Look Who’s Back: Steam on the Platte

These very attractive renderings are very out of date with the newest submittal—I’ll draw attention to a couple details. In the original plan, only two buildings are proposed: a smaller office building along Old West Colfax Avenue, and an apartment building inside the site with no street frontage. This rendering also nods to a trail improvement/open space opportunity along the east bank of the South Platte River. Set aside your skepticism on what the City will let them build outside of their parcel and just note that it’s a route for pedestrian circulation and emergency vehicle access.

Below, we’ll start evaluating what has changed for the northernmost building. Mouse over the picture to see the the new proposal compared to the old proposal. (The white box to the right of the new proposal is Raices Brewing.)

The first change is that the modest office building proposed along West Colfax Avenue has been newly proposed as hotel use instead of office from office. The second change is obvious: a jump in height from a 4-story to 8-story building. Take a look at the additional renderings of this building below.

In all probability, the speculative development of new office space in a novel submarket has become unappealing, post-COVID. But new lodging space near an exciting new Stadium/Sun Valley district, near one of Denver’s strangest new attractions (MeowWolf) has a much more solid use case. In either case, the replacement of surface parking only a mile outside of Downtown is great. (The un-screened parking garage at the ground-level is not so great.)

The third change from the previous vision is the increased size of the apartment building proposed. This project was originally conceived before the passage of Expanding Housing Affordability in Denver. One of the cool features of that policy is, if the developer commits to providing more affordable homes at deeper levels of affordability than is required, they can exceed the height limit zoning imposes on their lot. This site, unfortunately, is bound by the Old City Hall view plane. There is a height limit (194 feet, give or take) but should the development team have wished to take the full EHA incentive and increase their apartment building to 12 stories, they would still be allowed to do so. Mouse over to see the change in proposal regarding the large apartment building on the site.

Aesthetic note—the podium of the building is lower, only 3 stories, while the dramatic offset tower of the original proposal has been nixed in favor of the standard “upper story setback” required of almost every apartment building in Denver. And new to the buildings programming, there will be 3 “walk-up” retail spaces that face north into the green space on the property.

In the last major change, this redevelopment proposes a new building along the southernmost portion of their land, abutting the W Line’s tracks. There was already some parking structure proposed before. And by square footage, it’s more accurate to call the “new” building proposed a parking garage (>2:1 ratio)  than a residential building. But this still proposes 54 additional homes on top of the 4-story garage linked to the main apartment building by two skyways at the 5th and 8th floors. This building will require the most work in future submittals—said simply, it’s ugly and the two visible ramps through the parking garage are so unusual to see that they’re probably just not allowed.

This project is far from breaking ground, but action at this key site for urban infill is great to see. Keep your eye on DenverInfill for future updates to this project!

Editor’s note: the post was modified to reflect that Urban Ventures is no longer the developer of the site.