Denver, CO
These childhood best friends are trying to survive together in Denver after their lives derailed
Michael Webb and James Peters, best friends since third grade, sit on their e-bikes and lean against the brick wall of a vacant storefront.
They glare at the Capitol Hill King Soopers where, they say, workers just kicked them out.
“I’m too depressed to talk,” Peters says.
The whole ordeal started at 6:07 a.m., the day before, on a Monday. Peters had put all of his change — all the money he has in this world — into the store’s Coinstar machine.
The machine printed out a receipt, and he took it to the counter to collect his $111.
“But it was 6:07 a.m., and they don’t cash the vouchers until 8 a.m.,” Peters says.
He had a court appointment in Aurora that morning, so he left the store and came back on Tuesday with Webb. But when they arrived, a worker explained that they were too late. They should have come back on Monday — receipts need to be redeemed the day they’re printed.
The men felt the store was robbing them of $111 they desperately needed, and there was nothing they could do about it.
Peters’ temper boiled, and the store employees kicked him out for good.
Staff at the store declined to comment on this story.
“They robbed my brother,” says Webb, who called Coinstar on behalf of his friend. “I was on hold forever, but when they answered this super nice woman gave me a code and just made sure the transaction was right.”
Since Peters had been 86’d from the store, Webb went into King Soopers with the receipt and the code. Six people, he says, surrounded him to kick him out. He ignored them and walked to the counter.
“The poor man working there was going, ‘Oh my God, this guy’s back,’” Webb says. “But I gave him the code, and we got the money.”
The $111 was in their hands again. To them, it was a fortune. And it was so little at the same time.
“How is this all the money I’ve got in the world,” wonders Peters.
Not that long ago, Peters was thriving. Now, he’s crashed.
Peters is a master tiler and the owner of Trinity Tiling. For 19 years, he’s done custom tiling jobs for Denver homeowners.
Owning his own business, he made more money than he needed.
“Two, three years ago, I was renting a house out in Aurora in Southshore — $3,300 a month,” he says. “And that was chump change to me at the time — like easy. I had 10 grand for first and last month’s rent and a deposit. I was living like a baller, as they would say, and now I find myself all the way at the bottom.”
When he had the money, he spent it furiously. Then, he split with his wife. The pandemic and inflation disrupted the construction industry. Customers quit calling for tiling jobs.
These days, his business hardly earns a dime.
“I bill at $125, and with that, I can barely afford overhead to live in my parents’ basement for free,” Peters says.
His has his belongings locked in a storage unit. A rodent has the full run of the place.
“It’s in there eating through the golf club bags and eating the seat off my dirt bikes and my boots for my wakeboards and bindings and snowboard boots,” Peters says. “It’s all just trashed.”
For that kind of storage, he pays $400 a month — a bill he’s not been able to afford.
“I’m so broke right now because I haven’t had work,” Peters says. “I can’t even get into my storage unit right now. So it’s like, all my s*** is in the hands of God — me getting money before the first of next month. Is all my s*** going to be gone? Or am I going to live to die another day with that deal?”
Over the years, he’s struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, and he recently relapsed after five years of sobriety.
“I don’t even eat anymore,” he says. “I don’t work out anymore. I don’t do s***. Literally, I’m giving up on life. That’s how bad it’s been. I’m still alive, unfortunately, but I almost accomplished my mission the other day with an overdose. But my baby’s mama called 911, and they came and got me and took me to the hospital.”
For the third time in his life, he kicked fentanyl cold turkey, sweating and suffering in his bed alone.
He’s been sober for a week.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Webb says. “I don’t have anybody else.”
Webb, too, has struggled with addiction, though his housing situation has been improving.
When he was 12 years old, he says, he accidentally burned down a post office.
“That pretty much screwed my life up from the get-go,” he says. “Drugs and alcohol happened very early after that.”
He’s lived all over Colorado, from Parker to Castle Rock to Loveland to Fort Collins. But Denver felt most like home, and all his life, he’s wanted to live downtown.
“I always wanted to live downtown, until I was homeless downtown, and that’s not how I wanted to live down here,” he says.
When he was 25 years old, he lived outside under an overhang at the Althea Center for Engaged Spirituality, a church at 13th Avenue and Williams Street.
