Thornton clears Evergreen's Creekside Gardens, reopening the pipeline the tap freeze parked

The unanimous Thornton City Council vote clearing Evergreen Devco's Creekside Gardens this week reopens a pipeline the city's water-tap freeze had parked, and in doing so turns a stalled suburban entitlement into a dated delivery window that land buyers can now price. The project is a 26-acre mixed-use site at East 104th Avenue and Washington Street whose delay traced to water, not capital. The Denver Business Journal first reported the vote.

The approval covers 416 residential units plus commercial space: a 250-unit apartment piece on 9.8 acres at the center of the site, arranged as seven three-story buildings and four two-story carriage buildings around a clubhouse, pool, fitness center, dog park, and barbecue areas, with some ground-floor commercial space; a 166-unit senior project from Minneapolis-based Ryan Companies in a five-story building on four acres, with its own pool deck and dog run; and about five acres across from the Denver Premium Outlets that SullivanHayes is marketing as commercial pads for sale. Another 5.8 acres along Washington Street sits in a floodplain and will add more commercial only if it comes out of the floodplain.

The Phoenix developer has been working the site since buying the vacant property in 2021, and the hold was the citywide pause on new water taps. That crunch traced to delays around Thornton's planned 70-mile pipeline from Larimer County, where permitting disputes and court challenges were resolved last year, according to Tyler Carlson, Evergreen's managing principal and chief executive of its Denver office, and the resolution let the city sell taps again and allowed stalled projects to restart. Carlson expects grading and utility work before the end of the year, with apartments and senior housing starting next summer, and two years of construction points to first openings around late 2027 or early 2028, while the full buildout could stretch to three. The project's total cost has not been disclosed.

Tap moratoria queue pipelines rather than cancel them, and Thornton's queue now opens in front of the same permitting calendars the freeze delayed. The entitlement was a bet on what Thornton would let Evergreen build, and the council has answered it, which pushes the risk somewhere metro-level underwriting rarely looks. A suburb that reopens its taps releases a cohort of projects toward one delivery window rather than metering out supply, and Evergreen's schedule is likely to be shared by whatever else the freeze held back. Neither the coverage nor the city's public record says how many projects were waiting or how many taps have been sold since the pipeline dispute cleared; apartment pricing in a submarket like this is set at the block level, and a tap count is one of the few public records that shows the difference.

The commercial pads are being sold as finished land, which moves the retail program's construction risk to whoever buys them, and the floodplain acreage stays optional until the site is mapped out of it. The number to watch now is Thornton's tap tally this winter. It, more than any metro vacancy print, will set the lease-up calendars for late 2027 and 2028.