The naked man, in retrospect, was the least of Sean Herman’s worries.
In December 2023, Herman’s Osage Studios LLC bought a parcel of land at 1305 North Osage St. for $2.1 million. Herman, a designer, saw an opportunity to rehabilitate a couple of junk-car-storing warehouses into an interactive attraction at the northern tip of the abandoned Burnham Yard railyard. The dream for the site — bringing an immersive tiki lounge to Denver — was strong enough to shrug off a couple of purchase inquiries by legal representatives connected to the Denver Broncos, in the midst of a massive land grab just down the street. But actually designing such physical plans in a dilapidated area, Herman said, has been “an absolute horrorfest” of legal issues and property damage.
If he could go back, Herman would tell his former self to abandon ship rather than endure the Burnham mess again.“There were days where I was like, ‘I’ve made a huge mistake,'” Herman said.
The Broncos have now become the most visible entrepreneur to identify Burnham Yard as a ripe pocket for redevelopment, continuing to march forward with the railyard as their preferred site for a new stadium district in Denver. Beyond a finalized agreement to buy the railyard itself, property records compiled by The Denver Post show the Broncos have been tied to at least $186 million in land purchases in the surrounding area, with the expressed goal to build out a mixed-use district around a new stadium. For now, unlike Herman and its neighbors, the organization does not need to concern itself with potential break-ins.
The Broncos’ path to a successful stadium-anchored development at Burnham, though, is fraught with larger-scale hurdles surrounding their planned stadium opening in 2031 — stemming directly from the same reasons they keyed in on the site in the first place.
“I’m so skeptical,” Herman said, “that they’re going to pull it off in time.”
A simple building remodel took Herman a year and a half due to city processes. People have broken into his warehouses on multiple occasions, and stripped the copper wire from his air-conditioning units. He has bled money on damage control. And on one occasion, he walked into his primary building at North Osage to find his window shattered and a man without any clothes standing in the middle of the room.
Herman has stuck it out, one of several owners who have poured money into new development around the railyard in recent years. Directly east of Burnham, The Refractory — — has seen interest from potential businesses ranging from a jiu jitsu gym to an indoor golf facility, broker Russell Gruber said. Directly adjacent to Herman’s property, Memphis Orion and Adam Lerner are leading a $27 million development of a wellness center dubbed Coba Bathhouse; they saw a “giant wave” in the area, Orion said , and felt they could surf it. And the Broncos are the latest to hop on, because of such tantalizing development potential.
The modern era of stadium construction has popularized the “stadium district,” a mini-neighborhood that relies on mixed-use offerings around the stadium itself to generate revenue outside of gamedays. The Broncos are buying up over 150 acres around Burnham to build out that concept in Denver, similar to Kroenke Sports & Entertainment’s plans at Ball Arena. But such a large-scale development in an area primarily zoned for industrial use has inevitably entangled the Broncos in a web of lengthy city processes, community-benefits-agreement negotiations with the recently established Burnham Yard Community Action coalition, and soon-to-be-costly negotiations with private landowners and the public utility, Denver Water, that have yet to be resolved.
And that’s just the first wave, as both the organization and the city will need an immaculately phased development at Burnham to justify the investment there.
“While our current focus is on the community-benefits-agreement process, the long-term goal is for Burnham Yard to contribute to a connected, mixed-use community to the La Alma Lincoln Park and Baker neighborhoods,” Broncos president Damani Leech told The Post. “In terms of selecting the Burnham Yard site, we think it’s important for the Broncos to remain in Denver.
“Though a project of this scope on a former railyard presents some challenges, it aligns with our overall vision to create Denver’s next great neighborhood, the future home of the Denver Broncos and a year-round destination that delivers meaningful impact for the city.”
Why the Broncos ‘have to make the mixed-use district work’
Twenty miles south, a 440-acre expanse of open dirt spills out below the intersection of East Lincoln Avenue and Interstate 25 in Lone Tree, the site that was — and could still be — the Broncos’ Plan B.
