Last week, we were treated once again to a dust up of housing worries: “The bubble is breaking! The bubble is breaking!” New-home sales dropped nationally from one month to the next, and previously-owned home sales had dropped 21 percent nationally for the first six months of 2006.
And yet, also last week, I sat down with a developer, Lend Lease Communities, which just recently paid $22 million for 503 acres at the corner of Interstate 70 and E-470, where the Australian-based company plans to launch its first U.S., mixed-use residential and commercial project.
It’s planning 4.5 million square feet of office and retail space, along with almost 3,000 residential units it hopes to build out by about 2018. So far, the development is called Horizon City Center.
Simon Walker, the young, newly married project director for Lend Lease here, has moved from Australia and lives downtown, and from there will lead the company’s local foray into what it calls “sustainable” communities in the United States.
It picked Denver over Phoenix and Tampa, Fla., for its first U.S. project because growth projections for the region over the “long haul,” put Denver “right there” among the growing markets of the United States during the next two decades, said Michael Bellaman, CEO of Lend Lease Retail and Communities, the Chicago-based parent of Walker’s “communities” division.
Lend Lease touts its energy-efficient and urban-centric “vision” for its communities, with Bellaman pointedly making a case for a multitude of price points for its housing stock and an ethnically diverse customer base as the bedrock of those communities’ attractiveness to the homebuyer of the future.
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