The ball is in Denver City Council’s court. Or more specifically, Ball Arena development plans.
On Monday, city officials will have a public hearing and vote to decide whether or not to rezone 70 acres around the sports venue for plans to turn its parking lots into a new neighborhood extending downtown Denver.
It proposes new skinny skyscrapers with apartments and condominiums (18% to be set for affordable housing), retail, connections to the 5280 trail and a large park system close to a downtown in want of more greenery.
Days before the important public hearing, Ball Arena’s owners signed one of their last deals needed ahead of Denver City Council’s vote.
Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, the owners of the official NHL and NBA home stadium for the Colorado Avalanche and Denver Nuggets, reached a community benefits agreement with nearby neighborhood and community organizations after 15 months of negotiating.
The community benefits agreement included representatives from the Auraria Higher Education Campus, Denver Housing Authority, Downtown Denver Partnership, La Alma/Lincoln Park Neighborhood Association, Lower Downtown Neighborhood Association, Sun Valley Community Coalition and more.
The deal promised to create a one-time $16 million fund using a 1% fee of retail and hotel sales collected from the development to go toward rental assistance, attracting small businesses, hiring local artists and supporting Indigenous people and the displaced Aurarian community.
It was a voluntary negotiation between Kroenke Sports and community members, but City Council members have strongly encouraged community benefit agreements ahead of rezonings for large developments such as Cherry Creek West to have deals in writing with concerned community leaders and preemptively offset any negative impacts a project could cause them.
Concerns over protected mountain views
One of the largest obstacles the development will face is a separate bill from the rezoning, also up for a vote Monday, to void the City Hall view plane within the Ball Arena development.
The view plane limits building heights to preserve views of the Rocky Mountain from 14 points across Denver.
City planners found the view plane "obsolete" in the area because the Auraria campus next door is a state-owned property exempt from the local rule. Empower Field at Mile High Stadium is also exempted.
The Ball Arena project can have buildings with no height restrictions as long it includes affordable housing, according to the development agreement. But the towers are limited in width, requiring skinnier towers, which could still preserve some of those views.
Denver Councilmember Kevin Flynn said during the Oct. 14th meeting he’ll be torn during Monday’s public meeting about making any changes to the view plane, calling it a “very special piece of legislation.”
“I have had a lot of heartburn over amending the view plane, given the point of the view plane is not to penetrate it and build higher than it,” he said. “I wonder if the point of the view plane is more than just to protect the view from a person standing at that particular spot, but whether there is a secondary public benefit that derives from keeping building heights lower within that wedge.”
Some downtown residents have voiced concerns over potentially losing the mountain views they believed were protected, adding their property values could drop.
Councilmember Chris Hinds, representing downtown, said he'd consider community conversations held on Thursday before making his final vote. Councilmember Amanda Sawyer, from the district including Cherry Creek, also expressed she was “struggling” with the view plane and setting a precedent for exemptions.
“For us, it's so much about the opportunity of getting a really strong density of housing and jobs around those transit stations. And in some of those places, it's going to impact those views,” said Andrew Iltis, the Downtown Denver Partnership’s vice president of planning and community impact .
He added any new towers next to Ball Arena wouldn’t be like downtown’s office buildings taking up an entire block. The skinnier tower restrictions would allow not only some of the views to stay, Iltis explained, but also bring extra light and air to the street level.
“Some of those tradeoffs for density are just really important where we have the opportunity to build like that,” Iltis said.
The view tradeoff is for affordable housing, one of the top concerns amongst Denver city leaders who worry the high cost of living is unsustainable for the region.
Kroenke Sports is promising 18% of housing at the development would be affordable.
Development plans call for approximately 6,000 units of housing, which would be about 1,080 new affordable housing units.
Two buildings will be “fully affordable,” per the development agreement, and would have to be among the first three structures constructed.
Some community leaders wanted more.
“We were seeking a 20% affordable housing requirement,” Simon Tafoya, co-chair of the new Ball Arena Community Benefits Agreement Committee and a La Alma/Lincoln Park resident, told The Denver Gazette.
The committee was created out of the 15-month negotiation process and will be responsible for the $16 million community fund created by the project.
Tafoya said he still considers Kroenke’s 18% affordable housing commitment a huge win.
