LOS ANGELES — Young Geo Angulo hopped up and down, a few short steps from temptation.
A few hours before Broncos-Chargers kicked off on Sept. 21, the Angulos trekked out early, wanting to poke around SoFi Stadium’s surrounding Hollywood Park district for the first time. They were Broncos fans long transplanted to Los Angeles. They took pictures, in orange Denver jerseys, in front of the massive six-acre lake that surrounds SoFi. Geo beamed ear-to-ear.
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Want to jump in the water? Geo was asked.
“Yeah!” Geo responded, twisting with excitement.
Fellow Broncos fan Phu Nguyen, 44, came early, too. He’d paid $150 for parking to experience SoFi and Hollywood Park for the first time. His eyes popped at the price. But he said he was drawn to the surrounding environment.
“If Denver does something similar to this and turns it into a multi-use stadium,” Nguyen said, “they’ll attract so much, in terms of concerts and everything else. It’ll be great for the city.
“It’s something that the city can be proud of, especially for the downtown area.”
Broncos brass has spent parts of the last three years touring mixed-use stadium districts across the country in their early quest to construct the jewel of the Walton-Penner Ownership Era. Hollywood Park stands as the most ambitious of all of those touchpoints: a 300-acre sprawl in Inglewood, Calif., that KSE owner Stan Kroenke originally envisioned as the “world’s greatest sports entertainment district,” KSE’s president Kevin Demoff told The Denver Post. It is an experience, as Nguyen put it, planned to check off every box of mixed-use design: supporting entertainment venues, retail, hotels and apartments.
The scope of the Broncos’ planned stadium site . Broncos owner Greg Penner told The Post in September that the organization hasn’t seen a stadium development that they want to exactly replicate. Their goal is to build something “unique to this market.”
“I think itap up to them to decide whether they’re trying to make a full neighborhood around it, or whether they’re just trying to support the stadium itself,” said longtime urban designer Ryan Meeks , the chair of Denver’s Downtown Design Advisory Board.
The answer to that question will shape the game-day experience at the Broncos’ next home and the future of the city itself. The Walton-Penner ownership group could aim to construct a smaller version of the Hollywood Park model. It’s more likely, though, that the Broncos will incorporate aspects of that modern Hollywood Park design into a development that blends with the neighborhoods around it — and with the larger mixed-use transformation of Denver, as KSE’s Ball Arena and River Mile redevelopment sits roughly a mile north.
“Two great ownership groups are going to figure out not only what’s best for their venues, but what’s best for their districts,” Demoff told The Post.
“And I’m certain there’s room for the creativity and growth in Denver for all these projects, in a meaningful way.”
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In late August, the city of Lone Tree pushed its chips in and pitched a planned Lone Tree City Center development as an ideal stadium site for the Broncos.
In a statement shared with The Post, Mayor Marissa Harmon provided the first hint at the Broncos’ mixed-use vision: A “destination integrated with transit, walkable streets, and first‑class mobility.”
That current site in Lone Tree, however, is a 440-acre stretch of blank canvas surrounded by a few suburbs and freeways. The Broncos picked Burnham over Lone Tree or Aurora, Penner told The Post in September, because it would’ve been harder to “go buy some farmland out in the middle of nowhere” and start from scratch.
Penner said there are still some buildings around the Burnham site that could be incorporated into the organization’s final design. And the Broncos’ location pick is a major clue to what kind of development they envision. Brad Segal, president of Denver real-estate planning firm P.U.M.A., told The Post this summer that an outside-of-city-center location would be more beneficial for the Broncos if they intended to construct an entire community development like Hollywood Park.
“I would argue that the Burnham Yard location, being an urban center-city location, they can maximize the value of the revenue of the joint development,” Segal said. “Because they’re going to be able to — it also has transit access, it has all sorts of qualities that would support higher-density, more intense development.”
The Broncos envision a mix of “housing, office, retail and entertainment” at Burnham Yard, Penner told The Post. There’s no sequential formula to mixed-use success, said Cary Hirschstein , who’s worked on numerous stadium-anchored projects across the country. But there’s a growing trend of districts building multi-family housing first to establish a regular presence on the site, Hirschstein said.
“It’s usually one of the uses that excels and helps drive land value,” said Hirschstein, an advisor at real-estate consultant HR&A Advisors. “And because of that demand, you can really start to build out a district. Retail is hard to be the first, right?”
