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FOREST CITY STARTS THIRD PHASE OF STAPLETON PROJECT

As one urban project comes to a close, Forest City Enterprises remains busy on another. It has started work on a third retail center at Denver’s former Stapleton International Airport. And even when that is finished, the overall Stapleton project, going up on a site 10 miles east of the downtown, will be far from done.

In all, 13 million square feet of commercial space as well as housing for about 30,000 people will have gone up on the Stapleton site’s 4,700 acres by the scheduled completion date in 2016. Given that Denver long ago grew up around and beyond the airport, this is one of the biggest urban in-fill projects in the country.

The retail space now under way, called NorthField at Stapleton, is a mix of big-box and Main Street stores that will total just over 1 million square feet when that work is completed in the spring of 2006. Bass Pro Shops will anchor the center with its very first store in the state. Forest City is still negotiating with a cinema and some big-box chains that will join Bass Pro as anchors.

The firm loosely refers to this big-box and Main Street combination in one development as a “power town.”

“This is breaking new ground for us,” said Brian M. Jones, president of Forest City’s West Coast division.

The two existing retail centers at Stapleton are Quebec Square, a 740,000-square-foot power center with Home Depot, Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart as anchors; and East 29th Avenue Town Center, a 200,000-square-foot, King Sooper-anchored neighborhood center that also includes 34,000 square feet of offices and restaurants.

Much of the anticipated customer base for the three retail centers will be on-site, where in addition to the housing, Forest City plans to put up about 10 million square feet of offices. But NorthField will draw customers from beyond Stapleton too, the firm says. The Denver metro area’s northeast quadrant is underserved in retail terms, according to Colm Macken, senior vice president of the West Coast division. The Bass Pro will bring people from at least 100 miles away, he says.

Over the next 10 to 15 years, the developer plans to build an undetermined number of small neighborhood centers on the site, Jones says. That will bring NorthField’s total shopping space to just over 2 million square feet.

Meanwhile Forest City is busy elsewhere in the area. It has formed a partnership with the city of Westminster to build a 1.2 million-square-foot, mixed-use project along Interstate 25, just north of Denver.

— IR