An indoor/outdoor shopping mall that opened in 2000, FlatIron Crossing’s retail core will remain intact, as the Macerich long-term plan includes adding multiple office and multifamily residential buildings to complement the existing retailers and AMC Theatres multiplex. The 24-acre project will later include an outdoor pavilion, a 2-acre park, and new roads and restaurant sites. Macerich is also marketing a former Nordstrom as a 200,000-sq-ft Class A office building.

Flatiron Marketplace is an adjacent big-box-centric retail development that opened in 2001 and has been largely vacant for much of the last decade. The first phase of redevelopment began in 2019, when Provident began demolition of existing buildings and built 325 residential units on 6 acres. The second phase, dubbed 1B, will add another 350 units in two five-story towers, connected via skybridge, with ground-floor retail. The site is transit-oriented, located on the bus rapid transit route between Denver and Boulder.

“It was a good redevelopment opportunity,” says Anna Bertanzetti, Broomfield planning director, of Flatiron Marketplace. “They’ve now completed the first phase of residential, and they’ve got some commercial as well for the first phase of mixed-use.” She says she expects Provident to pursue additional phases in coming years.

Bertanzetti notes that the budget for the FlatIron Crossing project is about $350 million. She says she expects the first phase of residential and office development to get underway later this summer and to be complete by late 2024. The project architect is MG2 Corporation of Seattle.

“This reinvestment, especially with FlatIron Crossing, is critical,” she says. “It really activates the entire center. We’ve talked about it being more of an 18-hour place. We’re trying to make sure that there’s activity at the center.”

FlatIron Crossing has contributed more than $250 million of sales tax revenue to Broomfield since it opened, and typically has been 20-25% of the total. “It’s both a sales-tax generator and an economic-activity generator for Broomfield, and has been for more than 20 years now,” says Jeff Romine, director of Broomfield Economic Vitality, the city and county’s economic development agency.

Like other retail developments, FlatIron Crossing must evolve with the times, argues Romine. “It needed some upgrades and it needed some changes in the orientation of it,” he explains. “In this day and age, and Macerich has done this at Tysons Corner (Va.) and other locations, you really need to have more of a mixed-use philosophy. It doesn’t mean that retail’s not a key characteristic of it — that’s what makes it what it is — but at the same time, people are looking for something a bit broader that brings them that hospitality, that place where you can take friends, that place you can go entertain and be entertained as a family and as a group.”

Romine says the residential development at Flatiron Marketplace will help support the existing and future tenants at FlatIron Crossing. “The two of them together will represent roughly 1,500 new housing units in that area,” he says. “Both of these [projects] represent a strengthening of the property-tax base and a strengthening and sustaining of the retail sales-tax base.”

A representative from Provident Realty Group declined to comment for this story. Macerich did not respond to requests for an interview.