Rob Squire

In 2010, I retired from a 30 year career as an Aerospace Engineer working on satellites for Lockheed Martin. At that time, we moved into our home near Estes Park that we had built on weekends over a 9 year period. I served on the Board of Directors of the Homeowners Association for the development and enjoyed the problem solving and working with people where they live.

As much as we loved living in the mountains, we missed the downtown experience. We bought a small one-bedroom condo in Spire as a second home shortly after the building opened. Later in 2012, wildfires caused us to make the painful decision to sell that home and we moved full time into a two-bedroom unit in Spire.

We have loved living here, because downtown Denver has always been one of the cleanest safest big cities that I’ve ever seen in our country. All the things we love – restaurants, theater, conventions and so many others – are within easy walking distance of our home.

While living here, I’ve traveled extensively and started a business as an international travel photographer and travel writer. My website is RobSquirePhotography.com.

Over the past couple of years, I became bothered by the degradation that I saw in the quality of life in our downtown residential experience, and I want to do something about it. Beginning in August of 2021, Lisa Pope and I began working on the formation of UpDoNA at the request of Spire’s Board of Directors. On December 6, 2021, that became a reality and the Upper Downtown Neighborhood Association was formed.

It will likely take a lot of effort to get the city to make meaningful changes to correct the situation that we see around us, but I am motivated to work hard to get it done. There are other things that I think UpDoNA needs to do also, and we have already been put some of them in place. Things like volunteer cleanup days, a search for a homeless charity with which to align ourselves, social events with the rest of the buildings in order to build community spirit, and so many others.