Real estate investor Jon Cook recently announced plans to build a major urban redevelopment project called The Lumberyards near South Broadway and West Jewell Avenue in Denver’s Overland neighborhood. The site is across South Santa Fe Avenue from Overland Golf Course and includes the former Shattuck Chemical property. The project would potentially begin in 2011 with an 8-story building and would be developed over a number of years as the market allows.  At full build-out, the Lumberyards project would include approximately 1,000 residential units, about 250,000 square feet of office space, and 150,000 square feet of retail. For more details on the project including a site map and conceptual renderings, please read this article from the Denver Post.

Here’s a bird’s eye view of the site from Bing maps:

2010-01-06_lumberyards_birdseye

The southwestern corner of the project area is a quarter-mile from the Evans light rail station on the Southwest line; a bit far to be considered a true Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), but close enough for it to be considered “transit proximate”, and certainly a selling point for the project overall.

The Lumberyards will have to compete with the other big TODs that didn’t get very far along during the last boom, like the Gates project just up the road at Broadway and I-25 and Continuum’s project at I-25 and Belleview. When the next boom finally arrives, TOD may be king of Denver development, with Downtown Denver serving as the biggest Transit-Oriented Development site around.

Overall, this is a good project and one that will hopefully succeed in offering additional housing opportunities for people who may want to live in a denser, urban environment, outside of the Downtown area.