Drive past 825 South Colorado Boulevard most weekday afternoons and the lot barely holds a dozen cars. The King Soopers sign is dark. The liquor store next door closed even earlier. If you've lived in Belcaro for a while, you've probably stopped noticing the empty storefronts as anything unusual. They've been part of the block for close to two years now.
What most people driving past don't realize is that this corner isn't waiting on one project. It's being split into two, and the plan that eventually rises there looks almost nothing like what the developer first proposed to the neighborhood.
What Actually Closed, and Where It Went
The Belcaro King Soopers shut its doors for good on Tuesday, June 2, after prices on remaining inventory were slashed hard in the final days to clear the shelves. The next morning, Wednesday, June 3, Kroger opened a new $37.1 million King Soopers about a mile south at 4201 East Arkansas Avenue in Virginia Village, a roughly 103,000-square-foot store built on the site of the old Colorado Department of Transportation headquarters. The new location added a Murray's Cheese Shop, an in-house Starbucks, and a King Soopers gas station, none of which the Belcaro store had.
The shopping center itself dates to 1960, which puts the grocery anchor's run on that corner at somewhere around six and a half decades before Kroger decided a larger, newer format made more sense a mile down the road. For a store that old, closing quietly on a Tuesday and reopening under a different roof the very next day is a fairly clean transition. The site it left behind is where the story gets more complicated.
The Tower That Didn't Happen
In November 2024, Belcaro Park residents learned what developer Kentro Group actually had in mind for the vacated property: as many as three towers, the tallest reaching 12 stories, with up to 700 rental units mixed with retail and green space, a scale comparable to the 9+CO development two miles north. The Belcaro Park HOA organized fast. The first community meeting drew more than 100 concerned homeowners, according to Denver7's reporting on the fight. Resident Jori Hayes told the station her first thought was about her kids' safety, given what that kind of density would mean funneling traffic onto Belcaro's narrow residential streets.
By August 2025, Kentro Group announced it was walking away from the rezoning request entirely.
"We had hoped to create a friendly neighborhood gathering spot with personality generated from new residents."
That's how Kentro described its original ambition in a statement to Denver7 after dropping the plan. HOA president Susan Livingston and the residents who organized against it got what Denver7 called a rare win against a well-funded developer, and the site went back to the drawing board.
What's Actually Being Built Now
Four months later, on December 27, 2025, EMBREY and Kentro Group filed a new concept plan with the City and County of Denver. Gone were the towers. In their place: a single four-story, wrap-style apartment building on a 4.5-acre parcel at the southwest corner of East Exposition Avenue and Colorado Boulevard, capped at 55 feet under the site's existing zoning, no rezoning required.
Set the two plans side by side and the shift in scale is the whole story:
- First plan, revealed November 2024: up to three towers, tallest at 12 stories, as many as 700 units
- Current plan, filed December 2025: one building, four stories, 347 units (some early coverage rounded it to 350)
The current design includes 569 parking spaces in an internal structured garage, a private clubhouse, a fitness center, and several courtyards. It also sets aside 35 units for households earning up to 60 percent of the area median income, part of Denver's affordable housing framework. As of May 2026, the concept plan cleared its first review and moved into the city's site development phase, the stage where infrastructure, transportation, and design details get worked out in more depth. No construction start date has surfaced in reporting since. For now, the corner is mid-review, not mid-build.
A Second Project on the Same Lot
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only follow the apartment story: the shopping center parcel is being handled as two separate projects, not one.
South of the future apartment building, at 865 South Colorado Boulevard, a separate proposal would demolish the shopping center's existing 8,884-square-foot liquor store building and replace it with a new, roughly 18,034-square-foot single-tenant retail building on a 1.35-acre parcel, about 25 feet tall with 57 parking spaces. That proposal was still moving through Denver's development review process as of May 2026, tracked separately from the apartment concept plan to the north.
It's a detail that explains something that might otherwise look inconsistent if you're just watching the fence lines change. The roughly seven-acre property isn't one redevelopment with one timeline. It's a housing project near Exposition and Colorado on one track, and a standalone retail building near Ohio Avenue on another, moving through the city's process at their own pace.
Where Belcaro Shops Until Then
None of this solves the immediate, practical question: where do you actually buy groceries right now. Whole Foods, Target, and Natural Grocers all sit within a short drive of Belcaro, and the University Boulevard business district and Bonnie Brae's shops, including the long-running Bonnie Brae Ice Cream, remain intact for anyone running errands closer to home. The Cherry Creek Shopping Center corridor covers most other retail needs. For a full King Soopers run, the new Virginia Village store at 4201 East Arkansas is now the closest option, about a mile south of the old spot.
What to Watch Next
The corner at Exposition and Colorado is going to look unfinished for a while longer. Site development plan review typically takes months of back and forth over infrastructure and design before anything moves to permitting, and the separate retail proposal to the south is on its own clock entirely. What's worth remembering, next time you pass the empty lot, is that the building eventually going up there is considerably smaller and lower than what was first put on the table, and that a second, unrelated project is quietly working through the same process a few hundred feet away.
If you're watching this corner because you're weighing what it might mean for property values, home searches, or timing a move in or out of Belcaro, that's a different conversation, and one worth having with someone who tracks these filings as closely as the neighborhood does. Coleen Sanders works this part of Denver every day and is always glad to talk through what a project like this actually means for a specific block or a specific home. Let's Connect.
