Midyette plans project on Pearl Street

BOULDER – Real estate developer and architect J Nold Midyette has filed plans with the city of Boulder to add another story to the building at 1600 Pearl St., expanding the size of the building that formerly housed a Borders bookstore by up to 20,000 square feet.

The proposed redevelopment, which Midyette said would be his first major redevelopment project since about 2002, would add additional office space on the third floor of the building and convert its basement into a parking garage.

The building currently has 39,075 square feet of retail space, and 21,051 square feet of office space, according to the website for Pearl Street Mall Properties Inc., which owns the building.

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Midyette is proposing two options. The first would add about 8,000 square feet of office space to the third floor and would be allowable under current zoning requirements.

The second, which would add 20,000 square feet of office space, would only go forward if the city approved changes to the floor area ratio, or FAR, point system to allow developers to build additional office space downtown.

The FAR point system caps the amount of floor space developers can build on a given site and was created to encourage developers to build more housing units downtown.

City staffers are considering a proposal that would allow developers to claim an additional 0.5 FAR bonus that could be used to construct commercial-only development if they paid a commercial linkage fee to the city’s housing fund.

The change would affect the DT-5 zoning area.

Midyette said in an interview that he has a tenant for the proposed office space, should the city council change the zoning regulation and should the full expansion be built. He declined to name the company.

Midyette also said finding tenants for either the larger or small expansion would not be a problem, given the high interest in new office space downtown and the relative lack of buildings with large floor plates.

Much of the first-floor and basement space has been vacant since Borders closed its bookstore in 2007.

The two second-floor offices are occupied by Symplified Inc., a software startup that makes security software for cloud computing networks, and SolidFire Inc., a computer hardware company that makes solid state data storage systems for cloud computing networks.

The building was built in 2001.