Nearly four years after a developer put it under contract, key votes loom for the Rock Drill property in RiNo and the half-billion-dollar plan to turn it into a mixed-use project.
On Sept. 15, the City Council will weigh in on a rezoning and development agreement for the largely unused 6.7-acre industrial site along 39th Avenue, as well as up to $39 million in tax-increment financing.
“It’s exciting to see it finally culminate,” said Eric Buchanan, CEO of OliverBuchananGroup.
Buchanan’s Denver-based firm has been pursuing the project since late 2021, when it reached a deal with Byron Weiss, the property’s current owner.
The site between Franklin and Williams streets, a short walk from RTD’s 38th and Blake station, was originally home to pneumatic drills producer Denver Rock Drill Manufacturing Co. Weiss purchased the site in the early 1990s for his business selling warehouse equipment, which he relocated to the Montbello neighborhood more than a decade ago.
As a result, the mishmash of industrial buildings have been used only for storage in recent years. In 2022, after OBG went under contract, Weiss told BusinessDen he’d had five different deals to sell the property fall apart over the previous seven years.
“It’s such a unique and unusual site,” Weiss said at the time. “It lends itself to something other than a storage warehouse. We wouldn’t want to see the site scraped.”
OBG intends to demolish much of the western portion of the site in order to erect new structures.
“The eastern portion of the site is where the historic preservation and adaptive reuse is really going to be focused,” Denver Urban Renewal Authority Executive Director Tracy Huggins said at a City Council committee meeting last week.
The general plan, which could change, calls for 700 to 800 residential units in new buildings as tall as 22 stories on the west side of the property. Under an agreement with the city, 10% must be reserved for those earning a maximum of 50% of the area median income.
A hotel with 150 to 220 rooms is eyed for the northeast corner. The new structures would have retail space on the ground floor, as would a repurposed former foundry and boiler room.
On the southeast portion of the site, a large structure featuring a glass ceiling and distinctive sawtooth roofline would be preserved and renovated, with retail space at its edges — plans call for 100,000 to 150,000 square feet of retail across the project — and some 40,000 to 60,000 square feet of office space on the interior.
“The innate fabric of this site and, for lack of a better term, cool factor is already there,” Buchanan said.
Buchanan told BusinessDen his firm is “always looking to create unique, special places,” particularly ones where it can offer a mix of uses. Projects like that aren’t just attractive to future residents, he said, but also investors.
“Capital wants a story just like the customer,” he said.
On the retail front, Buchanan said he thinks retail and restaurant operations generally desire to be together, and that RiNo lacks places with big blocks of space.
“There’s pockets of really interesting retail … but not a critical mass, in our opinion,” he said.
One aim? A grocery store. While another local development team recently called it quits on their effort to lure a grocer to a project just blocks away, Buchanan said he’s very optimistic.
“We’re going to do everything in our power to bring a grocery store to the neighborhood,” he said.
Huggins, the DURA head, said OliverBuchananGroup approached DURA about the project in 2023. The agency, which aims to spur redevelopment of blighted properties in the city, sees Rock Drill as “an important but challenged site,” she said last week.
The tax-increment financing, or TIF, would allow OBG to be reimbursed for certain costs by the additional property and sales tax revenue the completed project creates.
The $39.1 million amounts to 6.9% of the total project cost, according to city documents. That imputes a total cost of $566 million. That doesn’t include a separate property across Williams Street, where OBG plans to build another 362 units.
Assuming everything passes on Sept. 15, Buchanan said construction could start next year. The current plan is to do the entire project at once, not in phases.
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