Do you live under a rock? If so, I would like to lift the rock from you and inform you that East Colfax is undergoing a huge transformation, one that we need to be championing and celebrating more widely. Center-running Bus Rapid Transit will fundamentally reshape traffic volumes, bus ridership, and urban form along the corridor. East Colfax Avenue will be safer, greener, quieter, and people-centered in just a few years. This is a big win! Additionally, knowing that development will spring up along the corridor, there was a city-led rezoning of much of the corridor to further urbanism in 2023. I have written a couple different times about the state of surface parking along the corridor, specific improvements for bike riders and tree enjoyers, and how businesses will inevitably change due to these improvements.
I had this idea, this crazy idea, that I would do a roundup in a novel way of the whole of East Colfax within city limits. But then as I tried to parse a fair boundary for the north and south of the catchment area, I just ran into all the developments in Uptown that felt like they needed their own explanation. Well, Uptown’s been covered! Now let’s talk East Colfax.
We will be looking at development within a block of Colfax, which bounds us tightly between 14th and 16th Avenues. That’s not to say that the fine folks a few blocks off Colfax won’t benefit from the BRT investment—but the corridor itself is genuinely interesting!
Completed Projects
The Marlow. One of only a couple large multifamily projects underway east of Colorado Boulevard but within the I-70 and I-25 highways, the Marlowe is close to Marzwyk’s fine foods, at the site of a BRT stop, and brings new multi-family availability to South Park Hill, a neighborhood that, in a recent analysis of Denver Census data, had among the lowest new residents move there of any neighborhood in the city. The northwestern edge of the lot will gain a small community garden, but that will not get much light because it is covered up by the building from the south. Still, it’s a nice idea, and interesting to see the large-scale multifamily model come to South Park Hill. There are many more lots that would suit the treatment!
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 stories | 205 apt homes | 3047 sq ft retail | 234 (v) & 147 (b) parking | Sable Partners | KTGY | <? |
The Vixen (neé Karoi – Colfax and Downing). I often find myself surprised by the scale of new infill development as in the case of this completed multifamily development. Next to a number of attractive, historic multifamily homes from the early 1900s, facing a strip of well-loved, small-scale retail on the north side of Colfax, this development is a step change for the corridor, though redevelopment at this scale is nothing new for Denver, just new for East Colfax. Considering Colfax historically—from its beginnings as an elite residential corridor to its midcentury kitsch and wicked reputation—the changing uses of the street from residential to commercial, the accompanying change in scale for motorist convenience, must have been pretty jarring for someone who was born and raised in one of those now vanished mansions. So change is really the core fact of East Colfax, is my point. And there are more projects coming to East Colfax, including one literally across the street, that further the block-wide, new-build multifamily context as part of the corridor’s next step in history. So welcome to Colfax, new neighbors!
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 Stories | 334 apt homes | 6,000 sq ft retail | 342 (v) & 166 (b) parking | Kairoi Residential | GFF Architects | Hinton Construction |
Under Construction
Route 40 Apartments. I think most of us were eagerly waiting for this project to break ground after sitting as a vacant lot for the better part of two years. As mentioned above, this project introduces a new context to the urban fabric along East Colfax, including ground-floor retail and an active street front. The only disappointment this project is that it is an outlier in that it is unambiguously over-parked. Capitol Hill is one of only a couple neighborhoods in Denver where it’s normal for your friend not to have a car. To say there are plenty of other transportation options for future residents of this site is an understatement. By the time this development is leasing, the closest BRT stop at Downing Street will already be bustling. Seems a shame to miss out because you’d feel shackled to that car, huh?
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 stories | 210 apt homes | 6905 sq ft retail | 242 (v) & 124 (b) parking | Consolidated Investment Group | Boka Powell | Symmetry Builders |
Proposed
1565 Colorado Boulevard. This project had been pretty well covered in the press, as the clearing of this site demolished the Royal Palace Motel which stood on North Colorado Boulevard since 1969. This development is certainly going to bring more activity to Colorado Boulevard than a vacant motel, though perhaps I will note a missed opportunity for ground floor retail along Colorado Boulevard. The closest BRT stop will be at Colfax-Colorado, of course, and in the years to come when Colorado Boulevard gets its own BRT improvements, this will be an extraordinarily transit-rich place to live.
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Most Recent Activity |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 stories | 155 apt homes | 131 (v) & 78 (b) parking | Laramar Group | KTGY | Zoning Permit 2025-12-07 |
1801 E Colfax Avenue. A very exciting project, as this same lot was only last year proposed for a drive-thru restaurant. Although the corridor had been rezoned to prevent drive-thrus, as I covered at the time, that rezoning only changed how drive-thrus looked, not really their operations. I think workforce housing is a better use here than a drive-thru!
