of painfully high prices that strained many people’s budgets and darkened their outlooks on the economy. It also assumed a central place in the presidential election, with inflation leading many Americans to turn sour on the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the economy.

The reluctance of consumers to keep paying more has forced companies to slow their price increases — or even to cut them. The result is a cooling of inflation pressures.

Other factors have also helped tame inflation, including the healing of supply chains, which has boosted the availability of cars, trucks, meats and furniture, among other items, and the high interest rates engineered by the Fed, which slowed sales of homes, cars and appliances and other interest rate-sensitive purchases.

Still, a key question now is whether shoppers will pull back so much as to put the economy at risk. Consumer spending makes up more than two-thirds of economic activity. With evidence emerging that the job market is cooling, a drop in spending could potentially derail the economy. Such fears caused stock prices to plummet a week ago, though markets have since rebounded.

This week, the government will provide updates on both inflation and the health of the American consumer. On Wednesday, it will release the consumer price index for July. It’s expected to show that prices — excluding volatile food and energy costs — rose just 3.2% from a year earlier. That would be down from 3.3% in June and would be the lowest such year-over-year inflation figure since April 2021.

And on Thursday, the government will report last month’s retail sales, which are expected to have climbed a decent 0.3% from June. Such a gain would suggest that while Americans have become vigilant about their money, they are still willing to spend.

Many businesses have noticed.

“We’re seeing lower average selling prices … right now because customers continue to trade down on price when they can,” said Andrew Jassy, CEO of Amazon.

David Gibbs, CEO of Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut, told investors that a more cost-conscious consumer has slowed its sales, which slipped 1% in the April-June quarter at stores open for at least a year.

“Ensuring we provide consumers affordable options,” Gibbs said, “has been an area of greater focus for us since last year.”

Other companies are cutting prices outright. Dormify, an online retailer that sells dorm supplies, is offering comforters starting at $69, down from $99 a year ago.

According to the Fed’s “Beige Book,” an anecdotal collection of business reports from around the country that is released eight times a year, companies in nearly all 12 Fed districts have described similar experiences.

“Almost every district mentioned retailers discounting items or price-sensitive consumers only purchasing essentials, trading down in quality, buying fewer items or shopping around for the best deals,” the Beige Book said last month.

Most economists say consumers are still spending enough to sustain the economy consistently. Barkin said most of the businesses in his district — which covers Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and North and South Carolina — report that demand remains solid, at least at the right price.

“The way I’d put it is, consumers are still spending, but they’re choosing,” Barkin said.

In a speech a couple of weeks ago, Jared Bernstein, who leads the Biden administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, mentioned consumer caution as a reason why inflation is nearing the end of a “round trip” back to the Fed’s 2% target level.

Emerging from the pandemic, Bernstein noted, consumers were flush with cash after receiving several rounds of stimulus checks and having slashed their spending on in-person services. Their improved finances “gave certain firms the ability to flex a pricing power that was much less prevalent pre-pandemic.” After COVID, consumers were “less responsive to price increases,” Bernstein said.

As a result, “the old adage that the cure for high prices is high prices (was) temporarily disengaged,” Bernstein said.

So some companies raised prices even more than was needed to cover their higher input costs, thereby boosting their profits. Limited competition in some industries, Bernstein added, made it easier for companies to charge more.

Barkin noted that before the pandemic, inflation remained low as online shopping, which makes price comparisons easy, became increasingly prevalent. Major retailers also held down costs, and increased U.S. oil production brought down gas prices.

“A price increase was so rare,” Barkin said, “that if someone came to you with a 5% or 10% price increase, you almost just threw them out, like, ‘How could you possibly do it?’ ”

That changed in 2021.

“There are labor shortages, Barkin said. “Supply chain shortages. And the price increases are coming to you from everywhere. Your gardener is raising your prices, and you don’t have the capacity to do anything other than accept them.”

The economist Isabella Weber at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, dubbed this phenomenon “sellers’ inflation” in 2023. In an influential paper, she wrote that “publicly reported supply chain bottlenecks” can “create legitimacy for price hikes” and “create acceptance on the part of consumers to pay higher prices.”

Consumers are no longer so accepting, Barkin said.

“People have a little bit more time to stop and say, ‘How do I feel about paying $9.89 for a 12-pack of Diet Coke when I used to pay $5.99?’ They don’t like it that much, and so people are making choices.”

Barkin said he expects this trend to continue to slow price increases and cool inflation.

“I’m actually pretty optimistic that over the next few months, we’re going to see good readings on the inflation side,” he said. “All the elements of inflation seem to be settling down.”

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NEW YORK (AP) — Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index soared nearly 11% early Tuesday, a day after it set markets tumbling in Europe and on Wall Street.