At Hollywood Park, KSE prioritized constructing SoFi Stadium before building out other features. Nothing else matters if “you don’t get the stadium right,” Demoff told The Post.
Five years after SoFi opened in September 2020, the majority of the retail space on Hollywood Park’s north end remains vacant, as the outbreak of COVID-19 a few years ago slowed plans to integrate businesses. The 300-room . But and almost fully leased.
KSE has also poured significant investment into entertainment venues around Hollywood Park, from the movie-theater complex Cinepolis to the immersive sports bar Cosm and YouTube Theater. There’s not enough room for such extravagance at Burnham. But Hirschstein noted there’s a trend of mixed-use districts incorporating “secondary anchors” — additional entertainment venues beyond the stadium — to increase foot traffic outside of game days.
“How could people go have dinner, or go to a movie, and truly enjoy it as if it was part of Hollywood Park, and not just near the stadium?” Demoff said. “How do you make it a great environment for people to live in, so the apartments lease up quickly?”
Here’s where KSE’s presence in Denver could come into play. In August, KSE , which incorporates an 89-foot-tall performance venue alongside a hotel and two apartment complexes next to Ball Arena. The Broncos constructing an additional venue at Burnham would mean four potential concert sites in a roughly 1.5-mile radius.
“They’re all very different sizes, scopes and visions, and I think thatap where they can all have interplay, coordination,” Demoff said of Burnham, Ball Arena and a future planned NWSL stadium down at Santa Fe Yards.
“But I think everybody’s going to want to make sure that their site does whatap best for their teams. As they should.”
There’s also potential for cohesion between KSE and the Walton-Penner group’s visions. KSE has expressed plans for the Ball Arena redevelopment, submitted to the city, which includes a “Wynkoop Crossing” bridge that will connect their district to LoDo across Speer Boulevard. The plan also proposes to to connect the Auraria campus to the south. And it wouldn’t be complicated for the Broncos to improve streets and sidewalks from Burnham to Auraria and increase walkability, as Meeks pointed out.
“Itap going to be really cool to see if the Auraria campus starts to feel like — ‘Hey, you could walk through downtown through the Auraria campus to the Broncos’ stadium,'” Meeks said.
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Yolanda Davidson had little trouble rattling off a laundry list of praises for SoFi during a mid-September conversation with The Post. It’s amazing. It’s beautiful.
In a few years, the Inglewood resident has faith the ultimate vision for Hollywood Park will come to fruition.
For the moment, however, its unfinished development has changed life for Inglewood lifers. It’s brought years of construction, Davidson said, and abandoned buildings and congested parking. At times, Lia Jones would go to open up her Champ City Bar & Lounge a few blocks to the south and find trailers of dirt parked out front. And Jones’ regular business trickled away enough, she told The Post, that she was hardly able to afford her mortgage.
“They need to have something where — people in Lincoln Park area can get 10% off parking or 10% off concessions, or just something where they get something back for what they give,” said Davidson, speaking of La Alma Lincoln Park residents in Denver.
“And they’re going to give a lot.”
The overall scope of La Alma Lincoln Park is much smaller than the sprawl of Inglewood. But there are similarities. Both are historic communities with a wealth of multi-generational families, and both are wary of rising costs and further displacement that could come as a result of nearby stadiums. Members of the Community Benefits Agreement committee for the Ball Arena and River Mile redevelopments emphasized they didn’t want the area to be “an island that wasn’t connected to the fabric of the city,” as committee member Simon Tafoya put it.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has told The Post he hoped discussions with the Broncos would lead to affordable-housing guarantees similar to Ball Arena’s CBA. And the Broncos have given every public indication that their plan for a mixed-use district will be influenced by community conversations.
“We’ll work closely with them,” Penner told The Post in September, “to come up with something that works for all those neighborhoods and the surrounding areas.”
In the years since arriving in Denver, the Broncos’ new ownership has appeared to appeal to the pulse of the city in new ventures. The team’s new practice facility, after all, is being specifically constructed with a mind to using materials from Colorado-based manufacturers.
This was a concept important to Geo’s father, Jeremy Angulo, a Broncos fan walking through Hollywood Park that Sunday in mid-September, an area that doesn’t especially scream with color or market itself as the home of the Rams or Chargers.
“I want people to know when you’re there, like – ‘I’m in Denver, I’m at a Broncos game,'” Angulo said. “We know that that team ties Denver together.”
Broncos beat writer Parker Gabriel contributed to this report.
