16th and Champa building is second downtown eyed for residential conversion

A four-story making along the 16th Avenue Shopping mall is the second in downtown Denver to be not too long ago eyed for a potential place of work-to-household conversion — one thing that the city is on the lookout to encourage.

Kresher Money, which owns the setting up at 1600 Champa St., submitted programs for the conversion to the city very last week.

The plans phone for the top rated two floors of the creating, at present workplace area, to be fashioned into a total of 40 flats, ranging in size from 470 to 1,135 sq. feet. Some of the models on the best flooring would aspect a mezzanine level.

The interior of the flooring, absent from the windows, would attribute storage, fitness and other amenity area.

The setting up is about 72,000 sq. toes, in accordance to home information. The base two floors, alongside with a basement degree, are residence to retail space. Tenants there include things like a liquor store, multiple eating places and a present store.

The framework also has numerous electronic billboards, which include a big 1 ideal on the corner overlooking the mall. The programs point out all those billboards would remain in location.

Kresher, which procured the 1600 Champa St. building in 2014 for $21.75 million, didn’t react to requests for comment. A contact to Bryant Flink Architecture & Layout, which drew up the designs, also was not returned.

On a national level, the strategy of converting downtown offices into residential room has acquired interest in recent a long time, with far more people today doing work from property and metropolis facilities struggling to return to pre-pandemic levels of vibrancy.

In December, the entrepreneurs of the Petroleum Making, a 14-tale framework at 110 16th St., submitted plans for turning its higher 13 flooring of workplace room into close to 130 residential models. No bodily operate has started.

Conversion isn’t necessarily quick. Business office buildings are likely to have higher ceiling heights than household kinds, and their floors are frequently broader, earning it tricky to vogue into models that all have a window with out sizeable unused house.

The city, however, thinks some conversion would be a superior concept.

Laura Swartz, spokeswoman for Denver’s Community Planning and Improvement section, explained to BusinessDen that Denver is developing an adaptive reuse program concentrating on older “Class B” and “Class C” place of work structures.

When the choice to change house will have to be produced by a constructing owner, the metropolis wishes to  ensure it isn’t posing any pointless obstacles.

“To that close, town workers have begun functioning with homeowners/operators of these kinds of properties with the target of determining and taking away regulatory obstacles to aid persuade these types of conversions,” Swartz reported. “This perform is nonetheless early appropriate now, and we would anticipate to have prospective code or process updates to share in about a yr.”

Swartz cited the point that numerous employers have embraced hybrid function insurance policies, meaning workforce are not in the office Monday through Friday.

“The city believes there is an opportunity in this article to assist produce a additional full neighborhood downtown with much more housing options by focusing on the vacant industrial and business room,” she explained. “Reusing present constructing inventory is also a a lot more environmentally pleasant and expense-productive approach to development.”

The most notable example of an place of work-to-residential conversion downtown is 1600 Glenarm Area. Denver-based RedPeak ordered the 31-story business office developing in 2004, fashioned it into flats and offered it in 2018.