Transforming the corridor

While construction projects that range widely in scope, type and completion progress  — from apartments to retail shops to manufacturing facilities — dot the landscape in Broomfield and Westminster, the development environment in mid-2024 is dominated by a handful of large-scale, master-planned efforts that seek to transform the communities over the next decade-plus into live-work-play destinations placed strategically between the higher-profile population hubs of Denver and Boulder.

Baseline

If you’ve driven along Interstate 25 from Northern Colorado to Denver in the last few years, you’ve probably seen it: a huge red sign on the west side of the roadway near the exit for Colorado Highway 7 that looks an awful lot like the virtual pin you’d drop to mark a spot on Google Maps inlaid with a large “B.”

That’s Baseline, McWhinney Real Estate Services Inc.’s a massive mixed-use development that is steadily transforming this patch of Broomfield dirt and grass into a modern mini-city home to tens of thousands of new residents and jobs.

Few existing communities in the Boulder Valley or the northern Denver metro area match Baseline in sheer scope and diversity of development types.

At full buildout, Baseline, an 1,100-acre property in northeastern Broomfield located generally south of Baseline Road, west of I-25 and east of Sheridan Parkway, is slated to have more than 17 million square feet of commercial space and more than 9,200 homes.

Baseline is among the region’s “catalytic projects,” Broomfield city and county manager Jennifer Hoffman said during a project update given by McWhinney staff to Broomfield officials this spring.

McWhinney bought the property in 2007 from Pulte Homes Inc., developer of nearby master-planned community Anthem.

The plan was always long term for McWhinney, which had no desire to perform minor improvements and quickly flip the property. The developer planned to hold onto the land until the economy improved before beginning to develop it. That holding pattern ended up being a bit longer than thought due to the slow recovery out of the recession.

“We always ground ourselves in our guiding principles, the North Star of the community: environmental stewardship, healthy living and innovation,” McWhinney’s vice president of community development and general manager of Baseline Kyle Harris said in March.

Baseline is divided into a series of phases and neighborhoods, many elements of which have begun infrastructure groundbreaking over the past several years. Along with industrial tracts that front I-25, Baseline districts include the residential West Village and East Village and the Center Street District, the mega-community’s urban commercial core envisioned to include offices, hotels, apartments, senior living, entertainment options and restaurants.

McWhinney is expected to begin horizontal construction at Center Street, perhaps Baseline’s most-anticipated district, in mid-2025, with buildings going vertical in early 2026.

“We have always envisioned this as a commercial hub not only for Broomfield, but quite frankly for north Denver,” Harris said. “… We have had a lot of interest and have been in discussions with many retailers.”

Of course, with thousands of new residents and jobs, the existing roadways and transportation networks simply won’t cut it. “The challenge is real from a public infrastructure” standpoint, Harris told Broomfield officials in March.

Broomfield Town Square

Broomfield has many things: a population of more than 76,000 residents, headquarters of major international companies, status as both a city and county. But it’s missing one important thing: a proper downtown that imbues the community with a sense of identity.

City officials unanimously approved last September a site plan for the Broomfield Town Square, an ambitious plan spearheaded by a well-known developer that could transform nearly 40 acres north of West 120th Avenue and east of Main Street into a community gathering place with hundreds of new residences, tens of thousands of square feet of commercial space, restaurants and shops surrounding a publicly accessible (and potentially swimmable!) lake. 

The Broomfield Town Square project, in the works in some form or another for a decade, will be developed in phases by Broomfield Town Square Alliance LLC, a consortium led by Joe Vostrejs, whose resume includes Denver’s Union Station and Hangar 2 mixed-use developments, and builder Milender White Inc. The developer is getting assistance  from the city in the form of land donations and public financing, likely to total in the millions of dollars.

Plans for the overall project “were approved for a mix of uses including up to 643 residential units located north of East 1st Avenue and up to 187,000 sqft of commercial development including the redevelopment of the former Safeway site as a market hall,” according to Broomfield planning documents. 

Approximately 63,590 square feet of commercial development, including a new market hall in the former Safeway building, is expected to be built in an early phase of the project, which Vostrejs told Broomfield officials in April could break ground as early as spring 2025.

One of the unique elements of the Broomfield Town Square concept is the 4.5-acre lake that will reach about 12 feet deep. Plans call for maintenance techniques that will ensure that the water quality is high enough so that visitors can swim in it. 

“We’re in that interesting place in our project right now where we’re in the chute and moving through the process and staying on schedule it looks like,” Vostrejs said.

Like all developers operating in this topsy-turvy financial environment, Broomfield Town Square Alliance has “challenges, no doubt. If anyone could tell me what the bond market is going to look like in spring of 2025 it would be extremely helpful,” Vostrejs said. “So that’s a risk we’re still facing here.”

While the financial particulars of the public-private partnership are expected to be ironed out this year, there are some in the community and among Broomfield’s leadership who have expressed worry that Town Square could be another debacle like the 1stBank Center, which is expected to end up costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. 

