This update of the HUB development across from the 38th and Blake transit station in RiNo is both a “final update” post on the first phase of HUB and a “new project” post for HUB’s second phase.
When HUB was first announced in late 2016, the project was envisioned as a two-phase project. The first phase was planned to cover about three-quarters of the block and consist of 220,000 square foot of office space, ground-floor retail, structured parking, and an outdoor terrace. The second phase would have completed the block with a hotel at the corner of Blake and Downing.
However, in July 2018, the developers submitted to the city an amendment to the project’s Site Development Plan to drop the hotel and replace it with more office space. That amended Site Development Plan was approved by the city on January 15, 2019. Consequently, the second phase will now include about 95,000 square feet of office space on seven floors above approximately 10,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. The first phase, of which HomeAdvisor is leasing 150,000 square feet for their corporate headquarters, has been rebranded as HUB South, and the second phase is now known as HUB North.
HUB South – Final Update
Construction of HUB South is virtually finished and tenants will be moving in soon. The first image below is the view of HUB South’s Blake and 36th Street corner taken from the 35th Street Pedestrian Bridge, followed by the 36th and Walnut corner:
Continuing around the building, here are views of the Walnut and Downing sides of HUB South:
RiNo is known for its colorful outdoor murals, so several were commissioned from local artists and incorporated onto HUB’s facade:
HUB North – New Project
The second phase, HUB North, is located at the corner of Blake and Downing, directly across the street from the 38th and Blake transit station. Designed by Gensler, the eight-story structure will match the height of HUB South and will have two ground-floor retail spaces fronting Blake and Downing. Here are some renderings of HUB North, courtesy of Gensler.
Construction of HUB North is already underway as the photos below show. Situated in between the L-shaped HUB South and the new HUB North is an outdoor terrace atop the parking podium that will be accessible from both towers.
HUB North is scheduled to be complete by the summer of 2020.
At least they’re not adding any more parking. Stupid ugly garage….
Also, DPW needs to fix that door-zone half-assed bike lane!
DPW won’t/can’t do anything about it at this point. It’s better than no bike lane at all 🙂
God forbid people want to get to work on time. Light rail is great if you have two hours to commute (each way).
Let’s not exaggerate. The three farthest away light rail stations from the 38th & Blake station are the Lincoln Station in Lone Tree, the Jeffco Station in Golden, and the Mineral Station in Littleton. According to the RTD schedule, a trip from those three stations to the 38th & Blake station (where this project is located) would take you 55 minutes, 65 minutes, and 51 minutes respectively.
LOVE the murals!
Wasn’t the Ace Hotel originally mentioned for this location? Then I thought it was later mentioned for Uptown.
The Ace Hotel will be built at 19th & Grant
Okay, I exaggerated. I have to respectfully argue, however. Residents of Golden or Littleton (where a working family can still barely afford a house) can’t start their commute right at the light rail station. Nor do they arrive at the moment the train leaves. That easily adds 20-30 minutes…Okay, still not 2 hours.
To be more thoughtful (under thoughtful scrutiny from Ken himself!), I ran the RTD trip planner to the HUB from my house in Wheat Ridge. My fastest trip is 1 hour 20 minutes. That’s fine, but I have a family and need to ferry children to daycare. Even with school two blocks off the 38 bus route, add a minimum 30 minutes for drop-off and catching the next 38 bus.
RTD to my actual workplace by DAM takes an hour and 5 minutes under ideal conditions…again add the 30 minutes for kids. Not remotely tenable. I drive on my schedule door to door in 45 minutes. I get that high parking ratios may not be needed, but all parking is not bad, and RTD is not a panacea (I am now dead on this hill).
Thanks for the follow-up response. Agreed, transit certainly may not be the best transportation choice for some people on some trips, depending on their situation. Hopefully in the future, through expanded transit investments and other mobility options, transit will become a more competitive choice for you. Just curious… will the soon-to-open G-line help you in any way, since you live in Wheat Ridge?