Over the last two years, the organization has done its due diligence on the Lone Tree City Center, a massive planned mixed-use sprawl that Douglas County has openly campaigned for as a possible home for the Broncos.
Lone Tree has already approved a sub-area plan for the Lone Tree City Center, and the area is zoned for large mixed-use development. The city “prides itself on being business-friendly,” Mayor Melissa Harmon told The Post, and aims to provide “clear expectations, timely feedback and response, and always a predictable permitting process.” And the alignment with the Broncos — or any other catalyst developer — is obvious: the city would make sure the integration was as smooth as possible, Harmon pointed.
“They have our phone number, and we know — I joked with Damani (Leech), I said, ‘You still say preferred, you know,'” Harmon said, referring to the Broncos’ current positioning at Burnham.
“But in all honesty, of course, we always knew that Denver and Burnham Yards was their preferred and No. 1 site for many reasons,” she continued, “and it was really such an honor to be able to have the conversations, but also really get national attention for this piece of property.”
To Harmon’s point, the Walton-Penner ownership group selected Burnham over Lone Tree or Aurora specifically to keep the franchise in Denver. And the specific location makes sense, as several real estate and development experts told The Post, because of the immediate proximity to higher-population-density neighborhoods around Denver that can therefore attract tenants and foot traffic alike.
“Obviously, like, the Broncos chose to be here instead of going to some suburban location,” said Ryan Meeks, founder of Denver-based Bosk Urban Design. “And so … they have to make the mixed-use district work, right?”
The appeal of building a stadium district at the lies in built-in historical and industrial aesthetics that the Broncos have highlighted since their very first Large Development Review pre-submission in November 2025. The organization has repeatedly cited therefurbishment of the site’s locomotive shop as a key component of its initial design plans. In that vein, the Broncos are the largest piece of a greater transformation around Burnham; a slew of developers have bought warehouses to repurpose for non-industrial uses in recent years, commercial broker Gruber told The Post.
“Itap a more challenging site, in some ways,” Broncos owner Greg Penner told The Post in September. “But we think it creates an opportunity to create something special.”
Those challenges, though, are substantial in the short term. Penner said in late March that the Broncos want to have “all of (their) ducks lined up” before officially shedding the preferred-site label for a Burnham development.
That calls for progress on a legally binding community-benefits agreement with the recently finalized Burnham Yard Community Action coalition, for one. That calls for progress on negotiations with Denver Water around the utility’s relocation, which has been further complicated by community pushback against the utility’s plans for a potential facility on Lot M of the existing Empower Field stadium site.
And that calls for progress toward a resolution with SRM Concrete, which owns a large concrete plant smack-dab in the middle of the Broncos’ stadium district plans.
Most important of all are the dominoes that’ll fall once the city’s Department of Community Planning and Development completes a small-area plan for the site, which a source with knowledge of the process said should be finalized late in 2026 or early in 2027.
The Denver Urban Renewal Authority will only begin work on an urban-renewal plan at Burnham once that small-area plan is finished, DURA Interim Executive Director Bill Pruter told The Post. That urban-renewal plan will determinewhethertax-increment financing is approved for the Burnham development, which Pruter said he expects the Broncos will seek.
Penner and Denver’s brass have made clear the stadium itself won’t introduce any new taxes. But if the larger 150-acre site is approved for a TIF district by Denver’s City Council, the infrastructure around the stadium can be paid for in some capacity by borrowing against future growth in property taxes within that district — a form of tax break.
Essentially, the Broncos can wind up using the potential for a larger-scale stadium district at Burnham to actually pay for the stadium itself.
“This is incredibly typical in stadium ancillary development,” said Geoffrey Propheter, a . “You build the stadium first, and then all the non-stadium stuff that you’re actually using to try to convince lawmakers to support this — all of this comes in years 10, 20, 30. And they all come with a promise.”
