Every six months we provide a comprehensive summary of the infill development activity within the Downtown Denver area. In today’s post, we focus on multi-family residential projects, and tomorrow we will look at non-residential (office, hotel, civic, etc.) projects.

You can check out our previous multi-family residential update from December 2015 here. As before, this analysis covers the area within a 1.5-mile radius of the historic D&F clock tower at the corner of 16th and Arapahoe, a good landmark to serve as the geographic center of Downtown Denver. We use a 1.5-mile radius because it covers the traditional downtown core area plus the closer-in parts of the downtown-adjacent districts like Uptown, Five Points, River North, and Highland. Our semi-annual DenverInfill development summaries are a nice complement to the Downtown Denver Partnership’s development reports, which use the DDP’s official downtown and center city neighborhoods boundaries rather than a distance-radius approach.

Many of Downtown Denver’s new residential developments are clustered near Denver Union Station.

From January 2010 through June 2016, 8,175 multi-family residential units have been completed within our 1.5-mile radius area, an increase of 426 from December 2015. The number of units under construction is currently 5,577, or 538 more than in December 2015. After all projects currently under construction are completed, 13,752 new multi-family residential units will be added to Downtown Denver since 2010, up from 12,788 six months ago. That keeps us on pace for around 17,000 new residential units in Downtown by the end of decade, with perhaps a little less than that if population growth and/or the economy significantly slows, or maybe more than that if the economy stays strong and meaningful construction defects liability reform is passed by the State Legislature to allow the market to respond to pent-up demand for condominiums. Note: we’ve mostly stopped tracking townhome projects, so there are probably a couple hundred more units in the survey area not included in our totals.

Click on the image below to view in full size our June 2016 Downtown Denver Multifamily Residential Projects exhibit, or use this link to view/download a high-resolution PDF version (6 MB) formatted for printing at 11″ x 17″.

2016-06-28_Downtown-Denver-Multifamily-Residential-Projects-June-2016

Quantifying proposed projects is a challenge, as “proposed” could mean anything from projects very early in the concept development stage to those just about ready to break ground. Our Proposed category (which we limit to developments already profiled on the DenverInfill Blog) now includes projects totaling 3,143 units. All other planned projects that we are aware of that haven’t yet been covered on DenverInfill total about 4,000 units (labeled as “In the Pipeline”).

You’ll see we added a “Floors” column to our table, representing the number of above-grade floors for each project. For multi-building projects, we used the floor count for the tallest building. Here’s a bar chart showing the distribution of new multi-family residential projects by floor count since the start of 2010, with Completed, Under Construction, and Proposed combined but excluding all 3-story townhome projects:

About half, or 41 of the 81 non-townhome projects, are 4- and 5-story buildings, about a quarter (21 projects) are in the 6-10 story range, and the remaining quarter (19 projects) are developments with buildings 11 or more floors. Generally, the projects have been getting taller as the boom has progressed.

To see the multi-family residential projects displayed by type and status (Completed, Under Construction, Proposed), visit our DenverInfill Project Map—link always available near the top of the right sidebar.

Up next… our June 2016 Non-Residential Projects summary.