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Most Recent Activity |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 stories | 111 apt homes | 32 (v) & 12 (b) parking | Kentro Group | The Mulhern Group | Concept Plan 2025-08-20 |
1459 Lafayette Street. This project, though it has been quiet in permits recently, would seek to bring a five-story apartment building to a surface parking lot within a couple hundred feet of Colfax avenue. The project offers a lot of parking, presumably to replace the surface parking lost for the commercial storefronts nearby. It’s a big project, and there’s still promise for it, as it’s being shepherded by the landowner of the commercial strip just north along Colfax Avenue. Fingers crossed!
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Most Recent Activity |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 stories | 82 apt homes | 151 (v) & 49 (b) parking | RCG | MUES | Formal SDP Approval 2025-1-03 |
1245 E Colfax. Tucked behind an existing office building on the north side of Lafayette Street, there’s a dead boring little parking lot. Not for long! Where this parking lot is today, a new five-story apartment building will be constructed. The old office building at the corner of Lafayette and Colfax will be converted to residential use on the upper stories, leaving retail on the ground floor. These new homes would be close to both the Colfax-Downing and Colfax-Park BRT stations, plus the existing retail spaces on the first floor are proposed to stay throughout construction.
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Most Recent Activity |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 & 5 stories | 7,185 sq ft retail | 146 apt homes | 40 (v) & 84 (b) parking | Lead Funding | Godden Sudik | Electrical Permit 2025-12-17 |
Conclusion
Over the next year, we should expect to see more developments proposed for East Colfax, not least of which due to the recent reforms to Denver’s building code allowing smaller, denser single-stair apartment buildings to emerge from some previously hard-to-develop lots along East Colfax Avenue. Though those buildings, by their nature, will be smaller and less Transformative (with a capital T) than the large multifamily developments described here, every bit of vacant land and underused parking along Colfax rightly should be turned into a useful, lively corner of this storied corridor. Colfax’s best days are yet to come!
About the author:
Andy Cushen is a car-free urbanist living and working in Denver; his reporting and analysis of the construction boom on Denver neighborhoods can be found under the handle @BuildupDenver on Twitter. Andy joins the DenverInfill team to cover neighborhoods outside of Central Denver (such as the Globeville, Sun Valley, and East Colfax), as well as RTD rail stops with big developments nearby.
It’s going to be a huge hit, Colfax.
I first lived on Colfax Avenue in 1978 at the site of the 1459 Lafayette Street parking lot that finally seems up for reuse. Sid King’s Crazy Horse club was still going strong, and gunfire sounds in the night was not unusual on a regular basis. I still live a two minute walk from that intersection.
A few comments:
(A) There is a consistent problem between the private club we call Historic Denver and the need to allow scaled redevelopment along Colfax and elsewhere. Historic Denver is a operated as a private club, because they only allow in board members and staff who agree with their views on preservation. Competing approaches on how historic preservation and redevelopment should be coordinated are certainly not permitted within their organization. In other cities, notably Warsaw, redevelopment is scaled to match the form and purpose of the best historic periods of the city. In Denver, the burned out ugly eyesore at Franklin and Colfax is a compelling case that Historic Denver’s approach of ‘preserving the brick’ to the the larger goal of preserving a neighborhood. The Vixen in particular stand in sharp contrast to the burned out hulk two blocks away, clear evidence that the members of Historic Denver have no real concept of historic preservation.
(B) Car free neighborhoods cater to child free residents, and generally dismiss the needs of families to get children to school and child care while also getting to work and grocery shopping. That’s OK, but it needs to be recognized that underlying a car free lifestyle is that it caters to a specific and limited demographic, and by extension has a political cast that also reflects on an underlying social and politcal bias.
(C) Nearly all of the housing being constructed in Denver at this point is built as rental units, with no option for purchasing, and then building equity. This means that we are condemning citizens to never building any equity in their most expensive cost of living. There are several reasons for this including Colorado’s condo liability statute, the high general cost of housing construction, and substantial investments by managed equity funds that appreciate the enormous profits available by ending substantial individual home ownership. The counter to this would be demanding that a certain amount of housing produced by any developer needs to be condos, that a developer must have a program for dedicating a portion of rent be assigned to immutable equity in a resident’s unit, and that housing cooperatives should be allowed to participate openly and competitively with private developers.
I have shared this article elsewhere together with my comments, I hope they can be published here as well.
Great update! I think the city is going to love the BRT system despite all negative dialog around it to date.
You mentioned that Denver might at some point also add BRT to Colorado Blvd?! That would be great to help connect the grid system of transportation in Denver. Do you have any more info on that timeline?