The verbal fireworks didn’t begin until the second hour of a meeting that started with a peace pipe being passed around.
Burnham Yard sits on land once inhabited by the Ute and Cheyenne tribes, and so one member of the 26 various constituents on the city’s Small Area Plan community advisory committee offered a prayer to an Indigenous mother and the stars at a Wednesday night gathering.
They prayed for peace in the La Alma Lincoln Park community. And they prayed for peace, too, in this meeting.
After long enough, though, discussion grew contentious around the future of Eighth Avenue, a thoroughfare that stretches east from Sun Valley all the way to Montclair, into the Broncos’ plans for a new stadium district at Burnham Yard. In late March, the Broncos submitted their initial infrastructure master plan on the Burnham redevelopment to the city and Eighth Avenue serves as a primary artery for flow in and out of the district.
A section of the infrastructure master plan proposes both a curved and expanded three-lane Eighth Avenue. For nearly 30 minutes Wednesday night, the Small Area Plan community advisory committee — comprised of local community members and representatives from the Broncos, RTD and the Colorado Department of Transportation alike — deliberated on the influx and outflow of traffic that could bring to the historic La Alma Lincoln Park neighborhood.
Some were supportive. Helen Giron-Mushfiq, of the La Alma Neighborhood Association, told The Post the next day that the expansion of Eighth Avenue would be the best way to “get people out of the area” on game days.
Others were not.
“It’s like,” one neighborhood-association member chimed in, “how would you like your displacement to look?”
Amid the push-and-pull, the city of Denver and the Broncos continue to march toward a Small Area Plan for the organization’s new mixed-use stadium district, which the city — according to slides presented to advisory-committee members Wednesday — expects to put in front of the City Council late this year .
“The initial submission of our Infrastructure Master Plan in March represents an early step in a collaborative, ongoing process with the city and community,” Broncos chief communications officer Patrick Smyth told The Post. “As we shape this vision at Burnham Yard together, the plan will continue to evolve to best integrate with the surrounding neighborhoods and reflect community needs.”
The initial submission shows the most detailed look yet at the organization’s plans for the new stadium district at Burnham, from a proposed layout of several parking structures to a breakdown of the district’s different areas.
A ‘tailgate park,’ and more information on district features
At an initial community meeting hosted by the Broncos in February, plan architect Sasaki confirmed that the total size of the stadium district at Burnham had expanded to 150 acres. Two months later, the infrastructure master plan now offers a glimpse of what’ll actually lie inside.
The stadium itself will take up just 30 to 35 of those acres, according to the plan. The rest will be a combination of mixed-use development (50 to 60 acres), public and private streets (25 to 30 acres), and “open space” (15 to 20 acres) — including a planned “neighborhood park” in a cluster of buildings just west of La Alma Lincoln Park and a “linear park” to the immediate southwest of West Sixth Ave and Osage Street. A previously outlined “tailgate area” has now been labeled a “tailgate park,” located directly south of the stadium and Eighth Avenue.
The plan, too, describes this Burnham development as divided into “five distinct development zones.” One of them — sitting to the east of a new main north-to-south thoroughfare next to the stadium dubbed “Broncos Way” — is an “Entertainment Zone,” likely to encapsulate anything from a potential new concert venue to shopping outlets, restaurants, a hotel and more.
“The Entertainment Zone serves as a high-energy destination with a dense, intimate urban form and curated retail experiences,” the plan reads.
Another area, the “North Zone,” is described as “residential in focus” and “designed to complement La Alma Lincoln Park.” The Broncos have discussed building a hotel inside the district in conversations with community constituents, and connected apartment complexes have become a wider staple of modern mixed-use stadium districts.
From a local planning and economic perspective, The Post sent the Broncos’ infrastructure master plan to Brad Segal, the director of the Denver-based real estate and planning firm . Segal said he was “particularly struck” by the Broncos’ vision to preserve and renovate existing historical aspects of the railyard — such as an abandoned locomotive shop, which team officials have discussed internally developing into a food hall.
Segal, though, noted one immediate concern: the placement of that “Entertainment Zone” directly adjacent to the La Alma Lincoln Park neighborhood, a working-class, majority-Latino community that experienced widespread displacement in the 1970s with the construction of the Auraria campus. Those “scars run deep,” as Segal said — a fact clear in ongoing Small Area Plan committee discussions, as community members like Giron-Mushfiq simply aren’t comfortable with any kind of large-scale development so close to a historic neighborhood.
“We don’t trust ’em,” Giron-Mushfiq said. “We’ll put it lightly.”
There aren’t many places the Broncos could reposition that district without bumping up against the neighborhood. And theoretically, that placement would allow La Alma residents to enjoy such amenities, as Segal pointed. The draw, too, could attract more foot traffic to businesses along the Art District on Santa Fe.
