A once-vacant Denver Tech Center office building is now welcoming its first residents as a 143-unit affordable apartment community. The transformation gives a new purpose to a property built for conference calls, cubicles and corporate life — not kitchens, kids' rooms and four-bedroom homes.
Lofts on Monaco opened in the middle of June and is the first Denver office-to-residential conversion completed since 2023, according to The Denver Post. Shea Properties converted the former office building into apartments ranging from studios to four-bedroom units, and the project was about 25% leased as of the publication’s report.
The financing was almost as complicated as the construction. Denver’s finance documents show the project was structured around as much as $29 million in multifamily housing revenue bonds, alongside private equity and federal and state tax credits.
The apartments are income-restricted for households earning between 30% and 70% of area median income, with the largest share aimed at residents at the 60% level. The city’s project materials list 23 studios, 89 one-bedroom apartments, 25 two-bedroom units, three three-bedroom units, and three four-bedroom units.
What Shea Kept From The Old Office
Shea’s own project page describes Lofts on Monaco as an adaptive-reuse community with large windows, open spaces, co-working areas, a fitness center and shared resident amenities. The company says the 124,000-square-foot conversion began construction in May 2025 and was designed to connect residents with nearby transit, employers and the Belleview area.
Some pieces of the old office layout did not translate neatly into apartments. According to The Denver Post, four conference rooms that could not become residential units were converted into community spaces, while Shea is planning solar panels for the all-electric building.
First Tenants Are Already Settling In
The project is not just a renderings-and-ribbon-cutting exercise anymore. CPR News reported that early residents include a special education teacher who moved from New Orleans with her children and pays about $950 a month for a three-bedroom apartment.
That early demand is arriving as Denver continues wrestling with empty commercial space and a shortage of lower-cost housing. The building’s conversion was expensive and risky, Shea executive Peter Culshaw told CPR, but the finished property now offers a rare mix in the Tech Center: affordable apartments inside a structure that already had the windows, parking and bones of a large building.
The DTC Is Testing More Than One Housing Fix
Lofts on Monaco is also part of a broader reshuffling underway around the Denver Tech Center. In February, Hoodline reported on a separate proposal near Technology Way that would demolish one office tower and replace much of the campus with roughly 660 apartments.
That contrast captures the local office-to-housing debate: some properties may be worth gutting and rebuilding from the inside, while others may be better candidates for demolition. Lofts on Monaco is now the neighborhood’s clearest proof that at least one former office can leap from an empty workplace to lived-in housing.
