Denver’s trendy River North neighborhood has nearly everything an urbanite might desire — condos, restaurants, brewpubs, arts and proximity to downtown.
But what about families with children who seek the same RiNo amenities and energy?
That’s the market targeted by father-and-son development team, Mickey and Kyle Zeppelin, with an $11 million rental project that caters to young parents and their kids.
The 48-unit Freight Residences at Zeppelin’s mixed-use Taxi campus will feature flexible living spaces and a 10,000-square-foot shared “front lawn” where children can play in view of their parents’ windows.
“We’ve been looking around the market and seeing thousands of new rental units, but all built pretty much for the same young professionals and empty nesters,” longtime Denver developer Mickey Zeppelin said.
“Nobody in the urban context has been addressing families,” he said. “There are people who want to remain in the city, but existing family housing is really overpriced or unavailable.”
Monthly rents at the Freight Residences will range from $1,200 for one-bedroom units to $2,400 for two- and three-bedroom apartments that include rooms easily convertible from nurseries to home offices.
Some units’ living rooms will have operable garage -style doors to provide direct, open-air access to the courtyard — a feature that has been popular with tenants in the nearby Taxi office space that was built at the former Yellow Cab dispatch center and fleet garage.
The project also includes an indoor children’s art room, as well as access to the Taxi complex’s exercise center and swimming pool made from steel shipping containers.
Construction of the new apartments begins next week and is scheduled for completion by spring.
The project fills an unmet need, said Cheri Meyn, owner of The Genesis Group, a metro Denver real estate consulting firm.
“The apartment market has been robust. The apartment developer, however, has been focused on the millennial and active-adult markets and largely ignoring the growing family sector,” she said. “This has left families who want to be urban or suburban dwellers priced out of for-sale housing and without adequate choice or supply of rental housing that features the floorplan and lifestyle amenities they are looking for.”
Renters at the Freight Residences will have access to a yet-undesignated number of slots at Taxi’s early-childhood education center.
Access to good public schools for RiNo residents is “an area that definitely needs work,” Zeppelin said.
The closest Denver Public Schools elementary school to the apartment site is Garden Place in the Globeville neighborhood, across the railyards from Taxi.
Zeppelin said proximity to schools will probably not be a big factor for prospective tenants because their children are likely to be in the age range of infants to 5-year-olds. Parents with older children are not considered a primary market for the apartment complex, he said.
Steve Raabe: 303-954-1948, sraabe@denverpost.com or twitter.com/steveraabedp
