The W Line‘s first large-scale for-sale housing development is set to rise starting this summer near Sheridan Station in Lakewood.
West Line Village at West 10th Avenue and Depew Street will feature 134 row-homes in its initial phases, a huge infusion of new housing stock in Lakewood’s oldest neighborhood, Two Creeks, just west of Sheridan Boulevard.
Prices in the transit-oriented development will start in the high $200,000s and go up to the mid-$400,000s, developers DIRC Homes, Trailbreak Partners and T.O.D. Properties said. The average unit price will be in the mid-$300,000s,, with about 20 of the 134 row-homes listed below $300,000.
“We really wanted to create a large-scale community here of attainable housing,” said Paul Malone, president of DIRC Homes.
Construction is scheduled to get underway in June on the 5-acre site, which sits between West 10th and West 11th avenues south of the Sheridan light-rail platform. The project’s marketing website was scheduled to launch Friday, and the first units should be completed by the end of 2017.
Floor plans will range in size from 800 to 1,750 square feet, with every row-home street facing and almost all with their own small yard. Studio and one-, two- and three-bedroom layouts will be available.
“An early goal for us was trying to meet the demand in the marketplace for housing that folks can afford to buy and that is well located and provides accessibility into town and out of town,” said Doug Elenowitz, principal of Trailbreak Partners. “This is all market-rate housing. There is no deed restrictions or affordability component.”
In addition to easy access to the W Line, the site is also near the Dry Gulch/Lakewood Gulch trails, which connect into the regional South Platte River Trail system.
“The Two Creeks neighborhood is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Lakewood. It’s a terrific community but it’s hidden behind what’s happened on Colfax over the decades,” Elenowitz said. “We like it because it lives more urban than what most of Lakewood is, being further out and suburban in nature.”
And while Lakewood has seen new apartments pop up along the W Line in recent years, West Line Village is the city’s first major for-sale residential project to take advantage of the public light-rail investment, said Robert Smith, Lakewood’s economic development manager.
Denver and Golden, the other two cities that the W Line crosses, haven’t seen any large for-sale residential transit-oriented development projects since the rail line opened in 2013, either, officials said.
In Golden, new TOD so far has been limited to rental units. In Denver, there have been some for-sale builds near the Perry and Knox stations, but they’ve all been pretty small in scale — a couple of houses scraped to make way for six row-homes, for instance — a city spokeswoman said.
“It’s a really tremendous location, and the light rail made it a much more desirable location,” said Smith, the Lakewood official. “You’ve got the Colfax connection, the U.S. 6 connection and the world-class light rail right between there. We’re excited that Trailbreak is coming out of the ground.”