“The track record for delivering on these promises by teams in development,” Propheter said later, “is shaky. And thatap being super generous.”
Why the phasing and selection of district features matter
Fortunately for Denver, the Walton-Penner Group has built a considerable track record of delivering on its promises.
Look to Denver, for one, where Broncos owners Penner and Carrie Walton Penner have revitalized the NFL franchise and just invested significant capital into the Colorado Rockies. And look across the country to Bentonville, Arkansas, where has been transformed into a mini-metropolis at the Walton family’s investment.
Nelson Worldwide senior vice president Lamar Wakefield, an expert in mixed-use development who helped design The Battery stadium district in Atlanta, told The Post that he’s working on a current development in Bentonville for the Waltons.
“They really want to see a wide range of housing options,” Wakefield said. “And I was really pleased to hear that. They understand that if you can make it attainable, but the whole neighborhood itself has all these wide ranges — maybe that single mom with three kids raising them in that environment is a little bit different … so they embrace that. I was very impressed.”
The Broncos will likely focus, in the initial phase, on the stadium and surrounding infrastructure before a 2031 opening at Burnham, multiple experts in stadium-district development told The Post. Slow-playing other aspects of the district for too long, though, would do a “huge disservice,” nearby warehouse owner John Victor said, to both community and city investment in the development. And the Broncos will face the challenge of establishing a center of gravity where there isn’t one at Burnham — different from KSE’s task of developing a district around the nearby Ball Arena.
“That’s the secret sauce there,” said Matt Mahoney, KSE’s senior vice president of development, “when we’re talking about neighborhoods that just do not exist. I mean, both these properties — our property is a surface parking lot. We’re fortunate to actually have an arena already built.
“The Broncos have a much tougher, steeper hill to climb. Because they want to create a neighborhood, but they also have to build a new stadium at the same time of establishing a sense of place there.”
The organization’s initial infrastructure master plan outlines that the Broncos would complete vertical construction of an “entertainment zone” in time for the stadium’s 2031 opening. The key there is what mix of mixed-use development (housing, office, retail, dining, hospitality) the Broncos will prioritize within that specific zone. Wakefield, who helped design The Battery Atlanta — a gold standard of mixed-use stadium development that the Broncos’ brass toured while identifying stadium-district ideas — emphasized the initial importance of establishing residential units to build an on-site customer base.
Any dreams about the district’s makeup, though, will be clouded by the current Denver market. Ortiz said building hotels would be an initial priority. But hotel-occupancy rates in metro Denver still haven’t rebounded to pre-COVID-19 levels, . RC Myles, a broker with Denver-based Pinnacle Real Estate Advisors, said he anticipates the Burnham district won’t prioritize much office development, as office vacancies in downtown Denver .
“There’s so many missing pieces to this,” said Carrie Makarewicz, chair of CU Denver’s urban and regional planning department. “I mean, they’re moving forward in the typical style of a private developer — you acquire low-cost land in a strategic location, you build the revenue generators first, you tap into as much public funding you can get … and then you work on the immediate surroundings for your project, but you don’t take into consideration the city and regional demand for retail, apartments and entertainment.
“Like, we’re cannibalizing all of our districts around the city.”
Demand for multi-family housing in downtown Denver has steadily ticked up, though, according to . And Myles pointed to Cherry Creek, which has dropped retail vacancy rates below 2%, as an example of a local destination for offices, families and businesses alike. Multiple real-estate experts noted to The Post that there aren’t currently many options for dining or support retail in the extended Burnham area — identifying a potential development focus for the Broncos.
“Colorado needs a big high five right now,” Gruber said. “And I think the Penners are helping do it.”
The Broncos, though, have yet to truly cement their investment in Burnham Yard, let alone a phased approach for an amorphous stadium district. And time is ticking, now a full nine months after their initial preferred-site announcement.
“If they can pull it off — I mean, dude, I guess money talks,” Herman said. “And they got plenty of that.”