Their agreement includes provisions to encourage families being able to afford living in the Ball Arena neighborhood by requiring more than 20% of the units to be two-bedrooms, and 15% to be three-bedrooms.
“It goes far above the 10% percent minimum requirement … but the fact that we were able to get to 18% for such a large investment over almost 30 years, I think it was a huge testament to what we were able to gain,” Tafoya said.
Efforts made to bridge communities
The Sun Valley neighborhood, south of Empower Field with one of the highest concentrations of low-income residents in the city, is separated from Ball Arena by the South Platte River and Interstates 70 and 25.
But Ball Arena and its 55 acres of parking lots have also played a part in further separating the community from downtown, said Jeanne Granville, president of the registered neighborhood organization Sun Valley Community Coalition.
“Well, that land has really been a physical barrier and helped contribute to the isolation of the Sun Valley neighborhood,” she said.
Granville, who was part of the community benefits agreement negotiations, said the plans to develop the area could help connect Sun Valley to downtown at a time the banks of the South Platte River are brimming with potential developments including Burnham Yard and Kroenke Sports next-door River Mile project.
“A lot of our redevelopment has been oriented toward the river,” Granville said. “That had not been the case in the past.”
Granville said she hopes the Ball Arena development will be a source of jobs for Sun Valley residents, especially for people of color, who have historically been shut out from large-scale developments and often displaced.
The community benefits agreement sets up for Denver residents from low-income neighborhoods to get “first hire” opportunities for the construction of the neighborhood. And 20% of new permanent jobs will be prioritized for low-income Denver residents.
“We're trying to overcome both the physical barrier and make sure it doesn't become this high-end economic barrier where our folks can't participate,” Granville said.
A city planning staff report found the Ball Arena redevelopment had the lowest-possible score for displacing residents. But community leaders acknowledge that’s because many were displaced decades ago.
Auraria was a culturally-diverse neighborhood — majority Hispanic — west of downtown. Denver officials at the time pushed residents from the neighborhood to build the Auraria campus in the 1970s.
Now community leaders want to recognize and support the displaced community as well as Native Americans who were there before them within the Ball Arena development area.
Kroenke Sports has promised in the community benefits agreement to offer $1 million in internships within sports and entertainment — and market those opportunities to displaced Auraria descendants and Indigenous youth.
The $16 million community fund also aims to contribute to student housing and $500,000 in scholarships for descendants going to school on the Auraria campus.
Support for the Aurarian and Indigenous community ”were at times difficult conversations” during negotiations, Tafoya said, adding they had to educate Kroenke Sports officials to understand why community leaders found it important.
While it can’t bring back what was lost, “it's a step in the right direction and it's definitely a nod and an appreciation to what happened to this community,” Tafoya said.
Councilmember Jamie Torres also expressed her support for efforts to include the communities in the agreement.
What happens if Ball Arena's rezoning gets approved?
For Kroenke Sports, Senior Vice President Matt Mahoney told The Denver Gazette this project is a rare opportunity to prioritize “people over cars.”
The plans for 55 acres of parking lots are symbolic of how urban development has changed.
The arena was built at a time when development centered on car transportation. But Mahoney said he’s seen demand for parking drop. The project proposes to construct shared parking within buildings, which will be available for games and events, and encourage other modes of transportation.
“We don't have to build out the same level of parking because the parking demand is just not the same,” Mahoney said.
A large percentage of the parking lot real estate will go toward developing an integrated park system, including a central park and concert space larger than a football field and a main boulevard extending Wynkoop Street with two-car lanes and a large sidewalk promenade to fit cafes and bike lanes.
There’s also a proposed “Confluence Ribbon,” a trail loop designed to connect biking and pedestrian paths to the South Platte River Trail, 5280 Trail, Confluence Park and downtown. Plans call for building eight pedestrian bridges across physical barriers such as Speer Boulevard and Auraria Parkway.
If the rezoning gets approved, Mahoney said Kroenke Sports will start the next day working on Phase 1.
He said there’s no timeline set yet, or a scope for this first phase, but added they’re likely to start on the property’s side closest to LoDo with a pedestrian and bike bridge across Speer Boulevard and Wynkoop Street to connect with Union Station. Several buildings around the bridge could be the first to be built, Mahoney explained.
“We're gonna work hard to just move that forward,” Mahoney said.
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