Some of the biggest real estate projects happening in the Denver area are all around major league sports venues.

There’s a new soccer stadium in the works for the women’s soccer team, plans to build a new neighborhood on the parking lots of Ball Arena and the Denver Broncos want to build a new stadium, potentially surrounded by a shopping and housing district at a historic rail yard.

There have been a few updates over the last few weeks from acquisitions of the land needed to house the stadiums and a potential investment in Denver from Elon Musk’s The Boring Co. that never came to be.

Here’s the latest you need to know.

City officially acquires land for Denver Summit stadium

As the new National Women’s Soccer League expansion team set a whopping 63,000-attendee record at Empower Field, Denver Summit FC announced Denver had secured the land needed for its stadium.

The stadium will be built on Santa Fe Yards — a piece of the old Gates Rubber Factory campus that has sat empty for years — with hopes to revitalize an area where Broadway and Interstate 25 intersect.

Last year, as the team said it might have to look elsewhere for a site if it doesn’t get approved, the Denver City Council agreed to spend $50 million toward the stadium site and $20 million to upgrade the area around the property.

Broadway Street Partners sold the land on March 27 to the Broadway Station Metropolitan District, a government entity with the power to use bonds to finance development on the site, according to property records.

“We are incredibly grateful to Mayor Mike Johnston, Denver City Council and the broader Denver community for helping turn this vision into a reality,” the team’s owner Rob Cohen said in a news release. “We look forward to this project providing a positive impact on our community for generations to come.”

The stadium is set to be finished by 2028, as promised by Denver’s bid to secure the franchise.

“This has been a long time coming for South Broadway,” Mayor Mike Johnston said. “This moment belongs to the Denver Summit fans and leadership team and could not have happened without every neighbor and business owner who believed in this dream from day one.”

The stadium is expected to seat 14,000 people and span 14 acres.

Broncos near closing on land for stadium

Work is trudging along to get started on a new football stadium a mile away from Empower Field at Mile High.

The Denver Broncos and the Colorado Department of Transportation’s investment office came to a sales agreement to buy the historic Burnham Yard, a site east of I-25 and south of Colfax Avenue, by May.

“This arrangement minimizes risk to the state and unlocks billions of dollars in private investment in this long-blighted, underutilized property,” CDOT spokesperson Matt Inzeo told The Denver Gazette last week. 

The Broncos stated Burnham Yard is their “preferred” site to build a world-class retractable-roof stadium by 2031, as the lease to play at Empower Field expires after the 2030 season. 

But team owner Greg Penner recently expressed the difficulties of getting it done on a tight timeline when he was at an NFL owners meeting in Arizona, and the team will need all the help it can get to have the stadium done by 2031.

“It’s an ambitious timeline that we have, and we won’t be able to accomplish our goals in terms of timing and getting in there just by ourselves,” Penner said. “So, it’s not just something that the Broncos are driving. We have to have a lot of support from partners and others that are involved with the site.”

The city is also collecting survey responses from community members to help the “development of policy recommendations” around Burnham Yard.

The survey closes Sunday.

Ball Arena to build bridge, a pedestrian tunnel still under consideration

The first steps to build a new neighborhood around Ball Arena will focus on a pedestrian bridge connecting the sports venue to the rest of downtown Denver. 

Kroenke Sports & Entertainment filed plans last year to build Wynkoop Crossing, a bridge that will go over Speer Boulevard. It’s the first item to be constructed in the first phase of Ball Arena’s redevelopment.

The first phase — which includes the bridge, a hotel, a potential new performance venue and multifamily housing — is expected to be completed by 2032, a Kroenke executive told city leaders last October.

The full project will bring approximately 6,000 units of housing (with 18% being designated as affordable) and is expected to be completed by 2050. 

Recently, the Ball Arena project was named a finalist by Elon Musk’s The Boring Co. to build a 330-foot pedestrian tunnel connecting Ball Arena to a light-rail station, but it lost out to projects in New Orleans, Baltimore and Dallas.

But there still might be a tunnel in the works for the River Mile development, just in a different location. 

“We are still considering either a pedestrian tunnel or a pedestrian bridge at that specific site connecting Ball Arena and Elitch Gardens,” said Jim Mulvihill, a spokesman for Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, last week.

Reporters Kyle Fredrickson and Emily Bejarano contributed to this report.