Today we have some exciting development news over in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. On Washington Street, between East 14th Avenue and Colfax, a permanent homeless housing project has broken ground. Not only does it eradicate a surface parking lot, it provides low income/homeless housing for the neighborhood. Here is a Google Earth aerial with the project site outlined.

2016-06-09_SaintFrancisApartmentsAerial

As you can see from the aerial, this block has a lot of surface parking with only two retail buildings fronting Colfax Avenue. Google Street View shows us how much of a dead zone this area is.

2016-06-09_SaintFrancisApartmentsStreetView

This is a joint project between Saint John’s Cathedral and the Saint Francis Center, a non-profit that has been helping the Denver homeless since 1983. The building will rise six stories and provide 50 one-bedroom units that will be approximately 500 square feet each.

This project will also feature a parking podium on the first floor, and 2,600 square feet of community space on the second floor. No plans for ground floor retail have been mentioned. For the full application and details of this project head over here. There are a bunch of preliminary, small renderings on the Saint John’s Cathedral website and we have one very high resolution rendering to share with you today, courtesy of Fox 31 Denver. Humphries Poli Architects is the project’s architect.

2016-06-09_SaintFrancisApartmentsRendering

The construction time frame for this project is still unknown, but since it has broken ground we can expect 12-18 months until completion.

EDIT – 06/10/2016 10:20am

Here are two more renderings courtesy of Humphries Poli Architects.

2016-06-09_SaintFrancisApartmentsRendering-02

2016-06-09_SaintFrancisApartmentsRendering-03