I don’t think RTD Trip planner is considering G-line (open 4/26!) yet, but anticipate that the G-line would nominally speed up a trip to the HUB from here. However, given the offspring situation, feasible transit options currently involve only the 38 bus. That’s just my situation. However, I belabor the point because I am probably not an outlier with my auto dependence. To accomodate a diverse workforce, it seems developers will need some level of parking in office buildings until we approve and build something on the scale of Seattle ST3 (which will only take about 25 years and $54 Billion) to fill in transit gaps like I face.
Don’t get me wrong…I think I found your site wondering about the Hyatt countdown from my Capitol Hill condo. I walked to work and the thought of family and driving seemed ALIEN and TERRIFYING (https://denverinfill.com/subpages_special_topics/hyatt_countdown.htm). Thanks, Ken!
At least Denver now has a plan for significant expansion of transit throughout the city (https://www.denvergov.org/content/dam/denvergov/Portals/Denveright/documents/transit/Denver-Moves-Transit-Exec-Summary-2019.pdf). While we don’t have dedicated funding plan yet and the type of transit (light rail, BRT, etc.) per corridor is to be determined, this is where it starts, with a vision for a city-wide network of transit-priority corridors. It will take many years to implement this, but it is exciting that at least now the city has its own vision for Denver-centric transit above and beyond RTD.
Yes!!! I’m excited. Man, I hope something good comes of it. I hope we eventually get rail.
One might also argue your family transportation situation is negatively affected by endless suburban sprawl. Only a generation or two ago, your kids would have ridden a bus by themselves, and would have walked to soccer practice, or wherever they’re headed afterward, within a neighborhood designed with that in mind. Your reliance on a car is the reason city planners don’t think twice about spacing family amenities ten miles apart along high speed roads with little to no sidewalk infrastructure. The sooner everyone stops doing the bidding of a dying auto industry, the faster urban and suburban neighborhoods can transition to more sustainable transportation.
There’s no doubt about it, Ryan. Denver grew this way because of the car (and sprawl-friendly geography), and its populace as a whole is not willing and probably can’t afford the remedial transit measures required to “fix” the situation. As an individual, I don’t practically have many other options (see last night’s rant). I’d love to live in a city-close neighborhood and roll my car into a quarry.
As we all know, real estate in close-in areas with quality neighborhood schools is cost prohibitive. Never mind the kids are both in daycare that costs more annually than my undergrad did. I guess a family may have jettison transit-oriented lifestyle for economics and general survival.
I guess what I am trying to say: I never thought I would become my father in front of the whole world on Denverinfill.com.
It is unfortunate that the cost of living in close in urban transit connected neighborhoods is prohibitive for most people, especially families, the young and the old who all would be safer not driving. And of course all of us who can live in walkable, bikable, community connected places built at a human (not car) scale benefit from increased activity, access, human connection, productivity, safety and improved air quality.
The key issue to make urban areas affordable and to turn urban edge areas into these effective, healthy neighborhoods is to build more, denser and more mixed development, especially housing. Unfortunately most of the land area of Denver, in the choking suburbs and even in the heart of the city are zoned for single family housing when they should be allowed to organically grow into the urban neighborhoods that they are. This would allow allow less expensive, less disruptive mid size 3-5 story townhouses, condos, apartments, co-housing to be built that would help equalize the supply demand mismatch for housing in our, and other growing cities (this is referred to as the missing middle housing, see DenverUrbanism link above). This medium density would allow for the mix of housing, services, amenities, work, school and other resources to be located near each other to walk, and provide funding for more mixed in affordable housing and dense grid of high frequency transit.
The problem is that since the later half of last century zoning was turned over to local neighborhood organizations, the meetings of which are attended by predominantly rich, white, old (retired) people who all resist any change and development in their neighborhood. These people are not representative of their communities, but they decide for everyone that “neighborhood character preservation” is more important that the ability of all people to be able to be able to afford a roof over their heads. Cities used to take responsibility for “housing the next generation,” but now wealthier whiter neighborhoods completely obstruct any new development in their neighborhoods and all development gets pushed into disadvantaged neighborhoods. We need great density, development, but everywhere, most especially places like Hilltop, Park Hill, Highlands, Congress Park (my neighborhood) and even to a more moderate degree places like Wheat Ridge, Littleton. If make it so new housing is created in every neighborhood, when development or even much needed improvements to lower income neighborhoods will not herald displacement in the same way.
