Crews have broken ground on Sun Valley's long-promised Riverfront Park, a project residents of the Denver neighborhood have been waiting on since 2017. City officials gathered to mark the start of construction on a project that will eventually bring an 11-acre park along the South Platte River, with the first phase — featuring a playground, an event plaza and gardens — expected to open in 2027.
A Nine-Year Wait Finally Moves Forward
As Denverite reports, plans for the park date back to 2017, the same year Denver voters approved $2 million for the project as part of the Elevate Denver bond package. Denver City Council member Jamie Torres, who represents Sun Valley, said she is thrilled that construction is finally underway, according to the outlet. The project has experienced repeated delays in the years since, the report notes, even as the Denver Housing Authority spent hundreds of millions of dollars replacing Sun Valley's old public housing with new affordable apartment complexes.
Denver Parks and Recreation identified Sun Valley as a neighborhood in need of a park back in 2019, per the same report. Residents who moved back into new public housing complexes the Denver Housing Authority built starting in 2021 found little new green space waiting for them, Denverite's reporting indicates. The neighborhood does include Rude Park and Weir Gulch Marina Park, but those spaces lack amenities and upkeep comparable to many other Denver parks, the outlet reports.
Residents Describe Life Without Grass
Jeanne Granville told Denverite that the neighborhood has a lot of concrete. Fairview Elementary School once had a grass yard used by many residents, but Denver Public Schools closed the campus and later put up a new fence around that yard, according to the report. Sylvia Chairez said the lack of grass in the neighborhood makes it difficult to take her chihuahua out for bathroom breaks, and she told the outlet she's excited about the coming park.
The scale of the surrounding transformation is significant. The Denver Housing Authority is replacing 333 units of public housing with 940 new homes meant to serve more than 2,500 residents, according to the Denver Housing Authority. That broader effort traces back to a $30 million federal Choice Neighborhoods Implementation grant the agency received in 2016 to help fund a $350 million redevelopment, per a City and County of Denver project summary.
What's Actually Being Built, and When
The park will be built in two phases, Denverite reports. The first phase includes roughly half of the planned park — about 4.5 acres — with a playground, an event plaza and gardens, and it draws funding from the Denver Parks and Recreation capital improvement fund, the 2017 Elevate Denver bond, the 2025 Vibrant Denver bond and other sources, according to the outlet. Denver Parks and Recreation also plans to improve the South Platte River Trail as part of the broader effort, Denverite notes.
A splash pad could be part of that first phase, but the city has not funded it, and the Denver Housing Authority hopes to raise $1 million to build one, per Denverite's reporting. The second phase has no completed design or secured funding, the outlet reports. Separate figures from Denver7 describe a first phase of six acres funded at $8.5 million, with the remaining five acres still needing environmental remediation and millions more in funding — a figure that differs from the 4.5-acre phase described by Denverite. Denver7 reports the Denver Housing Authority estimates the total cost to complete the entire park will exceed $20 million.
A History of Shifting Timelines
The park's timeline has moved repeatedly over the years. Plans reviewed by Denver7 in 2017 projected a 2024 completion date, and a 2021 city project summary listed construction beginning in 2022 with completion to be determined. A later summary from June 2022 pushed construction to 2023 with completion slated for 2024. Denver7 now reports the Denver Housing Authority projects completion of the full park somewhere between mid-2026 and mid-2027, while Denverite's more recent reporting states the first phase alone is expected to be completed in 2027.
Denver7's reporting attributes the delays to environmental cleanup and coordination with nearby river and flood-mitigation projects. The Denver Housing Authority previously received a $1,049,300 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to remediate eight acres of the former Xcel site, clearing the way for some of the park planning, according to the Denver Housing Authority. Residents in the Colorado Trust's reporting on the neighborhood's transformation have pointed to a lack of green space and recreation facilities as a persistent problem throughout the redevelopment process.
For now, Sun Valley residents have a groundbreaking to point to after years of waiting, with city officials framing the moment as the start of a long-overdue neighborhood amenity. Denverite, whose coverage is powered by Colorado Public Radio, notes that residents say they need a place to play as more families return to the rebuilt neighborhood.
