Belmar project takes Lakewood downtown: city center rises in Villa Italia's wake.

• Author: Titus, Stephen
• Position: Who owns Colorado

ASK ANYONE TO NAME COLORADO'S FOURTH-LARGEST CITY and there's a very good chance they'll give you the wrong answer. Behind Denver, Aurora and Colorado Springs, in fourth place with 550,000 residents, is Lakewood, the city without a downtown--until now.

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Lakewood Mayor Steve Burkholder said that since the 1960s, Lakewood's identity and major income source was the Villa Italia Mall. The shopping center's demise in the mid- 1990s left a gaping tax hole, but created a redevelopment opportunity in the center of a large community that was sorely in need of a physical and marketing makeover. Denver-based Continuum Partners and the city of Lakewood are now turning the former 104-acre mall into Belmar, the modern heart of the city.

"A lot of what (Continuum Partners) is doing at Belmar is creating a sense of community," Burkholder said. "Quite frankly, a lot of first-tier cities don't have this."

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A model for its time, Villa Italia Mall peaked in 1994, then swiftly declined like many other shopping centers in Colorado and across the country. A complex ownership and lease-holder structure made it impossible to reach a redevelopment agreement, and financial difficulties of several anchor tenants nailed the coffin shut on the mall. Burkholder said he and others in local government saw this coming. Their first goal was to prevent the site from being boarded up, killing surrounding property values.

"We could have scraped it and put up big-box retail outlets, but we thought we could do better than that," he said.

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Eliza Prall, a principal at Continuum as well as its director of marketing and community development, said Lakewood city officials approached her company and worked for months on a rough idea of what it would take to redevelop the site. After nearly a year of community meetings and research, they formulated a plan for a new downtown, and the city finally purchased the property and buildings in 1999 and 2000.

In the mid 1990s, Denver was in the early stages of a financial recovery, and banks were still shy about lending money for what was considered a risky "mixed-use" project. But the City of Lakewood stepped in and helped Continuum with tax incentives and other support to get the Belmar project started.

"This was a classic public/private partnership and frankly it wouldn't have gotten done without that cooperation," Burkholder said.

Continuum representatives agree, saying the...