COLORADO SPRINGS — New cranes have been popping up along the Colorado Springs skyline over the summer working on major developments in the city.

Two new hotels are nearly completed—the Hyatt Place on Nevada and Kiowa will be wrapped up by the end of summer and the Marriot Springhill Suites on Tejon and Costilla will be finished around the new year. The two will bring on 120 rooms and 259 rooms respectively.

Concrete pillars for two major apartment buildings are also beginning to sprout from the ground. The Vim Apartments on Vermijo and Wasatch will bring 150 new units to the city.

The Pikes Peak Plaza Apartments is a massive development off of Pikes Peak and Prospect, rising five stories tall with a parking garage coming online as well. Over 200 units will sit above the street-level retail space once that building is finished.

“Our number one goal for several years for our city center is—we need more people living in it,” said Susan Edmondson, the president and CEO of the Colorado Springs Downtown Partnership. “You really can’t be a mature city unless you have people living in it. It’s their own neighborhood.”

Edmondson said people constantly downtown creates a vibrancy that attracts tourism and young professionals looking for a desirable place to live.

“We struggle to attract talent, a talented workforce. It’s what every city is trying to do. If we don’t offer the lifestyle that talented workers want, they’ll go to another place,” she said.

The traffic that is created by people living in the downtown area helps businesses too, according to the City’s economic development officer, Bob Cope.

He said it creates more hours of viable business for restaurants, retailers, and other companies, helping their bottom line.

“Downtown is really the heart and soul of a community. I don’t live downtown, but I know how crucial it is to my property values, for my quality of life, for the economy here,” he said. “It’s an employment center, it’s a cultural center, and if you don’t have a health downtown, it’s difficult to have a healthy community.”

These are just the downtown projects that have begun construction. There will be three more residential buildings—The Elan Pikes Peak Apartments off of Pikes Peak and Wahsatch, 277 apartments at Cimarron and Weber, and a mix of apartments and townhomes on Cimono Dr., around America the Beautiful Park.