Uplands neighborhood moves forward in Westminster

WESTMINSTER — A massive new residential development in Westminster has moved two steps closer to reality, with the Westminster City Council voting recently to approve an overall development plan for part of the project, and the Westminster Planning Commision advancing another.

The City Council voted 6-1, Sept. 11, to approve an official development plan for Uplands B(1), a 16.5-acre parcel south of West 84th Avenue, west of Lowell Boulevard and north of Bradburn Boulevard.

The official development plan allows for low density on the parcel — five units per acre, or 82 single-family attached and detached homes. The parcel also includes a park.

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City Council approval of that plan came one day before the Planning Commission unanimously recommended approval — by a vote of 7-0 — of an official development plan for another parcel, Uplands A(2). That parcel is bounded by Lowell Boulevard on the west, Irving Street on the east, West 87th Avenue on the north and West 86th Avenue on the south.

Uplands A(2) would include 135 homes, including single-family detached homes, single-family paired homes and townhomes. That plan goes before the City Council on Oct. 23.

While the initial phases for Uplands will be modest, the overall development will be massive, accommodating about 2,350 homes on 234 acres and constituting the single-largest residential master-planned community in the history of Westminster.

Matt Childers, regional vice president of land operations for Dream Finders Homes Inc., one of the home builders for the project, told BizWest in a recent interview that Uplands will help address the state’s shortage of affordable housing.

“It was really imperative to us to reach the entire housing spectrum,” Childers said. “We’ve been absolutely plagued in Colorado, and really nationally, with the housing crisis. The reason values have shot through the roof is because there’s just been a complete lack of supply. So that was something that we were really keyed in on solving here.”

The B(1) phase will include single-family detached and single-family paired homes. The single-family detached homes will include two-story fronts, with “tuck-under” garages in the rear. 

Dream Finders Homes is no stranger to development along the Front Range, building in about 20 communities from Castle Rock to Fort Collins. While product types in many of those communities are dictated by the master developer, Childers said the Uplands project provides flexibility to home builders.

“We’re really able to kind of have a little more of a blank canvas and say, ‘What is best for us here?” he said.

Childers said the various product types that Dream Finders will offer are designed to complement surrounding neighborhoods, taking into account topography issues.

“One thing that’s pretty unique about us is we’ve always been design focused,” Childers said, noting that the company started as a semi-custom home builder in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2009. “Design has always been very inherent in our growth as an organization, so we’re a lot more creative on the product side. That’s something that kind of feathers in really well with B(1) because B(1) is a site that’s significantly topographically challenged, and we’re offering a couple of product lines here that blend in with the environment with the adjacencies.”

Dream Finders also is implementing significant water-conservation and clean-energy features, Childers said.

“We’re pre-wiring every single home for solar readiness. We’re putting a 220 outlet in every single garage to allow for EV charging,” he said. “There are several things we’ve thought through programmatically to make sure that we’re being good stewards of the property.”

High interest rates have dampened the residential market, but Childers said Dream Finders has the ability to buy down interest rates for prospective buyers, offering significant savings in the early years of a mortgage.

Construction at Uplands initially will focus on infrastructure — roads, utilities and other “horizontal” features.

“So you kind of have a two-stage approach in homebuilding,” Childers said. “You have to develop the site, and that means the horizontal improvements — your roadways, your utilities, things of that nature. So that’ll carry us through the rest of 2024. And hopefully somewhere around January of ’25, we’ll start building our first homes, and I would expect it to be approximately that two-year buildout, so  ’25 and ’26, we’ll be building those 82 homes.”