Pre-leasing is underway at The Aston, a seven-story apartment building rising at 603 E. Sixth St. in downtown Des Moines' East Village, with tenants expected to begin moving in next month. The 228,400-square-foot building will hold 161 apartments and roughly 4,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space once it fills up.
According to Business Record, the residential mix includes 36 studios, 78 one-bedroom units and 47 two-bedroom units. The developer's website lists apartment sizes ranging from 499 to 1,711 square feet. Every unit comes with an in-unit washer and dryer, and seventeen apartments are set aside for workforce housing, including 10 units certified under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Heart of America Group is developing the project.
The building sits on a site that, per a project narrative filed with city reviewers and hosted at cms2.revize.com, involved demolishing an abandoned barber college building and infilling an existing lot. That same narrative, filed in 2023, described the project as a 186-unit development — a different unit count than the 161 apartments described in current leasing materials, and the reason for the change isn't established in available records. Business Record also reports an estimated project cost of $44 million, a figure that differs from an earlier report describing the development as costing nearly $50 million; that discrepancy hasn't been resolved in the records reviewed for this story.
Amenities Built Around Pets, Pickleball and Soundproofing
The Aston leans into lifestyle amenities aimed at renters who want more than a parking spot and a gym. Outdoor space includes pickleball and bocce ball courts, grilling stations and a dedicated dog park, the Business Record report notes, while indoor features include a fitness studio with an outdoor studio component, a community lounge and a lobby with a pool table and courtyard access.
Underground, the building offers a controlled-access parking garage with 149 leasable stalls, eight EV charging stations and dedicated bike storage, according to the development's own site, astoneastvillage.com. That figure is lower than the 184 parking stalls described in earlier city planning documents hosted at dsm.city, which also pegged first-floor commercial space at a minimum of 7,000 square feet — compared with about 4,000 square feet reported by Business Record and more than 5,000 square feet listed on the developer's website. The Aston's amenities page separately touts a fitness center with outdoor studio, a community room and lounge, private work stations and an expansive exterior courtyard, plus in-unit high-speed wireless internet.
Concrete Construction and a Height Exception
Beyond the dog park and pickleball courts, the building's construction method is meant to pay off in quieter, cheaper-to-run apartments. The project was built using insulated concrete form technology and solid concrete floors, which the developer says increases efficiency, reduces utility costs and improves soundproofing between units, per the same Business Record account.
To reach its current height, the project received special permission to exceed the East Village's 75-foot maximum for structures in the district, according to cda-eng.com's account of the building's groundbreaking ceremony. That height allowance helped make room for the seven stories now filling out the East Village skyline.
Part of a Broader Downtown Building Boom
The Aston isn't rising in isolation. Nearly 3,160 new apartment units were under construction across the Des Moines area as of mid-2026, with downtown accounting for 38% of that activity, Business Record reported in a separate analysis of the local multifamily market. Other downtown projects underway at the time included 515 Walnut Tower with 390 units, Residences at Two Ruan with 221, Mezzo on Walnut with 209 and the Falcon with 202 — all part of a wave that's helped push the area's multifamily vacancy rate down to 6.3% in the first half of 2026, from 6.8% at the end of 2025.
That construction surge hasn't cooled rents, though. Average asking rents across the Des Moines area climbed to $1,216 in the first six months of 2026, up 2.9% from $1,182 at the end of 2025, even as the region added 723 new multifamily units in that same stretch, with another 1,019 expected to be finished by year's end.