The Japanese index advanced more than 3,300 points, not quite making up for the huge loss of more than 4,400 points the day before, when it plunged 12.4% in its worst single-day decline since 1987.

The scary Monday started with a plunge abroad reminiscent of 1987 ’s crash swept around the world and pummeled Wall Street with more steep losses, as fears worsened about a slowing U.S. economy.

The S&P 500 dropped 3% for its worst day in nearly two years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average reeled by 1,033 points, or 2.6%, while the Nasdaq composite slid 3.4% as Apple, Nvidia and other Big Tech companies that used to be the stars of the stock market continued to wilt.

The drops were the latest in a global sell-off that began last week, and it was the first chance for traders in Tokyo to react to Friday’s report showing U.S. employers slowed their hiring last month by much more than economists expected. That was the latest piece of data on the U.S. economy to come in weaker than expected, and it’s all raised fear the Federal Reserve has pressed the brakes on the U.S. economy by too much for too long through high interest rates in hopes of stifling inflation.

Professional investors cautioned that some technical factors could be amplifying the action in markets, and that the drops may be overdone, but the losses were still neck-snapping. South Korea’s Kospi index careened 8.8% lower, and bitcoin dropped below $54,000 from more than $61,000 on Friday.

Even gold, which has a reputation for offering safety during tumultuous times, slipped about 1%.

That’s in part because traders began wondering if the damage has been so severe that the Federal Reserve will have to cut interest rates in an emergency meeting, before its next scheduled decision on Sept. 18. The yield on the two-year Treasury, which closely tracks expectations for the Fed, briefly sank below 3.70% during the morning from 3.88% late Friday and from 5% in April. It later recovered and pulled back to 3.89%.

“The Fed could ride in on a white horse to save the day with a big rate cut, but the case for an inter-meeting cut seems flimsy,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management. “Those are usually reserved for emergencies, like COVID, and an unemployment rate of 4.3% doesn’t really seem like an emergency.”

Of course, the U.S. economy is still growing, the U.S. stock market is still up a healthy amount for the year and a recession is far from a certainty. The Fed has been clear about the tightrope it began walking when it started hiking rates sharply in March 2022: Being too aggressive would choke the economy, but going too soft would give inflation more oxygen and hurt everyone.

Goldman Sachs economist David Mericle sees a higher chance of a recession within the next 12 months following Friday’s jobs report. But he still sees only a 25% probability of that, up from 15%, in part “because the data look fine overall” and he does not “see major financial imbalances.”

Some of Wall Street’s recent declines may simply be air coming out of a stock market that romped to dozens of all-time highs this year, in part on a frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology. Critics have been saying for a while that the stock market looked expensive after prices rose faster than corporate profits.

“Markets tend to move higher like they’re climbing stairs, and they go down like they’re falling out a window,” according to JJ Kinahan, CEO of IG North America. He chalks much of the recent worries to euphoria around AI subsiding, with pressure rising on companies to show how AI is turning into profits, and “a market that was ahead of itself.”

The only way for stocks to look less expensive is either for prices to fall or for their profits to strengthen. Expectations are still high for the latter, with growth for S&P 500 profits this past quarter looking to be the strongest since 2021.

Professional investors also pointed to the Bank of Japan’s move last week to raise its main interest rate from nearly zero. Such a move helps boost the value of the Japanese yen, but it could also force traders to scramble out of deals where they borrowed money for virtually no cost in Japan and invested it elsewhere around the world.

Treasury yields also pared their losses Monday after a report said growth for U.S. services businesses was a touch stronger than expected. Growth was led by arts, entertainment and recreation businesses, along with accommodations and food services, according to the Institute for Supply Management.

Still, stocks of companies whose profits are most closely tied to the economy’s strength took sharp losses on the fears about a slowdown. The small companies in the Russell 2000 index dropped 3.3%, washing out what had been a revival for it and other beaten-down areas of the market.

Making things worse for Wall Street, Big Tech stocks tumbled as the market’s most popular trade for much of this year continued to unravel. Apple, Nvidia and a handful of other Big Tech stocks known as the “ Magnificent Seven ” had propelled the S&P 500 to record after record this year, even as high interest rates weighed down much of the rest of the stock market.

But Big Tech’s momentum turned last month on worries investors had taken their prices too high and expectations for future growth are becoming too difficult to meet. A set of underwhelming profit reports that began with updates from Tesla and Alphabet added to the pessimism and accelerated the declines.

Apple fell 4.8% Monday after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that it had slashed its ownership stake in the iPhone maker.

Nvidia, the chip company that’s become the poster child of Wall Street’s AI bonanza, fell even more, 6.4%. Analysts cut their profit forecasts over the weekend for the company after a report from The Information said Nvidia’s new AI chip is delayed. The recent selling has trimmed Nvidia’s gain for the year to nearly 103% from 170% in the middle of June.