Future of the 1stBank Center

The 1stBank Center was built at the cost of $45 million, financed on the back of $59.8 million in bonds. If the city were to play out the string on the initial bond issuance, Broomfield will have paid $135 million for the venue by the expiration date in 2029.

The finances of the venue, which was managed prior to its closure by Peak Entertainment, are complicated because the venue is owned by the Broomfield Urban Renewal Authority, which collects its revenues from different sources than the city’s general fund, staffers said during a hearing on the 1stBank Center’s future last year. 

The city owns about a dozen acres south of the site, which could eventually be combined with current venue acreage to entice a developer that might be more interested in a larger, contiguous plot. 

“They made the best decision at the time as they could,” Hoffman, the city manager, said last year, referring to Broomfield leaders in office at the time when the venue was approved and built. “We’re just moving forward.”

Because the venue has failed to generate the revenue necessary to justify its continued operations, “the time has come to rip the Band-Aid off.”

City officials have been in discussions with consultants who they hope can help guide the process of developing the site, where the city controls about 22 acres. Any future development plans are likely to dovetail with the nearby Broomfield Town Center.

Broomfield City Council in February named September as a target for contracting with a demolition company and early 2025 for the start of demolition.

The 2023 decision to tear down the venue came amid declining box office revenue for 1stBank Center.

“In 2023, Peak has held less than 10 concerts and events in the Event Center to date, with only three additional shows publicly scheduled over the next six months,” according to a Broomfield planning memo. “During this same period, the Mission Ballroom and other regional venues (many operated by Peak) have captured audiences and opened new possibilities for Peak as those venues continue to have an increasing number of shows and events.”

Broomfield officials’ decision to move on from the 1stBank Center was part of a broader, regional conversation about which kinds of developments work in the post COVID-19 environment and which don’t.

Uplands

A group of developers in Westminster has spent the past year or so winning a series of regulatory approvals for various aspects of the Uplands project, which, upon buildout, is expected to be the single-largest residential master-planned community in the history of the city.

The largely-residential project is planned to include 2,350 homes on 234 acres near the corner of 88th Avenue and Lowell Boulevard.

Matt Childers, regional vice president of land operations for Dream Finders Homes Inc., one of the home builders for the project, told BizWest in an interview late last year 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.”

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.

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.”

Other notable development projects

Texas-based developer Provident Realty Advisors Inc. is in the middle of an already half-decade-long redevelopment project at the aging Flatiron Marketplace shopping center in Broomfield.

The first phase, which began being built in 2019 and is now complete, included 327 apartment units and about 4,600 square feet of ground-floor retail.

Plans for the second phase, which began winning approvals from the city last year, call for 350 multifamily rental units (51 of which will be priced below market rates) and 2,500 square feet of ground-floor-retail space spread across two buildings that will be connected by a skybridge. 

At full buildout, the reimagined Flatiron Marketplace is expected to have as many as 1,200 multifamily residential units and about 12,000 square feet of commercial space.

The Flatiron Marketplace redevelopment is adjacent to an ongoing effort to transform portions of the long-stagnant Flatiron Crossing shopping center in Broomfield into a mixed-use entertainment, housing and employment district.

Flatiron Crossing owner Macerich Co. expects the first phase of mall redevelopment to include about 320 apartments and as many as 250,000 square feet of office space. The approved zoning at Flatiron Crossing allows for as many as 750 new apartments to build on the site, and additional units are expected to be included in plans for future phases.

At buildout, the plans “envision a mix of use with one to three office developments, one to three multi-family residential developments, one hotel, two to four restaurant pads, grade-level retail, a parking structure, and the removal of certain existing surface parking areas to accommodate new development,” according to Broomfield planning documents. “The core mall area, AMC theater, Red Robin, PF Changs, and most other stand-alone buildings are anticipated to remain. The proposed redevelopment is planned to enhance and energize the shopping district by reinventing elements of the shopping center.”

Last summer, developer Gorman & Co. and the Broomfield Housing Alliance broke ground on Crosswinds at Arista, which will create 159 new affordable homes along Destination Drive.

Las Vegas commercial real estate developer and investment group LaPour Partners Inc. is planning to build a three-building flex-industrial campus off Wadsworth Boulevard dubbed Arista 36, a nod to the city’s adjacent Arista district. 

Getting antsy

Many development (or demolition) projects — particularly those with the potential to transform neighborhoods and whole cities — create excitement (and controversy) among members of the community. And because these projects often take years or decades to come to fruition, managing expectations can be a challenge.

“Sometimes we get antsy,” Broomfield Councilman Deven Shaff said during a recent Broomfield Town Square project update.

Neighbors, Broomfield Mayor Guyleen Catriotta said, “don’t always realize that long, complex projects like this take time (with) all of the pieces that need to move.”