WHEAT RIDGE — When you get only one rail station in FasTracks’ 122-mile transit system, you had better make it count.
That’s what Wheat Ridge did last week when it made a zoning change that paves the way for a sizable multifamily housing development to go in next to the end-of-the-line station on the G-Line, which starts rolling in October. City manager Patrick Goff said it’s a rare chance to introduce a higher-density housing type — along with a more urban lifestyle — to the largely bedroom suburb west of Denver.
“This could be an opportunity to show that Wheat Ridge can take a step toward something more modern,” he said.
This city of 31,000 is just the latest metro area community in the path of the multibillion-dollar FasTracks project faced with trying to figure out how to make the most of development opportunities around a rail stop.
Denver last fall appointed its first transit-oriented development point person to oversee and influence land use decisions at the city’s many rail stations. Twenty miles away, Lone Tree has massive plans at not only its existing Lincoln Station light rail stop but for three additional stations that will be built over the next two years as part of the Regional Transportation District’s Southeast Rail Extension.
Former Lone Tree Mayor Jim Gunning has equated the opportunities near the stations as a “new Colorado gold rush.”
Goff recognizes the opportunity that awaits his city while at the same time acknowledging that it can do only so much in determining what happens at the Wheat Ridge & Ward station. The site — bounded by Ward Road, West 52nd Avenue, West 50th Place and Tabor Street — is already surrounded by homes, warehouses and light industrial operations that have been there for years.
“We are trying to shape the vision, but we’re also bounded by the market realities,” Goff said. “What we’re starting to realize is that not every station (in FasTracks) can be a blown-out town center-style station.”
That bustling, walkable, downtown streetscape, encompassed by the term “transit-oriented development,” is often what is pictured as the inevitable land use type sprouting up around transit stops. But Chris Nevitt, Denver’s TOD director, said of the 90 or so rail stations eventually destined for the FasTracks system, not all can be the idealized ground-level boutique with compact studio apartments above.
“Development follows planning, and good planning is indispensable,” he said. “In a lot of peoples’ minds, if you build it, they will come. But you have to work hard to promote the development you want.”
That’s true whether it’s Wheat Ridge’s attempt to do something on the G-Line or the various approaches Denver has taken to development along multiple rail lines.
Even at the airport train’s 61st & Peña stop, where land is plentiful and largely undeveloped, Nevitt said it took the better part of a decade to lure the U.S. headquarters of Panasonic Enterprise Solutions Co. to the site. The 112,000-square-foot facility, which is nearly complete, will “create the center of gravity” for other transit-oriented development around the station.
That more community-conscious approach to developing a site Nevitt characterized as a “blank slate” was deliberate, even if it was not as easy as simply plunking down a massive office park on prairie land a few miles south of Denver International Airport.
But only time will tell whether the 61st & Peña station proves to be a successful transit-centered community, Nevitt said. After all, it is located 15 miles from downtown Denver.
“People like to be where people are doing stuff,” he said.
Ken Schroeppel, an assistant professor with the University of Colorado’s College of Architecture and Planning, said rail station development opportunities generally fall into three tiers: shovel-ready, midrange launch and long-term prospects. For those with a longer time horizon, like Wheat Ridge, he said it’s important that city planners refrain from being too prescriptive with their blueprints.
“Good TOD plans need to be flexible,” he said. “The market 10, 15, 20 years from now is certainly going to be different.”
Wheat Ridge didn’t just come to the topic in the last couple of years, Goff said. The city started planning for the rail stop a decade ago when it adopted its Northwest Subarea Plan. Three years later, voters in the city passed a measure exempting the area around the future rail station from the city’s height and density restrictions.
In 2010, a new mixed-use zone district was adopted to encourage higher-density developments, and a specific transit-oriented development zoning category was created to allow “densities that support transit ridership and encourage land uses and buildings that enhance connections to transit,” according to a city document.
“We knew the train was coming,” Goff said.
Wheat Ridge recently hired a consultant to help identify the steps it needs to take to “catalyze TOD development” at the station while voters this fall will decide whether to pass a sales tax increase that will pump $12 million into street construction and a pedestrian bridge at the site.
What that attention and investment ultimately turns out to look like is not clear to Rich Majors, an owner and partner with Denver-based HRE Development LLC. The firm just got Wheat Ridge to change the zoning on a vacant 7.5-acre parcel at the southwest corner of West 52nd Avenue and Tabor Street — known as the Hance Ranch — so HRE can move ahead with a midpriced project featuring 230 apartments and 80 townhomes.
Majors expects other parcels — especially the 15-acre site along Ward Road where the Jolly Rancher candy factory used to sit — to take off once the train goes operational this fall. But he’s not convinced it will ever look like some of Denver’s more aggressive transit-oriented development locations.
“The coffee shop and bar at every station — it just doesn’t work,” Majors said.
Wheat Ridge may find itself ahead of other communities in terms of planning development around its station. Littleton is just getting around to creating a master plan for its Mineral and Downtown Littleton light rail stations, built in 2000, with a community open house on the Mineral plan scheduled for later this month.
In the case of neighboring Englewood, the city is revisiting land-use decisions it made around its light rail stops 16 years ago in an attempt to bolster economic opportunities along the southwest rail corridor.
Meanwhile, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock told a Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce luncheon last week that the city is working on plans to invest in private condo developments near three as-of-yet unnamed rail stations.
Schroeppel, the CU professor, said all the talk about transit-oriented development, regardless of what form it ultimately takes, is a welcome shift from the automobile-centered planning that dominated land use discussions a generation ago.
“It’s this long-term land use issue that is the hidden gem behind FasTracks,” he said.
