Planning for Large Scale Urban Infill: The Case Of The Stapleton Redevelopment
Creators: name: Palmberg, Britton
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2006
Subjects: Stapleton International Airport

description: Suburban expansion has continued largely unabated across the United States over the last 50 years in part because of the lack of available and relatively inexpensive properties in infill locations closer to the core of metropolitan areas. Often, for example, homebuilders seek large acreages of farmland on the outskirts of urban areas in order to deliver large numbers of homes quickly and efficiently to the market. Developers who would like to carry out projects on infill parcels often complain of problems with land assemblage, high land prices, and entitlement delays. Over the last several years, however, several disparate forces have created opportunities for significant, large scale infill projects in various locations around the country. As the Pentagon continued to consolidate and streamline operations domestically as a result of the end of the Cold War, the Base Realignment and Closure Commission ("BRAC") targeted dozens of military installations, many in or near large urban areas, for closure and conversion to civilian real estate uses. For example, during the 1990s the Defense Department closed the famous Presidio complex in San Francisco, and over the last few years developers have worked with local governments to create a mixed-use recreational, residential, and office complex, including the new headquarters of Lucasfilms (Fost). In Denver, the closure of Lowry Air Force Base in 1991 spurred an infill development of residential and commercial properties within five miles of Downtown Denver. During the last ten years, the diminishing influence of manufacturing in local economies in the U.S., coupled with increased demand for urban residential options such as lofts and condos, has spurred a significant market for redevelopment of "brownfield" and related industrial properties in urban areas nationwide. For example, officials in San Diego have converted an aging industrial area into the Padres' Petco Park baseball stadium and nearby residential and commercial developments. Atlanta officials have converted the 138 acre former home of Atlantic Steel north of downtown into Atlantic Station, a mixed use development including over 12 million square feet ("SF") of retail, office, and residential space. A few cities have converted or are considering converting older airport facilities in the heart of their urban areas to other uses as a result of new airport construction elsewhere. The City of Austin, Texas, has been working on plans for reuse of the Robert Mueller Municipal Airport as a mixed-use urban village for several years. The City of San Diego is considering relocating its current airport away from the increasingly revitalized downtown area and using the existing airport parcel to augment its central city redevelopment efforts. As cities, and private developers, continue to pursue and execute large scale infill developments, whether on brownfields, former military or airport facilities, or on relatively clean raw ground, the experience of Denver, Colorado in redeveloping the former Stapleton International Airport should prove instructive. This effort, which began following the movement of the city's airport operations to the new Denver International Airport on the Eastern Plains about twenty miles from Downtown Denver in 1995, continues to evolve. However, planning for the $4 billion Stapleton effort began over 15 years ago, and Denver's experience provides several lessons for large scale infill projects. This paper will examine the progress of the Stapleton development to date, including its successes and areas for improvement. How did Denver plan for the redevelopment of the airport site? How was the development program for Stapleton structured, and how was the private sector brought into the picture? What kinds of incentives and financing arrangements did the city utilize to launch the development process? How have the retail, residential, and office components of the Stapleton project fared in the marketplace, and what lessons from the venture's performance in each of these sectors can developers of other infill projects use? In general, what have development professionals at Forest City, the project's master developer, learned from Stapleton that can apply to subsequent infill ventures? The paper will conclude with a set of general recommendations for future infill development projects, and in particular for larger scale projects such as base, airport, or brownfield conversions.