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

A 4-tale creating along the 16th Road Shopping mall is the 2nd in downtown Denver to be recently eyed for a potential place of work-to-household conversion — a thing that the town is seeking to persuade.

Kresher Cash, which owns the constructing at 1600 Champa St., submitted plans for the conversion to the metropolis past 7 days.

The plans simply call for the leading two flooring of the making, currently office room, to be fashioned into a total of 40 apartments, ranging in dimension from 470 to 1,135 square feet. Some of the units on the top rated flooring would function a mezzanine level.

The interior of the flooring, absent from the home windows, would attribute storage, exercise and other amenity place.

The constructing is about 72,000 square toes, according to property documents. The base two floors, alongside with a basement stage, are household to retail space. Tenants there contain a liquor keep, several dining establishments and a reward store.

The framework also has quite a few electronic billboards, which includes a large just one ideal on the corner overlooking the mall. The programs reveal individuals billboards would continue being in spot.

Kresher, which ordered the 1600 Champa St. constructing in 2014 for $21.75 million, didn’t answer to requests for remark. A get in touch with to Bryant Flink Architecture & Style, which drew up the options, also was not returned.

On a countrywide degree, the concept of converting downtown offices into residential space has received curiosity in modern many years, with extra individuals performing from property and town centers having difficulties to return to pre-pandemic concentrations of vibrancy.

In December, the proprietors of the Petroleum Developing, a 14-tale construction at 110 16th St., submitted strategies for turning its higher 13 floors of office area into close to 130 household models. No bodily operate has started.

Conversion is not necessarily uncomplicated. Business office properties have a tendency to have higher ceiling heights than residential kinds, and their flooring are often broader, producing it tricky to style into units that all have a window without the need of significant unused house.

The metropolis, nevertheless, thinks some conversion would be a great notion.

Laura Swartz, spokeswoman for Denver’s Local community Planning and Enhancement section, told BusinessDen that Denver is building an adaptive reuse method targeting older “Class B” and “Class C” business office structures.

When the selection to change room will have to be produced by a creating operator, the city would like to  guarantee it isn’t posing any unwanted road blocks.

“To that finish, town staff members have begun doing work with owners/operators of these varieties of properties with the aim of determining and taking away regulatory boundaries to assistance encourage these sorts of conversions,” Swartz mentioned. “This perform is nonetheless early suitable now, and we would expect to have probable code or procedure updates to share in about a yr.”

Swartz cited the reality that numerous companies have embraced hybrid do the job insurance policies, that means staff aren’t in the business Monday via Friday.

“The town thinks there is an chance right here to enable create a far more finish neighborhood downtown with much more housing solutions by focusing on the vacant professional and office environment place,” she mentioned. “Reusing present building inventory is also a a lot more environmentally friendly and value-powerful technique to construction.”

The most well known instance of an business-to-household conversion downtown is 1600 Glenarm Position. Denver-based mostly RedPeak obtained the 31-tale business office setting up in 2004, fashioned it into residences and sold it in 2018.