Steamboat Springs, CO Real Estate and Community Blog

When Danny Mulcahy of Steamboat 700 LLC announced his plans to develop West of Steamboat, it was mainly seen as a good thing. People had visions of grocery stores and affordable housing and real houses that real people lived in twelve months a year.

The reality?

Affordability means small — To keep the houses affordable, the lots will be tiny. Mulcahy says he has “designed a majority of [the] single family housing lots to be 4,500 to 8,000 square feet.” That’s almost ten homes per acre for the small lots. (Silver Spur home sites are about three homes per acre.)

The larger lots will be about the size of lots in Milner, which are about 7,500 square feet.

Don’t throw away your Safeway or City Market card yet –People want a grocery store in West Steamboat, but that’s not likely. First, developers look at the “highest value” use of property. Houses can sell for hundreds of dollars a square foot, but rents for grocery stores might only be $5 per square foot. Add in the parking lot, and you can see why the developers say “grocery stores will have to do their own market demand study”. In other words, don’t count on them to build one. With luck, we’ll see a small neighborhood market like Market on the Mountain.

Plan on moving in between 2010-2030– Steamboat 700 still has to be approved by the planning department, get annexed into the city, and be surveyed.

Steamboat 700 will bring much needed housing to our area, but it isn’t going to happen overnight. I think one of the reasons people are so excited about this project is because it is a local’s neighborhood. New projects are going up on every corner, but most of them are not for year round living with families. They’re resort properties being built to serve our visitors from all over the world.

It’s nice to have a project that targets the regular folk.