The windows have been dark for over a year now. If you've walked past the old Macy's at Streets at SouthGlenn on your way to the fountain, the ice rink in winter, or a movie at the Regal, you've probably wondered the same thing everyone on the neighborhood forums has been asking since the closure: what happens to that much empty square footage in the middle of a shopping center you actually use?
The answer, now moving through Centennial's approval process, is not another store. It's 361 apartments.
The plan on the table
Alliance Residential Company, working under its Broadstone brand, wants to build a five-story, roughly 361-unit apartment building on the old Macy's footprint, a 5.24-acre parcel at the corner where the fountain plaza already draws foot traffic. The design, from Santulan Architecture with Norris Design handling the planning work, calls for a masonry base topped with stucco and fiber cement in warm neutral tones with darker accents, meant to echo the Colorado landscape rather than read as a generic apartment block dropped into a retail center.
The parking is structured and internal to the building, roughly 557 spaces for those 361 units, which works out to about 1.56 spaces per unit and just over one per bedroom. That ratio matters if you've ever circled the SouthGlenn lot looking for a spot near Whole Foods on a Saturday. The garage is designed to be screened from the street by the residential units themselves, so from the sidewalk it should read as housing, not a parking structure with an apartment wrapped around it.
A few design choices are worth knowing if you walk this corner regularly:
- Ground-floor units are designed with stoops and direct sidewalk entries rather than blank walls, an intentional choice the project team describes as putting "eyes on the street."
- The building fronts directly onto the old Macy's fountain plaza, meaning that public space you already pass through gets reactivated rather than left to sit behind a vacant anchor.
- Select units are two-story townhome style, with some placed at the top of the building for double-height windows and views, and others at ground level to break up the five-story mass into something closer to a neighborhood street.
- The project is also meant to restore a north-south walking connection, an internal "mews," that currently dead-ends at the back of the retail buildings.
Why housing, not another store
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only skim the headline: this isn't really a story about one empty department store. It's a story about what SouthGlenn has quietly decided it's for.
Centennial's shopping center was rebuilt from an enclosed mall into an open-air lifestyle center back in 2009, and its zoning was amended again in 2019 specifically to allow more housing across the property. That amendment didn't get much attention at the time because it was theoretical. This project is the first real test of it. City planning staff have said plainly that mall retailing has shifted away from the center in a way that leaves it unable to fill the amount of retail space originally planned back in 2005, and that replacing that vacant retail with residential is one of the only strategies available to stabilize the property. In other words, the fountain plaza in front of the old Macy's isn't losing a store. It's gaining the thing that's now propping the center up.
If you live nearby and treat SouthGlenn as a de facto town square, the season of holiday tree lightings and summer concerts at Commons Park, the practical reality is that the retail identity you grew up with is being partially replaced by a residential one. More neighbors living inside the center itself, fewer big-box anchors holding down the corners.
The timeline, and the one date residents actually care about
City project documents list construction starting in the fourth quarter of 2026. A more recent community report puts it slightly later, early 2027, which suggests the schedule has some give in it depending on how the final application and city council review play out. Both sources agree on the far end: an opening targeted for summer or fall 2028.
| Milestone | Estimated window |
|---|---|
| Demolition of the vacant Macy's building | Fall to winter 2026 |
| Site construction begins | Late 2026 to early 2027 |
| Vertical construction | Spring 2027 |
| Building opens | Summer to fall 2028 |
That means the demolition phase, the part that will actually change what you see driving past on University Boulevard, is likely to start within the next few months. If the fencing and equipment show up before the holidays, that's on schedule, not ahead of it.
The traffic question, answered more precisely than most people expect
Public comments on the project have leaned heavily on one worry: more residents means more cars. It's a reasonable instinct, but the mechanism is more specific than volume alone. City planning staff have pointed out that a large retail anchor like the old Macy's generated its own significant traffic on its own schedule, concentrated around store hours and weekend shopping peaks. Residential traffic spreads differently across the day and, according to the city's own assessment, tends to produce a different and often lower peak-hour pattern than a big-box retailer did.
That doesn't mean the concern is baseless. One resident, in comments during the public input period, flagged the existing bend on University Boulevard near Dekoevend Street and the reduction in northbound lanes there as a spot that's already tight, and worried the new units would add to it. The city's response was that any project of this size triggers a formal traffic impact study comparing projected trips against what the SouthGlenn master traffic plan already accounted for, and that study, once complete, becomes public. If you drive through that stretch regularly, that's the document worth watching, not the raw unit count.
What's changing around it while this gets built
The apartment project isn't happening in isolation. The dining mix in this part of Centennial has been shifting too, in ways that say something about what kind of foot traffic the area is now built to serve. Home Team Deli already operates a location inside Streets at SouthGlenn itself, one of three in the metro area. A few miles away on Dry Creek Road, local restaurateur Skye Ni, who also owns Shoyu Sushi in Parker, is opening an upscale all-you-can-eat concept called Kinoya Sushi & Izakaya in the former Bono's Pit Bar-B-Q space. Rosati's Pizza opened a Centennial location on South Gibraltar Way under franchise owner Jim DiSanto. And on Briarwood Avenue, Chicago Mike's Beef & Dogs closed for good after nearly three decades, a loss tied to the passing of longtime owner Giles Everist rather than the neighborhood losing its appetite.
None of that is directly connected to the apartment project. But it's the same underlying pattern: a corridor that used to be defined by a handful of big anchors is becoming defined by a denser mix of smaller, more specific places, some residential, some culinary, replacing the fewer, larger tenants that used to carry the whole center.
What to actually watch for
If you live near SouthGlenn, the practical markers are simple. Fencing and demolition equipment at the old Macy's site this fall or winter means the project is on the city's stated schedule. A published traffic impact study, once the application is finalized, will tell you more about University Boulevard and Arapahoe Road than any comment thread will. And an opening date landing anywhere in the second half of 2028 means the five-story building with the reactivated fountain plaza is doing what it was designed to do, adding neighbors to a corner that used to just sell things to you.
Centennial's mall isn't disappearing. It's just quietly becoming less of a mall and more of a place people actually live, one vacant anchor at a time.
If you're curious how shifts like this one ripple into home values and buyer interest in the neighborhoods around SouthGlenn, Sherry Beindorff tracks these changes closely and is always glad to talk through what it means for your specific street.