During the day, he would hide his belongings in a nearby bush while he worked in construction cleanup for $50 a day at Ready Labor. At night, he’d drink at the Satire. Then he’d go back to the church to sleep, hoping his belongings would still be there. Often, they weren’t.
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Now 38, he’s finally getting his life back together. He’s spent multiple stints in hardscrabble rehabs. He’s relapsed and suffered through withdrawals that led to brutal seizures. He found some stability in the Denver Rescue Mission’s New Life Program, where he stayed sober, kept a job and eventually earned a car upon graduating.
And he recently lived for nine months in a safe-occupancy site, where he slept in a heated tent with a refrigerator. Sure, he was still homeless, but at least he managed to find some stability.
Through government subsidies, he got a RadPower e-bike. Tired of driving, he sold his car and enjoyed cruising through the city. Then he crashed into a fire hydrant going 18 miles an hour and broke his leg — a tibial plateau fracture. He received 50 staples in his leg and needed to use a wheelchair.
In the spring, Webb connected with a volunteer at the Saint Francis Center who helped him find a studio at the Colburn Hotel and Apartments, the housing above the classic Denver dive Charlie Brown’s.
For the first time in his adult life, Webb is living near downtown, in a home in Capitol Hill. Peters moved his belongings in for him. Webb used crutches to get to his fourth-floor apartment. Without Peters, he doesn’t know how he would have pulled off the move.
“Man, he’s done a lot for me,” Webb says. “If I didn’t have him, I wouldn’t be around. I’d be gone. Not gone from Denver, gone from the world. It’s good to have a friend, a brother.”
Webb says Denver has programs that helped him out along the way.
“When I first became homeless, when I was 25, I really dug into resources and really researched,” Webb says.
There are many homeless people who go without food, and as he sees it, that’s entirely unnecessary.
“There’s all kinds of places that give out food and stuff,” he says.
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Medicaid saved him when he had to go into treatment for his alcoholism and when he broke his leg on his bike.
“If you’re homeless, you can get Medicaid,” Webb says. “And Medicaid is the best insurance that you can possibly have. I’ve had Medicaid. It’s saved my a** multiple times through alcoholism. I’ve been to treatment centers. Medicaid has saved my butt with medical stuff.”
Webb says the investment in his health is ultimately good for society.
“I’ve done a lot of work through my years,” he says. “I feel like I’ve worked enough to feel like I’m not ripping off the taxpayer. I pay taxes every year, so, I’m damned grateful for it … Denver’s been pretty terrible, but pretty good to me, honestly. Like, when it comes down to it, Denver’s been wonderful to me. I mean, I’m lucky to be where I’m at.”
But Medicaid hasn’t worked for Peters. His prior income has disqualified him from having the coverage.
Peters broke his leg in a motorcycle accident five years back.
It took him a year, walking on his broken leg, to finally seek treatment.
The doctors asked him, “How did you do that?”
“Drugs,” he replied.
He felt like he didn’t have any other choice and says he couldn’t afford “millions of dollars in medical debt.”
“You gotta do what you gotta do,” Webb says.
“I have two abscessed teeth,” Peters says. “And I can’t get approved for Medicaid because of my taxes in prior years.”
He reaches into the pocket of his cargo short looking for his Orajel, and realizes it’s missing. He can barely open his mouth.
“This guy’s worked his whole life, hard work,” Webb says. “He’s the hardest worker … It sucks. His teeth are blowing up, and he can’t get them fixed right now. There’s a lot wrong with this place. It’s hard to keep happy. It’s hard to smile all the time. It’s hard to be nice.”
But being nice matters to both men. It’s something they see less and less of in Denver since the pandemic.
As they speak about how the city’s becoming tense, a man at a bus stop down the street screams at a woman in her car. He’s mad she’s blocking a bus that’s nowhere in sight.
Even though Peters acknowledges the woman is parked illegally, he is appalled by the man’s behavior.
“Everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt,” Peters says. “Be nice, too. You don’t know what they’re going through. They could be going through something 10 times worse than what you’re going through. They could have lost a parent this week and a parent last week. You don’t know. Be nice. Everyone doesn’t have to be so high-strung.”
Peters is strong. He knows how to defend himself and has saved Webb from the sort of scraps people struggling with addiction find themselves in all too often.
