Downtown Greeley building to be torn down soon

GREELEY — Once a mainstay in Greeley’s downtown retail district, one of the area’s oldest and largest retail buildings will soon be no more.

The former Greeley Furniture building is coming down.

Building owner Richmark Real Estate Partners LLC received a demolition permit on Thursday, and it is expected to take a couple of months to demolish the building, remove all the debris and clean it up. 

“What really expedited this was the May 29 hailstorm,” said Adam Frazier, president of Richmark Development LLC, in an interview. “A lot of the structure failed. A roof caved in.

“It was more of a public safety concern just with the cave-in, structurally it just wasn’t safe,” Frazier said. “We decided it needed to come down rather than leaving it.”

He said the company finished asbestos removal at the site a couple of weeks ago.

The Richardson family purchased the building in 2017, and former owner Derrick Snyder closed the business the following year. The 35,000-square-foot building was built in 1900.

Richmark had partnered with Indianapolis-based developer Milhaus to build a $71 million, seven-story building with a two-story parking structure at the site. The plan was all but set, with even the Downtown Development Authority pitching in with a $500,000 tax-increment financing incentive upon completion, with $140,000 in additional net rebates annually until 2033, when the DDA’s TIF tool expired, for a cap of $1.7 million.

In 2023, plans scaled down to a smaller version, and eventually dwindled altogether with the economy.

“It was pure economics. We just couldn’t pencil it,” Frazier said. “When it came down to it, even after the development agreement with the DDA, with interest rates and material escalation,” the project was just too dense with 200 units and a private parking garage planned.

“It will take a combination of lowering density expectations and probably some construction pricing coming down,” Frazier said of reviving the project.

While Richmark is still in conversation with Milhaus, anything is on the table at this point, Frazier said.

“We’re in constant communication with the city and DDA to figure out what’s best for the community and when. Multifamily housing is obviously a passion of the Richardsons. Now, really, the plan is to clean up the site and explore all our options. The Richardsons are very community-minded and I have no doubt that whatever we end up doing there, it is going to be community focused.”

Bianca Fisher, executive director of the DDA, said she remains hopeful “that such a prominent site will be viable for future development as costs continue to stabilize. The current owners have taken on the time-consuming and costly burden of environmental remediation and demolition to create a blank canvas for the next project to take place. We are hopeful and certain that the development that comes next will add to the mix of housing and retail our downtown district needs.”

The building was on a long list of downtown projects Richmark purchased to eventually revamp downtown into a haven for multifamily living.

In the past several years, the company has replaced tired, old buildings along Eighth Avenue in Greeley with shiny new commercial and apartment buildings, including the Apartments at Maddie, Madison Avenue apartments (which used to house the Greeley-Evans School District 6 administrative offices), Natural Grocers at 1310 8th Ave.. which it remodeled from a storefront that had been vacant for years; and the Doubletree Hotel, which was the site of Greeley’s former Fire Station No. 1 and the Lincoln Park Library.

Richardsons also revamped an old building at 1227 Eighth Ave. into Dutch Brothers Coffee. The old Firestone tire shop also is under Richardson ownership.

AnCon construction is the contractor for the demolition, which will be accomplished with excavators and other heavy equipment.

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