Colorado-Real-Estate-Journal_325687

A s Colorado experiences the economic benefits of a rapidly expanding workforce boom due to an influx of tech, research, energy and other growing industries and businesses, the critical lack of affordable and workforce housing is becoming a real threat to our future. While there is broad awareness of the problem, there is little agreement on solutions that will quickly move the needle and provide the influx we need of both affordable and attainable workforce housing. With the best of intentions, increasingly socially conscious investors and municipalities are requiring higher and higher percentages of workforce or affordable housing on a project. The result in the current climate is that the projects simply won’t pencil out and can’t get financing, so these desperately needed units aren’t getting built. When it comes to addressing particularly the missing middle, there’s a better way to create more units faster. Elevate@Peña Station, a 218- unit apartment community MGL Partners recently sold for $61.25 million, offers a replicable model for addressing a specific workforce housing need, delivering units to the market faster and freeing up capital to be recycled and deployed into the next workforce housing project. n Directly addressing community housing needs. Located one light- rail stop from Denver International Airport, and the growing warehousing and fulfillment centers in the area, Peña Station is envisioned as a next-generation of community, with integrated smart technologies, sustainability and clean energy, and public transportation connectedness to serve the expanding industries in the metro Denver area. Originally, we intended to develop Elevate@Peña Station as affordable housing. We have extensive experience developing affordable housing projects across the state and saw Peña Station as an opportunity to ensure a broad variety of housing options for residents. However, in looking at the target market that would be served here, we saw that the target market – the local workforce – made more income than the Please see Missing Middle, Page 28 INSIDE We must all find a way to navigate 2023 differently than we did in years past Finance The spotlight is focused on what electrification means for affordable housing Affordable housing PAGES 31-40 During the pandemic, Denver converted 116 apartments, all former office buildings Adaptive reuse PAGE 25 February 2023 PAGE 12 Greg Glade Co-founder and principal, MGL Partners Creating a model for adding missing-middle multifamily units Approaches like those taken to develop Elevate@Peña Station are becoming increasingly common and accepted by institutional buyers.

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy