FRISCO — Drive around the south side of Frisco these days and it may be hard to recognize parts of the town compared to just a few years ago. Hemmed in by a lake on one side, an interstate on another and a national forest and a highway on the other two sides, it’s not secret that there’s not much room left to build in Frisco — thus the onset of redevelopment.
Even in a down housing market, developers are bullish on the town, with a variety of new projects in the works and others on the drawing board. The decrepit Frisco Boardwalk building was recently torn down to make way for The Residences at Water Tower Place: 11 “luxury” residences priced from the 600’s up to nearly $1 million.
The old Lark Bed & Breakfast on Granite Street gave way to Mt. Victoria Lodge, a substantial, log-themed building with several residences and commercial space underneath. Other lots that formerly had small homes on them have been converted to duplexes and triplexes as well.
Given the cost of this kind of redevelopment, what is it about Frisco that has people pouring money into the town like this?
“Proximity to Denver is a real key element,” said Mark Harris, a Lakewood developer who’s done a number of projects in town and has a few more in the works. “Frisco is centrally located to all of Summit County’s offerings, and so makes it very attractive. It has a quaint downtown that some of the other towns don’t.”
Harris has two significant projects ready to get underway, both of which involve scraping off existing buildings. One is Latitude 39 at the corner of Granite and Fourth Street: two buildings with four units ranging in size from 1,000 square feet up to 2,640 square feet, with prices topping out at about $1.3 million. On the site of the old Denver Archdiocese retreat at 2 Miner’s Creek Road, the buildings will be razed to make way for another pair of duplexes in the $1.2 million price range.
Frisco Realtor Butch Elitch said more buyers are looking less at the extra-large single-family homes and more at smaller units with more manageable properties.
“We’re seeing a lot of interest in these kinds of properties,” Elitch said.
Harris’s wife and business partner Carrie Harris said they’re optimistic that the housing market will start to swing upward and make their investments worthwhile.
“People don’t like to travel as much anymore. They want to be close to the mountains,” she said.
At what cost?
There is a certain irony behind Frisco’s redevelopment wave and what the town says it wants to do: maintain a small-town character. Another goal of the town is creating more affordable housing for locals — something not likely to be found in a million-dollar development. And town residents who live in more modest dwellings are not always thrilled to see the ranch home next door get swapped out for a towering four-plex.
“I see a real disconnect between what the town surveys say and what’s going on here,” said Todd Powell, a Galena Street resident who has a large building going up behind his house as well as a new, massive duplex across the street. “It’s kind of sad, but we think about leaving Frisco because of the changing feel of the town. It’s becoming east, east, east Vail, or Breckenridge’s parking lot.”
Harris said his developments attempt to strike a balance between size and compatibility with the town.
“407 Galena is scaled to fit in the neighborhood and architectural stylings and work with materials indicative of the Colorado mountains,” he said. “With Latitude 39, we really tried to scale the building down and break it into two separate buildings so the scale and mass don’t overwhelm the lot and fit with downtown character.”
Even so, there’s a significant shifting underfoot when a single-family home or small business is swapped out for a multi-unit structure. Frisco has several examples where the buildings consume most of the building footprint and, in some cases, tower over the neighboring property.
Cabin zoning
Jocelyn Mills, a senior planner at the town, said the planning commission and staff are working on a new type of zoning to address such concerns. Called “cabin zoning,” the idea is to encourage developers to go smaller but have the ability to build more units. If a lot is zoned for three residential units, for example, cabin zoning might allow five.
But they’d have to be smaller — only 750 square feet for the ground level and another 30 percent of that on the upper level.
“It’s a voluntary thing but hopefully it will provide folks with another opportunity to consider when they’re redeveloping a site,” Mills said, adding that the planning commission will discuss the idea at its meeting this Thursday. “We’ve gotten good feedback from the investment community.”
Another aspect of the cabin zoning is an affordable housing component, she said. Overall, smaller units should translate into less-expensive ones even at market rate.
“I believe the planning commission wants to offer another opportunity to people so we don’t lose Frisco’s character,” Mills said.
Powell wonders if it isn’t already too late.
“Ultimately the developer and planners will say ‘this is the zoning, this is the density’ and they’ll do it,” he said. “Frisco as a nice, small town? I don’t see it in 10 years.”
Elich notes that some of the older homes being torn down were older and in disrepair — especially ones that were rentals for many years.
“There are other people who are doing a really nice job of reconstructing older homes,” Elich said, pointing out several examples on a recent tour of the town.