Of course many other things need to be done as well, including mitigating the historical and current effects of redlining and other community investments to prevent displacement and allow everyone to benefit from their cities growth. In addition we more mixed affordable and market rate housing like projects by DHA and what is now required for denser development around the 38th and Blake station, and more public and private sector funding for affordable housing as well as more housing to relieve market rate price inflation. We need proactive investment to make these dense neighborhoods viable and livable, work to make construction more affordable (I am a fan of efforts to develop high quality, mid rise pre-fabricated building units), and again to the point of our conversation, eliminating parking minimums, imposing parking maximums, incentivize developers to not make parking a 3rd of the cost of a building, provide other options, or at least create parking structures that can be converted later to other more useful applications.
Is the auto industry dying? We already have automated vehicles on the road that will soon make the roads safer and more efficient. Parking will not be needed, but Uber will take you to your door while RTD will not answer that last mile issue. Do the limiting trains really win out over door to door automated vehicles? Reminds me how all cities used to have street cars, but eventually realized busses are street cars without limits.
Tell me: If the future of automobiles is the next evolution of ride sharing, and not every household will need its own one, two, or three automobiles—I agree!—then fewer cars will need to be manufactured, right? Dying doesn’t mean dead overnight; it means means a gradual decline in total car sales and diminishing usefulness of the road infrastructure cities have invested untold billions of dollars to accommodate the last 70 years. That moment is approached faster than most care to acknowledge. Now that personal computing has plateaued, this is the next great technological paradigm shift and venture capital knows it.
And busses and streetcars only became limited when suburban sprawl extended beyond their reach. “Last mile” problems didn’t exist when neighborhoods weren’t designed to segregate the affluent miles away from the poor.
right, all reports about a dying auto industry revolve around falling sales. that doesn’t mean the industry is dying, it just means it’s changing.
correct, we won’t own cars in the future, but they will exist and they’ll be everywhere.
yes, they’ll park, but they can park in all of those decks that will be unneccessary or just go out to the country or whatever.
the prediction of more gridlock is strange considering how computers are efficient and dominate the human driver. i believe there will be no traffic to speak of at all, despite billions of autonomous vehicles on the road.
no, the auto industry is not dying at all. maybe the mom and pop mechanic is in big trouble, but the gazillions of dollars of investment going into Uber isn’t an accident.
if anything is dying it’s the “light rail” model. extremely limiting, expensive, and questions about efficiency. look at markets like Durham and Nashville that are going the other direction. they’re probably right.
“the prediction of more gridlock is strange considering how computers are efficient and dominate the human driver.”
I’m not sure exactly what that’s supposed to mean. More cars on the road is more cars on the road. The only way I can imagine computers allowing us to cram more autos on the road without increasing congestion would be if there were only autonomous vehicles on the road, all communicating with each other, and no human drivers mixed in. Then you could have them zooming down the freeway packed tightly together or something. But that future is not going to come to us the day the first autonomous vehicle finally arrives on the market. That future isn’t coming for several decades at least.
When a large proportion of cars on the road are empty (on their way to pick up their riders) there will be unprecedented gridlock. Also, staging of cars near where they’ll most likely be needed (parking) will still be necessary (unless we want them randomly circling the neighborhood when not in use — which would make the gridlock even worse). I don’t think autonomous vehicles will ever be a sustainable transit solution. Every mile that a person travels would require substantially more than a mile of a car being driven, no matter how you look at it.
Something to thing about, at dinner with several venture capitalist at the table. A shrted version of conversations. This is Year 2000, computers will stop working all over again — what a great way to raise money to do nothing. Fully autonomous vehicles are a fantasy — but a great opportunity for creating fortunes spending our venture dollars. Cars will never be given the chance to autonomously drive, just imagine the liability issues, for example and the deal killer — a scenario where the car has to decide between hitting one person or the other — to choose whether to cause this death or that death. The research into it will create payouts for use in other, less litigious, avenues.