Colorado Real Estate Journal - March 18, 2015

Public Projects

The Auraria Higher Education(AHEC) home to the University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and the Community College of Denver, had been historically disconnected from the rest of Downtown Denver. The 2007 Downtown Area Plan called for fully integrating the campus and Downtown Denver core through improvements to physical, social, economic and programmatic connections. In 2013, the Connecting Auraria study kicked off its examination of how to improve the existing connections between Auraria and the campus’s surrounding neighborhoods, such as the Commercial Core, LoDo, Golden Triangle and La Alma/Lincoln Park.

Recently incremental improvements have already been implemented, such as the addition of a campus bike lane on Curtis Street and planters and banners along Larimer Street which have already improved the pedestrian environment along one of Auraria’s most traveled pedestrian corridors.

$254,000,000 has been in invested in new buildings at the Auraria Campus since 2013 with two projects that recently completed construction. University of Colorado’s Academic Building One, a 146,000 SF, $60 million project, was completed in the summer of 2014 and now is the home to support services and consolidated student facilities. AHEC’s 5th Street Parking Garage finished construction in 4th quarter of 2014 and is a $20 million project that provides the shared campus with a 1,100 space, five story parking structure with 15,000 square feet of ground floor retail.

Outside of the Auraria Campus, the newest public project to be announced was that the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Arts plans to leave its current facility in the Capitol Hill neighborhood and move into a new 19,000 square foot facility adjacent to the Clyfford Still Museum that will commence construction in 2015. Another project that is currently under construction is the 42,000 square foot, $15.8 million expansion of the Children’s Museum that will nearly double the size of the facility when it opens later this year.