The Lease That Explains Twenty Years of Empty Storefronts at Englewood's CityCenter

Drive along Hampden Avenue past the RTD light rail station in Englewood and the mismatch is obvious. A Harbor Freight sits next to a shuttered Office Depot. Parking lots stretch wider than the storefronts they serve. A rail platform capable of moving people in and out of downtown Denver sits a few hundred feet from acreage that has looked roughly the same for a decade. Transit access this good is the kind of asset most Denver suburbs spend years lobbying to manufacture. Englewood has had it since 2000 and mostly sat on it.

The obvious explanation is that big-box retail simply never found its footing here. That's partly true. But the deeper reason CityCenter stalled for two decades has nothing to do with demand for the land and everything to do with who legally owned the right to improve it, and what they had to gain by doing so.

A Prepaid Lease Nobody Had Reason to Improve

When the city redeveloped the former Cinderella City Mall, once the largest covered mall west of the Mississippi, into CityCenter in 2000, it structured the deal as a 75-year ground lease that began on August 4, 2000. The lease covered the central retail and mixed-use core of the property. Critically, it was prepaid: the city collected its lease revenue up front rather than as ongoing rent tied to the site's performance.

That detail matters more than it sounds. Once the payment is banked, the landowner has no further financial stake in whether the site thrives, sits empty, or falls apart, because the money already changed hands regardless of outcome. The leaseholder still has 75 years to use the land, but if that leaseholder later goes bankrupt, the lease becomes an asset held by whoever inherits the bankruptcy estate, not by anyone with an operating reason to build anything.

That is exactly what happened. The original developer, Weingarten Realty, built the big-box retail concept that ultimately wasn't successful, and the company went bankrupt. The lease then passed to trustees for the bondholders who had financed the original development, and in 2018 those bondholders foreclosed on it outright. A local civic blog covering Englewood city government summarized the resulting years in blunt terms: the city was left dealing with what amounted to an absentee owner. Nobody on either side of the lease had a financial reason to fix vacant storefronts or reinvest in the property. The city had already been paid. The bondholder trustees held a legal claim, not a business.

Why 2026 Reads Differently Than the Last Announcement

Englewood has been declared "on the verge" before. Back in 2018, the Colorado Real Estate Journal profiled the city's newly hired chief redevelopment officer and described the CityCenter opportunity as "poised to take off," in the same piece that noted Englewood's South Broadway corridor had just been selected as one of only eight nationally studied by the Urban Land Institute's Healthy Corridors Initiative. The optimism didn't immediately translate into shovels at CityCenter itself. A master-developer process for the site involving the SKB/Tryba team ran from a December 2019 recommendation through an extension amendment in April 2021 and did not produce a groundbreaking. If you've lived in Englewood any length of time, a certain skepticism toward CityCenter headlines is earned.

What makes February 2026 structurally different is that the ownership problem, not just the development plan, finally changed. On February 5, 2026, the City of Englewood closed the first phase of a ground lease termination with New Englewood LLC, a joint venture of two Denver-based firms, Ogilvie Partners and DPC Development Companies, who acquired the foreclosed ground lease interest in a sale finalized in December 2024. That first phase transferred title to Block D and Parcel C-2 outright to New Englewood. In exchange, the city took ownership of the former 24-Hour Fitness building and the plaza retail space inside the western ArtWalk Apartments building.

The distinction is not cosmetic. New Englewood now owns land it can build on and keep, rather than holding a decaying legal claim on a lease someone else prepaid two decades ago. That is the incentive the site had been missing since 2000.

The Track Record Behind the Structure

Ownership alignment only matters if the owner actually builds. Here the record helps. Ogilvie Partners and DPC Development Companies bring redevelopment experience that includes converting the former Sports Authority headquarters site adjacent to CityCenter into roughly 300 new residential units, evidence the partnership follows through on entitlements rather than sitting on them.

For CityCenter itself, reporting from the Littleton Independent in January 2026 put the expected scope at 600 to 700 multifamily units across the roughly 12-acre site, alongside small retail, services, and possible restaurant space. The deal also carries specific guardrails worth tracking as leading indicators rather than watching for another press release:

• New Englewood is barred from selling any transferred parcel for two years after the February 2026 closing, unless the buyer is city-council approved, which limits the speculative flip that sometimes follows a land handoff.
• New Englewood must spend $300,000 on redevelopment planning during that same two-year window.
• The city retains an option through roughly early 2028 to buy the parcel containing the Tokyo Joe's building for $3.5 million.
• Phase II, which would transfer the parcel holding Harbor Freight and the former Office Depot to New Englewood, only triggers once the company gets a development plan approved and breaks ground on the site that currently holds a two-story mixed-use building.

As of the city's most recent public update, dated February 2026, staff and New Englewood were still working on the Predevelopment Agreement, described as the next agreement to come before city council before any of this becomes visible construction. No groundbreaking date has been announced. The honest read for a buyer today is that the ownership problem is solved, but the calendar is still a multi-year one, and this piece reflects the most recent information the city had published as of this writing.

What This Means If You're Comparing Englewood to Other South Metro Options

The useful thing to notice is that Englewood's recent momentum has not been waiting on CityCenter to resolve. While the ground lease sat in legal limbo, South Broadway saw its own wave of private investment on the merits of the corridor itself. The Barn opened at 3299 South Broadway in the space most recently occupied by the Whiskey Biscuit, which had closed in 2025. Its owners bring resumes from Brider, the Platte Street rotisserie chicken restaurant that closed after a decade-long run in 2025, and from Rio Grande Mexican. Newer arrivals from established Denver hospitality groups and a long-running South Broadway music venue booking national touring acts have added to that momentum. None of it depended on CityCenter's ownership question getting resolved first. It happened alongside it, which tells you the corridor's appeal was never contingent on the anchor site.

That distinction matters for how you underwrite a purchase near CityCenter today. Treat the 600 to 700 planned units and the associated retail as a multi-year tailwind gated by specific, checkable milestones, not as something already priced into the neighborhood. The two-year anti-flip clause and the pending Predevelopment Agreement both suggest visible construction is not imminent. What you can reasonably factor in now is that the ownership structure that kept the site frozen for twenty years no longer exists, and the same development team has a completed 300-unit project next door as evidence they build rather than bank entitlements.

A related question worth asking before you assume CityCenter changes retail options block by block: does the redevelopment include the library or city offices? It does not. The city's public hearing notice on the deal is explicit that the Civic Center building, including the Englewood Public Library, is excluded from the ground lease transaction and any future change to that building would require a separate council decision.

It's also worth separating this from the South Broadway Revitalization Project, a distinct city initiative covering roughly two miles of Broadway from Jefferson Avenue to Belleview Avenue, which installed new corridor banners in April 2026 as part of streetscape and placemaking work the city has said will continue through 2026 and 2027. That project and the CityCenter deal run on parallel tracks with different timelines and different developers, even though both fall under the city's broader vision of connecting downtown Englewood with CityCenter into a single walkable core.

The One-Line Version

CityCenter's problem for twenty years was never its location next to a rail line. It was a lease structure that let the paperwork sit in someone's filing cabinet with no financial reason attached to fixing it. The February 2026 deal replaced that structure with actual ownership, which is a different kind of news than another master plan. If you're weighing Englewood against other South Metro neighborhoods, that is the detail to track, along with the Predevelopment Agreement and the Phase II groundbreaking trigger, rather than the renderings.

If you're comparing Englewood to other South Metro neighborhoods and want the local context behind a specific block or listing, Maritt Bird can walk you through it. Get Your Instant Home Valuation to see what your current property looks like against this market.