Another Big Tech titan, Alphabet, fell 4.4% after a U.S. judge ruled Google’s search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation.

All told, the S&P 500 fell 160.23 points to 5,186.33. The Dow sank 1,033.99 to 38,703.27, and the Nasdaq composite tumbled 576.08 to 16,200.08.

Worries outside corporate profits, interest rates and the economy are also weighing on the market. The Israel-Hamas war may be worsening, which beyond its human toll could cause sharp swings for the price of oil. That’s adding to broader worries about potential hotspots around the world, while upcoming U.S. elections could further scramble things.

Wall Street has been concerned about how policies coming out of November could impact markets, but the sharp swings for stock prices could affect the election itself.

The threat of a recession is likely to put Vice President Kamala Harris on the defensive. But slower growth could also further reduce inflation and force former President Donald Trump to pivot from his current focus on higher prices to outlining ways to revive the economy.

“It comes down to jobs,” said Quincy Krosby, chief global strategist for LPL Financial. Jobs drive spending by U.S. consumers, which in turn is the biggest part of the U.S. economy.

“When we get to election day, the unemployment rate is going to be extremely important.”

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AP Business Writers Elaine Kurtenbach, Matt Ott, Christopher Rugaber and Damian J. Troise contributed.

Inflation has been falling steadily closer to the Fed’s 2% target for the past several months. And the job market has cooled, with the unemployment rate rising about a half-point this year to 4.1%. Fed officials have said that they are seeking to balance the need to keep rates high enough to control inflation without keeping them too high for too long and causing a recession.

Rate cuts — as early as September — could help the Fed achieve a “soft landing,” in which high inflation is defeated without an economic downturn. Such an outcome might also affect this year’s presidential race, as Republicans have sought to tie Vice President Kamala Harris to the inflation spike of the past three years. Former President Donald Trump said the Fed shouldn’t cut rates before the election.

“While I don’t believe we have reached our final destination, I do believe we are getting closer to the time when a cut in the policy rate is warranted,” Christopher Waller, a member of the Fed’s governing board, said earlier this month.

Financial market traders have priced in 100% odds that the central bank will reduce its benchmark rate at its Sept. 17-18 meeting, according to futures markets, so Fed Chair Jerome Powell does not need to provide further guidance to markets Wednesday about the timing of a cut, economists say.

Instead, Powell will have more opportunities in the coming months to illustrate how the Fed is thinking about inflation and interest rates, particularly in his speech in late August at the annual Fed conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. As a result, he may not provide much of a hint Wednesday regarding how quickly the Fed will cut rates after it starts doing so. Economists expect relatively gradual cuts, unless there is evidence the job market is faltering, which would spur the Fed to move faster.

Even so, the Fed could alter several parts of the statement it releases after each meeting to lay the groundwork for a cut in September.

In the statement it released after its June meeting, for example, Fed officials said, “In recent months, there has been modest further progress toward the (Fed’s) 2% inflation objective.” On Wednesday, the Fed could drop “modest” or alter it in some other way to underscore that additional progress on inflation has been achieved.

In the latest piece of good news on price increases, on Friday the government said that yearly inflation fell to 2.5% in July, according to the Fed’s preferred inflation measure. That is down from 2.6% the previous month and the lowest since February 2021, when inflation was just starting to accelerate.

One encouraging sign for the Fed is that rental prices, a key driver of broader inflation, have started to noticeably cool, as new apartment buildings have been completed in many large cities.

Rental inflation was a leading example of what economists call “catch-up” inflation, in which prices were still rising this year because of distortions from the pandemic economy. Many Americans sought more living space or moved out on their own during COVID, pushing up the cost of rents and homes.

The government’s rental inflation measures have been rising faster than usual, well into this year, to reflect those increases. This even as rapid apartment building has slowed cost increases for new leases. Other examples of “catch-up” inflation include car insurance, which soared more than 20% earlier this year from a year ago, as insurance companies have charged more to reflect the pandemic-era spike in new-car prices. Yet, even car insurance costs have started to rise more slowly.

Powell has long said the Fed was seeking “greater confidence” that inflation was falling back to the Fed’s 2% target. Earlier this month — even before the latest inflation readings — he said that recent inflation data does “ add somewhat to confidence ” that it is cooling.

Powell and other Fed officials have also worried that strong job growth and rapidly rising paychecks would potentially fuel inflation, as some companies would likely raise prices to offset the higher labor costs.

But hiring and wage growth have slowed in recent months, and Powell this month acknowledged the job market is “not a source of broad inflationary pressures for the economy.”

On Friday, the government will release a quarterly measure of wage growth, which is likely to show that paychecks, while still growing at a healthy pace, are not growing as fast as a year ago, adding to evidence that inflationary pressures have eased.

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