Belmar Sold to Starwood Capital Group

Well, it's finally a done deal. Belmar has been sold Starwood Capital Group.

As I reported earlier, the Southern Utes, faced with a downturn in gas revenue, have been looking to raise cash by selling Belmar. It's finally happened. Interestingly. Continuum Partners, the design firm that has been the driving force behind Belmar since its inception, has also announced they will sell their minority share of the downtown Lakewood development. But what do we know about Starwood Capital?

The Denver Business Journal is reporting that Starwood's interest in Belmar is focused on expanding retail, which reflects the strong economic recovery currently underway in Colorado. It wasn't that many years ago that I heard people say Belmar (and indeed the entire metro area) was overbuilt in terms of retail, but the population of the front range is expected to boom over the next decade, and downtown Lakewood is well positioned to capture its share of that growth. The Denver Post, meanwhile, quotes Lakewood's deputy city manager as saying that only 50% of Belmar's residential and 45% of its commercial development is complete. (Does that 50% include the large Trifecta building, which is almost but not quite finished? I don't know.) Starwood has a history of buying underdeveloped properties, adding value, and then selling them for a healthy profit. Taken together, this suggests Starwood sees Belmar as having lots of room to grow.

Starwood has been involved with development in Denver before, including around the revamped and bustling Union Station. But Starwood is a huge, huge investment firm. They're involved with everything. The firm owns property worldwide, including resorts in Spain, office buildings in Florida, and hotels in London. Belmar was a big deal for the Southern Utes and Continuum. For Starwood, a big deal was its 2005 acquisition of Group Taittinger for $3.2 billion. In a portfolio like that, will Belmar be just another measly $250 million property?

The Weakest Link

If there's a weak link in the effort to make an urban, walkable neighborhood out of central Lakewood, it's the Belmar Best Buy.

The site violates all sorts of new urbanist principles. Instead of defining the corner of Alameda and Wadsworth, the Best Buy sits back behind a massive parking lot. It presents a blank wall to the tree-lined sidewalk on W. Alaska Dr. The building has no windows. The list goes on.

Continuum allowed it during the darkest days of the recession, presumably under the assumption that bad development was better than no development.

Alas, this is not so, at least not for anyone who wants to see good urban planning in downtown Lakewood. The only bright spot is that there's plenty of talk in the financial world of Best Buy going belly up. Perhaps then this terrible building and its oversized parking lot can be repurposed by a retailer interested in something other than rehashing the greatest hits of 90's strip mall suburbia.

Developer Requests Increased Density at Belmar

The City of Lakewood has posted notes from the Villa Italia O.D.P. Modification meeting last April 20th. Continuum Partners (the developer of Belmar) has requested an increase in residential and commercial densities on the Belmar's as yet undeveloped parcels.

The notes are here, and go to some length to explain that the city does not expect the new higher densities to ever be fully built out. Instead, it was explained that the change is merely to allow individual property owners maximum flexibility.

Personally, my fear when I first heard about the rezoning request was that Continuum might be seeking to reduce density because of lowered market demand. I moved to Belmar with the hope that it would someday truly grow into a downtown Lakewood, and density is a prerequisite for that.