But, these days, Peters avoids confrontations. Even with the King Soopers workers who refused to give them their money, he and Webb helped each other stay grounded, he says. They worked to keep their cool as best they could, even as they felt robbed.
“Everyone looks at you like you want to fight,” Peters says. “It’s like, ‘I’ve got no interest in fighting. I want to buy donuts for my daughter and go back home.’”
Rob Cohen’s bid to bring the 16th NWSL franchise to Denver was everything the league had imagined. The chairman and CEO of IMA Financial, who in 2001 founded the Metro Denver Sports Commission, not only offered a record $110 million expansion fee, but also pledged an infrastructure investment with little precedent in women’s professional sports.
Cohen proposed a 14,500-seat stadium within Denver’s city limits that would set the standard for purpose-built NWSL venues and anchor a mixed-use district designed to serve as a model across the league.
The club wouldn’t even need to be a tenant while that venue was built. Cohen committed to building a temporary stadium for the team’s first two seasons, adjacent to a new performance center and four training pitches developed from scratch.
Between the expansion fee and facility projects, excluding mixed use, Cohen is set to pour roughly $450 million into the club’s launch. The plan exemplifies NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman’s vision of deep-pocketed owners controlling their own facilities.
Cohen expects the club to reach operating break-even within roughly five years, with infrastructure costs and financing recouped within a decade through a combination of franchise appreciation and returns from the mixed-use development. The model relies heavily on venue control and the sponsorship inventory created by the club’s stadiums and training complex.
But ambitious plans take time to execute, and Denver hasn’t had much. The NWSL’s protracted process to choose an ownership group to launch alongside Boston Legacy FC for the 2026 season dragged into 2025. By the time the league finally awarded the franchise to Denver on Jan. 30, Cohen had less than 14 months before this Saturday’s inaugural match.
“It was ‘ready, set, go,’ and we basically had nothing in place,” Cohen said. “We didn’t have a bank account, we didn’t have a single staff member, we didn’t have any of that. So, to go from that to actually being on the field of play with a full roster … it’s been a whirlwind 14 months like none I’ve ever had in my life.”
After a full sprint by Cohen and his team, Summit FC’s inaugural season is poised to reflect both strong demand for women’s soccer in the market and the constraints of an accelerated launch.
Experienced hand
To help launch an NWSL team in a matter of months, Cohen looked to someone who had done it before. In July 2023, Jen Millet joined incoming expansion team Bay FC, which had an even shorter 11-month runway, as COO. That club launched in 2024 and has ranked in the top five in NWSL attendance in its first two seasons.
After a search process led by CAA, Cohen hired Millet, who attended high school in the Denver area, as president and the first employee of his then-unnamed franchise in April 2025. Millet was an SBJ Game Changers honoree in 2020, when she was senior vice president of marketing for the Golden State Warriors and Chase Center.
Since beginning in her role, Millet has identified three key differences between her experience at Bay FC and the task ahead in Denver.
First, Bay FC’s ownership group, led by Sixth Street, had ambitions to secure a purpose-built training facility and stadium, but didn’t attempt to do so prior to launch. The club signed a five-year lease to play as a tenant at PayPal Park and secured a short-term practice facility at San Jose State, taking facilities off the table as an immediate concern.
Making facilities a top priority from the jump made the Denver project a far heavier lift.
“We’re managing four facility projects right now, which adds a degree of difficulty,” Millet said. “At Bay, we had to navigate some of that, but we weren’t in build mode on multiple projects on multiple sites at the same time we were standing up the club. That piece has been really challenging.”
Second, Millet and the executive team at Bay FC had the luxury of tapping into the resources of a private equity firm with more than $125 billion under management and more than 700 employees. While the business side at Summit FC is now up to around 55 employees, Cohen and Millet have done much of the heavy lifting themselves.
“At Sixth Street, there were seven or eight people that could navigate certain things around real estate, or capital calls, or whatever was happening — there was an army you could tap into,” Millet explained. “Rob and I had a conversation last week where we said, ‘Wow, it’s just us trying to do all of this.’ So, I think it is a lot.”
The third difference, however, has made launching Summit FC considerably easier.
“Fans in the Bay area were really excited about Bay coming, and I would never diminish that,” Millet said. “But in Denver, from Day 1, the response to the club has been 10X that. It’s probably a factor of the market being a little bit smaller and easier to impact, but everybody has been locked in on this club in the market since announced. It has really helped us move through this expedited timeline with more ease.”
