Stapleton ready for takeoff

The nation’s largest urban redevelopment has broken ground and construction of homes and retail begins this fall. The sheer size of Stapleton explodes previous notions of new urbanist infill. The site of Denver’s old airport covers 4,700 acres and will contain development on almost the entire scale of the Transect, from center to rural. Stapleton is infill in the sense that it redevelops a transportation hub and is connected to existing neighborhoods on three sides, but it will also include some suburban elements, like a regional retail power center. The employment districts — single-use but built on a modified grid — are an urban/suburban hybrid. Nearly a quarter of the area, 1,100 acres, is preserved as natural open space. The first phase of construction is scheduled to progress with unprecedented speed. During the next two years, a supermarket, a drugstore, a health club, a five-story, 170,000 sq. ft. office building, main street shops, 400 apartments, and 800 single-family homes are slated to be built in and around the first neighborhood center. In the northwestern corner of the site, a Home Depot store begins construction this fall, the first part of a 750,000 sq. ft. power center. The decision to lead with a big box center highlights the pragmatic approach of Cleveland-based developer Forest City. “We don’t fool ourselves,” says Greg Vilkin, president of Forest City Stapleton Inc., “everybody needs to go to Home Depot, but you can’t shrink a Home Depot. But we have gotten Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, and Home Depot to readdress the way their stores look, to work on their signage, and we have put all of the smaller stores on a street grid, so it’s a walkable power center, if you will.” Stapleton will take about 30 years to complete, and the planned 8,000 single-family homes, 4,000 multifamily units, 10 million square feet of offices and other employment facilities, and 3 million square feet of retail are projected to add $4 billion in value to the area. Foundation of public support Forest City has extensive experience with urban projects — commercial as well as residential — and with a portfolio valued at $3.8 billion has the clout to finance a project as complex and intense as Stapleton. However, according to Vilkin, a close collaboration with the city and the general public has been essential to make the project a reality. “We refer to it as a three-legged stool — equal parts developer, municipality, and local community,” Vilkin says. “All have to have the same vision, all have to have the same political will to make the tough decisions to move forward. This is the only way to successfully do” urban redevelopment projects. “The public financing is such that the public is actually not putting any money out at all,” he adds. “It’s a complete reimbursement agreement, so Forest City is taking all the risk if it does not create tax revenue.” The city has created a special district and issued $145 million in bonds, all of which Forest City will purchase. A tax increment district will rebate a significant portion of the developer’s taxes over the next 25 years, Vilkin says. Last year, Forest City agreed to take title of the 2,935 acres of developable land within the next 15 years for $79.4 million (600 acres have been sold to other companies, United Airlines among them.) Public agencies and citizens have guided the redevelopment from day one. Years of outreach and public visioning led up to the approval of the Stapleton Development Plan, known as the “Green Book,” by the City Council in 1995. An initial master plan by Cooper, Robertson & Partners also grew out of this process. The Stapleton Development Corporation (SDC), a nonprofit entity created to instigate and oversee the project, hired Forest City in November 1998, and the firm has since turned the public vision into a specific plan in collaboration with new urbanist planning firm Calthorpe Associates. According to Vilkin, SDC originally intended to sell pieces of the development to different developers, but Forest City argued that this would work against an integrated community and insisted on being the sole developer. This allows the company to develop with a long-term view. “For example,” Vilkin says, “when we are developing our first town center, we are taking less of a return than we otherwise would for a similar development, in order to get it in early and in order to have it as a marketing advantage to sell single-family homes. With separate retail and residential developers, there would not be the same incentive to move forward simultaneously.” Physical and economic diversity In the residential sector in particular, the rapid construction pace and use of production builders makes strong architectural guidelines essential. In collaboration with Boulder architects Wolff Lyon and the Denver office of EDAW, Forest City has published a 150-page book of design guidelines for 12 housing types. For the last six months, Forest City and SDC has reviewed designs and business plans from the builders. According to Hank Baker of Forest City, the guidelines have produced some unusually strong designs. He adds that some of the lower-end homes may have to be somewhat “dumbed down” in order to prevent values from appreciating too rapidly. Lot sizes and house types will be mixed within each block, Vilkin says, and instead of letting builders cluster all their homes on a contiguous eight or ten acres, Forest City sells them blocks of lots in different areas of the development. To keep streets as diverse as possible, different builders will typically work on opposite sides of a street. Forest City will also push for a diverse, yet harmonious, color scheme on every street. “We’ve taken control of color away from the sales people and the home buyers,” Baker says. Buyers can still choose homes of a particular color, but the guidelines dictate the location. The exterior materials will mirror the choices in Denver’s historic neighborhoods, with use of brick, wood, stucco, Masonite boards, as well as fiber-cement siding. While the primary styles in single family homes — Victorian, Colonial Revival, Craftsman — reflect traditional precedents in Denver, Stapleton will also include a significant number of more modern town center buildings. Urban Design Group of Denver has designed a range of retail and apartment buildings inspired by the industrial and functional patterns of the old airport buildings. “We are staying away from a literal interpretation,” says Terry Willis of Urban Design Group, “this is not ‘ye olde Stapleton.’” The three-story loft and retail buildings are of particular interest, since each two-story residential unit will have direct access to the street through an exterior staircase. The buildings will be expensive — Willis estimates that the construction cost may be $110/square foot — “but Forest City knows the importance of the first stroke and setting high standards,” he says. Creating a community with a high level of income diversity is a thornier problem, but one that Forest City intends to tackle, Vilkin says. “To have a sustainable community we need work-force and affordable housing, and though we are under no obligation to build it, we have been committed to it from the start,” he says. The City of Denver and Forest City have come to an agreement under which 20 percent of the rental housing, 800 units in all, will be restricted to households earning less than 60 percent of the average median income. Ten percent of for-sale homes will be available to households earning less than 80 percent of the median income, i.e. Denver households with an income of $40,000 to $50,000. In addition, the developer has set aside four parcels of land where nonprofit housing providers can build housing for those earning below 50 percent of the median income. Home prices in the rest of Stapleton will range from just below $100,000 to $600,000 and above, the company says. The first residents are scheduled to move into Stapleton in the spring of 2002, and the first of five town centers should be done by the fall. Beyond that lies many surprises and adjustments, Vilkin says. “We know what our vision is and we know where we are starting, but in between we will make course corrections on a weekly basis. The development business is not linear.”