“But, if it results in pushing up housing costs, rental rates, property values – thatap going to force many people to leave who maybe don’t want to leave because of the economic pressure,” Segal said. “And acknowledging the history of the neighborhood and what it has already endured 50 to 60 years ago — I would say residents would be justified in fearing those types of pressures and changes moving forward.”
Parking and transit information, with Eighth Avenue the key
In the plan’s executive summary, the Broncos describe the light rail station at 10th and Osage as “the district’s heart” and later refer to it as “anchoring a transit-oriented framework.”
That would hinge on the district’s ability to attract foot traffic through RTD lines, as RTD has seen a slight bump in ridership in recent months, according to the to the previous year. Community members and nearby residents, though, are heavily concerned about the impact of gameday and non-gameday traffic in the area — including those who have reviewed the Broncos’ most recent plan.
“There’s some things that I like about it,” Giron-Mushfiq said, who’s on the Small Area Plan advisory committee. “But the biggest problem is they haven’t really addressed the parking.”
They do, in some sense. The plan envisions 5,000 to 7,500 available parking spaces on gamedays, with a mixture of seven different below-grade, above-ground and surface parking lots. On gameday, too, the plan anticipates a majority of traffic flow both entering the district from Eighth Avenue to the west and from Sixth Avenue to the south.
The Broncos, however, are proposing a slew of significant road changes with those traffic patterns: realigning West Eighth Avenue further south, removing some existing infrastructure from West Sixth Avenue, and proposing future on and off-ramps that align with planned $50 million repairs — — to the Sixth Avenue viaduct.
“For Eighth Avenue, the background traffic, the additional traffic from the development and then the complexity of the roadway — traveling over rail lines like light rail, whether it remains grade separated — there’s a huge amount of complexity there and I couldn’t guess how it will turn out,” Stephen Wilson, a senior development project administrator with the city, told The Post. “Some of them, I have a pretty good idea. I’ve done this long enough where I have a pretty good sense of how it will turn out.
“I can’t tell how Eighth is going to turn out yet.”
It is likely, though, to be one of the most high-profile infrastructure projects around the stadium and perhaps one of the most costly. The stadium itself is set to be fully paid for by the Walton-Penner Group. Infrastructure to construct roads and sidewalks around the district, however, will be funded by a combination of state and city funding, as Mayor Mike Johnston told The Post in September.
“I see a big dollar bill right next to, ‘How do we improve infrastructure for egress?’” said Geoffrey Propheter, a professor at the CU Denver School of Public Affairs .
Propheter also noted that infrastructure will likely be funded through the potential implementation of a tax-increment financing district, a form of public subsidy that would borrow against expected future growth in tax revenue within the Broncos’ stadium district and apply that revenue to infrastructure costs on the front end. The Denver Urban Renewal Authority is conducting a study of Burnham Yard to determine whether the area is “blighted” under Colorado state law, which would set in motion the TIF process.
Phases of implementation
So what’s next? A three-phase approach to development at Burnham, according to the plan. And a three-step approach inside of that first phase.
“The plan follows the typical blueprint, which is stadium first, non-stadium second,” Propheter said.
The Broncos, though, do intend to address key elements of the surrounding stadium district while constructing the stadium itself, still targeting a 2031 opening. Phase 1A, the plan details, will involve environmental cleanup and roadway and transit construction. Phase 1B will involve the construction of parking facilities. Phase 1C, meanwhile, will see the Broncos begin construction on their “Entertainment Zone.”
Stephen Wilson called the Broncos’ plan to first build out infrastructure and then supporting facilities “absolutely logical.” The plan defines Phases 2 and 3 as more general construction in northern and southern parts of the district — likely involving residential properties — which Wilson said would be largely market-driven.
“So if next year, multifamily housing, financing is great and demand is great, if employment and people’s ability to pay for rental places is great … the conditions could change, and then some of that could come online a lot faster,” Wilson said. “Or interest rates could remain high, construction costs could remain high, and it might take more time.”
Regardless of how exactly the phases are developed, there are a broad set of processes, negotiations, discussions and decisions to be made in the coming months at various levels of government and among and between neighborhood groups and the Broncos.
“We’re definitely very concerned with the impacts and then the impression of the impacts and understanding the breadth of those and the magnitude of those and addressing concerns,” Wilson said. “Itap also balanced against city building, and when we look at overall citywide, we do need infill development overall. We do need additional housing. We’re supporting housing and affordability as a city in all the ways we can, but there are also macroscopic market factors that we’re trying to work with, too.
“Thatap the fun part about city building. Thatap why I love doing this job is itap hard to come up with a good city that works for everybody. Thatap certainly the goal.”