That excitement was reflected in season-ticket deposits, which quickly converted into sales. The team secured 8,500 season-ticket holders before capping sales to leave room for groups and single-game buyers at the 12,500-seat temporary stadium. Summit FC granted even more deposit holders who remain on the waitlist access to their membership program, Club 5280, which comes with merchandise discounts, special ticket offers and exclusive events.
The true scale of the enthusiasm will be on display at the team’s home opener at Empower Field at Mile High Stadium, home of the Denver Broncos. As of late February, the team had sold more than 45,000 tickets for the March 28 match, positioning it to break the NWSL attendance record of 40,091 set by Bay FC at Oracle Park last year.
Denver’s sporting build also differed from past NWSL expansions. Summit FC and Boston Legacy FC are the first teams in league history to launch without the benefit of an expansion draft or a college draft, leaving the club to construct its roster entirely through free agency and international signings.
Time crunch
Warm temperatures and minimal snowfall made for terrible skiing this past winter in Colorado, but provided Denver Summit FC with ideal construction conditions for key infrastructure ahead of its inaugural season.
The team broke ground last June on a 20,000-square-foot training center, temporary stadium and four shared-use fields on a 43-acre site owned by the city of Centennial. The project stems from a partnership with the Cherry Creek School District and the city that Cohen began developing with CAA Icon before securing the franchise.
Once Summit FC moves to its permanent stadium in Denver as early as 2028, the school district will become the primary tenant of the Centennial venue, while the club retains the right to use the facility for its academy and a potential second team.
“Once we learned that Cherry Creek School District was planning on building their own stadium anyway, we started having discussions with them and saying, ‘Hey, if we do this together, you can spend half the money you were going to spend, we can spend half the money we were going to spend, and we can create something that’s a legacy for the community down the road,’” Cohen said.
The club expects to move into the performance center in June, roughly a year after breaking ground. With a more generous launch runway, that pace might have positioned Summit FC to open its inaugural season fully settled into its new facility. Instead, the team will train at a local rugby stadium for the first few months of the season.
It also will play just three of its first 12 matches at home and won’t open its own stadium until July, after the league’s midseason World Cup break. Following the opener at Mile High, the club will stage two additional early-season home matches at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, home of MLS’s Colorado Rapids. Its first game at the 12,500-seat Centennial Stadium is scheduled for July 3.
“I don’t think any expansion team would say that’s a great way to start, and it is heavily loaded with some of the best teams in the NWSL,” Cohen said. “But it is what it is. You can’t complain about it. You just have to deal with it.”
While the team has yet to break ground on its permanent stadium, which will ultimately anchor a mixed-use development in Denver called Santa Fe Yards, Cohen is hopeful it will be ready for the start of the 2028 NWSL season. The political process was bumpier than anticipated, but the city council agreed to contribute $70 million to the project.
Beyond facilities, one aspect of the business in which Summit FC could have used more time is sponsorship sales. The club retained Legends to lead its commercial efforts and scored a major win with its sale of performance center naming rights to Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health.
Financial terms were not disclosed, but Cohen said the deal is the richest naming-rights agreement for a women’s sports practice facility and exceeds comparable deals in MLS, as well as the average value of similar agreements in the NBA and NFL.
While the club also has announced deals with Canvas Credit Union, Xcel Energy and LaCroix, it has yet to sell some of its most valuable inventory, including front-of-kit placement and naming rights to Centennial Stadium. Sponsorship will be key to making the economics of the temporary stadium pencil out.
“A lot of those conversations on the sponsorship front, especially bigger assets, just take more time to develop,” Millet said. “You’ve got to be within a brand’s budgeting cycle. You’ve got to allow time for C-level approvals on those things. So, the turn on those doesn’t move as quickly through the business as it is to stand up something like ticketing.”
Millet expects the team to begin the season with six or seven corporate partners, and to add more throughout the season. Having a schedule backloaded with home matches at Centennial Stadium, where the team controls signage, will ensure late-joining sponsors don’t miss out on as much value early in the season.
With the NWSL expanding at a rapid clip and franchise valuations continuing to soar, the league under Berman’s leadership has prioritized ownership groups willing to invest in purpose-built infrastructure for its clubs. Summit FC is a prime example of that vision and evidence that big ideas require time to execute.
