Macy’s Boulder store closing appears imminent

BOULDER — A year after Boulder city officials gave their blessing to a plan to redevelop the Macy’s Inc. (NYSE: M) location at the Twenty Ninth Street shopping area, the store has been tapped to shut its doors in the next few months. 

The department store at 1900 28th St. was among seven locations around the country that USA Today has reported will be closing around the first quarter of 2022. The Macy’s in Centennial is also on that list. 

The department store chain has not confirmed the Boulder closure with BizWest, but signs around the store advertise a storewide inventory blowout sale. A store employee told BizWest that the Boulder location will indeed close soon, but workers have yet to be informed of a specific date. 

Since 2016, Macy’s has announced the closure of hundreds of stores, but the company’s Colorado locations have thus far been spared. Locally, Macy’s operates in Boulder, Broomfield, Fort Collins and Loveland.

Last year, the Fort Collins location at Foothills Mall was purchased by a private equity company with ties to the development firm that’s been tapped to lead redevelopment at the mall. 

There have been plans in place to redevelop the Boulder Macy’s for several years.

In early 2021, the Boulder City Council decided in an 8-1 vote to approve a site plan that proposes to transform the aging department store into a mixed-use office and retail space.

Through a process of “adaptive reuse,” Macy’s, with help from Corum Real Estate Group Inc. and Trestle Strategy Group, plans to morph the store into a three-story, roughly 155,000-square-foot office building with about 7,700 square feet of retail space on the ground floor.

Despite the approval, the Macy’s project has remained controversial due to nagging concerns that the addition of office space will exacerbate Boulder’s jobs-housing imbalance.  

That imbalance is a reference to Boulder’s ongoing challenge of providing affordable housing options for the city’s workforce while continuing to add high-wage professional jobs that push up the cost of housing. 

Boulder’s concern over the jobs-housing imbalance is so acute that the council in early 2019 adopted a development moratorium across a swath of the city that includes the Macy’s site. That moratorium, inspired by Macy’s proposal, was meant, in part, to assure existing residential and retail spaces wouldn’t be gobbled up by developers and turned into office buildings. Macy’s plans were initiated prior to the moratorium, which was rolled back in October 2019.

In an effort to address these concerns, Macy’s has pledged to contribute $3 million to Boulder’s affordable housing program.

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