Hospitality & Tourism December 1, 2021 9:52:09 pm

Millennium Harvest House Hotel edges toward student-housing redevelopment

The Millennium Harvest House Hotel could be redeveloped into student housing.

By Lucas High

This story has been corrected to remove a reference to the Millennium Harvest House hotel being used to house University of Colorado students during the COVID-19 pandemic. BizWest regrets the error.

BOULDER — The Millennium Harvest House hotel site at 1345 28th St. very close to the University of Colorado campus is edging toward a complete redevelopment as rental housing aimed at the Buffs.

The Boulder City Council briefly weighed in on a conceptual proposal for the redevelopment from Landmark Properties Inc., a Georgia-based builder specializing in student housing, but declined to formally call the development plans up for additional review — at least for now.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Landmark has proposed demolishing the hotel, built in 1959, and replacing it with three four-story buildings of up to 55 feet in height.

Those buildings would house 295 apartments, with a total of 931 bedrooms.

There will be no on-site affordable housing at the complex, but the developer intends to pay about $15 million in cash-in-lieu, Boulder senior planner Sloane Walbert said.

The hotel is located in a high-hazard 100-year floodplain, but the planned residences would be elevated outside of that plain.

The property would be available for all to rent — so long as they are comfortable living in close proximity to hundreds of college students.

“It’s a focused-student housing project, but there’s no restriction on who could live there,” said Danica Powell, founder of Trestle Strategy Group and representative of Landmark.

Landmark senior director Andrew Costas told members of the Boulder City Council that its leases include clauses that address noise and nuisance behaviors. The company would also be willing to consider entering into a good-neighbor agreement with the city and surrounding subdivisions.

Boulder’s Planning Board reviewed the project in November, but because it is only in its conceptual phases, offered no recommendations.

Boulder City Council has referred the project to the Design Advisory Board and Transportation Advisory Board for further analysis, but the council has ultimate approval of development plans.

The proposal will come back before the Planning Board and City Council when final development plans are submitted.

Landmark is no stranger to development projects at prominent Front Range universities. In 2019, the company finished construction on The Standard at Fort Collins, a 232-unit student-centric complex near Colorado State University.

While there is certainly a need for additional housing in Boulder and around CU, the loss of a legacy hotel like the Millennium House is a blow to the city’s hospitality industry, already on the ropes since the pandemic outbreak.

“It’s such a beautiful site, and it’s so centrally located in proximity to other hotels and the university,” she said. “I’d hate to lose that site for a hotel,” former Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau CEO Mary Ann Mahoney told BizWest in March when plans for the redevelopment first surfaced. … We never like losing hotel inventory.”