“My recommendation to the league is if you’re going to have a new expansion team and they have to build infrastructure as a part of their standing up of the team, it’s almost impossible to do what we’ve done in 14 months,” Cohen said. “We got it done, but I would encourage the league to allow the runway to be longer.”
Things are looking up revolving around Denver Nuggets guard Jamal Murray and his injury status moving forward after his recent ankle sprain.
And it looks like leading up to the Nuggets’ upcoming game vs. the OKC Thunder, Murray could even have a chance to play, just days after leaving Denver’s contest vs. the New York Knicks with an ankle sprain.
According to ESPN’s Tim MacMahon, Murray is considered day to day following his ankle injury suffered against the Knicks, and is expected to be listed as questionable against the Thunder.
“Nuggets star G Jamal Murray is considered day to day after leaving Friday’s loss to the Knicks with an ankle injury, sources told ESPN. Expected to be listed as questionable for Monday’s game in OKC.”
Nuggets star G Jamal Murray is considered day to day after leaving Friday’s loss to the Knicks with an ankle injury, sources told ESPN. Expected to be listed as questionable for Monday’s game in OKC.
— Tim MacMahon (@BannedMacMahon) March 8, 2026
It’s a massive breath of fresh air for the Nuggets after seeing their star guard go down with a scary-looking injury headed into the weekend, but it may actually be an injury that isn’t as bad as initially thought.
Jamal Murray Could Play vs. Thunder
There’s no guarantee whether Murray will be able to go against the Thunder and not miss any time with his ankle injury, but seeing his status trending in the right direction is a sign that he’ll be on the floor sooner rather than later.
Compared to the injury troubles the Nuggets have faced all year long, with multiple impact players missing multiple weeks of the regular season, it’ll certainly do.
When Murray has been on the floor for the Nuggets this season, it’s paired with some career-best numbers en route to his first-ever All-Star selection earlier in the year.
In 59 games played across the year, Murray has averaged a career-high 25.8 points per game, along with 4.3 rebounds and 7.8 assists on 48.3% shooting from the field and 43.1% from three.
This season, Murray’s also been one of the Nuggets’ most available players on the roster in a campaign where virtually all of their top names have missed multiple weeks with their own respective injuries.
Murray has missed five games up to his latest injury from the Knicks game, and could even have a chance to keep that total where it’s at, depending on how his status develops before playing the Thunder.
The Nuggets’ health has started to turn a corner in a positive way in recent days and weeks, as both of their starting forwards, Cam Johnson and Aaron Gordon, returned to play against the Knicks, thus allowing Denver their entire starting five healthy and on the floor at the same time since November.
Peyton Watson remains one of the few names out with his respective hamstring injury leading into the final month stretch of the regular season, but expect to see him returning in the next few games. As for Murray, it looks like he also could be back on the floor in the very near future.
Expect to hear more regarding Murray’s injury before tip-off arrives against the Thunder, which could even lead to him taking the floor in one of the Nuggets’ biggest remaining games left in the regular season.
The Farber brothers have sold a site in LoHi with approved development plans, and a groundbreaking is imminent.
Elevation Development Group, founded by Brent, Brad and Gregg Farber, sold 0.68 acre at 3301-3333 Mariposa St. in Denver on Wednesday to Greenwood Village-based Century Communities.
Century, a large homebuilder that also develops apartments, paid $9.5 million, records show. That works out to $322 a square foot.
The Farbers bought the property in 2019 for $5.65 million, records show. At the time, it was home to industrial buildings, which have since been demolished.
The site is zoned C-MX-5, which generally allows a mix of uses up to 5 stories.
The Farbers, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, submitted initial plans in late 2020 for apartments on the site. The latest version, which has been approved by the city, calls for 116 units.
Century Executive Vice President Jim Francescon confirmed in a statement that the company will build that project. It will break ground this week, he said, and wrap up sometime in 2028.
The Farbers, who operate out of Cherry Creek, have built two office buildings in that neighborhood. Last year, they completed the Steel House office building in RiNo in partnership with Boston, Massachusetts-based Beacon Capital Partners.
The Farbers also own half a city block along Market Street in downtown Denver, where they’ve proposed apartments.
Read more from our partner, BusinessDen.
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