City sign photo illustration.
Neighborhood rebrands like SoBro and SoWa were once oddities — now these two-syllable names are an epidemic.

About a month before I moved to Denver in 2018, I texted another recent transplant to ask for neighborhood suggestions. Her reply might as well have been in another language: Among the options she rattled off were RiNo, SoBo, LoDo, and the head-scratching LoHi. I couldn't find those names anywhere on the city's official maps, but the shorthand flowed freely among the youngish crowd I met there. The older real-estate types I encountered while reporting on the city's housing market were fond of the nicknames, too. Soon I was parroting them all.