I went to a great talk today given by two folks from CU. Frances Draper
(Vice Chancellor for Strategic Relations and Communications) and Derek Silva (Executive Director of Real Estate Services).
They are currently waiting on the city of Boulder to review their annexation application. The entire land area is 308 acres which CU bought in 1996. It was formerly used as a quarry (gravel mining).
Currently CU has their NCAA tennis courts on the site but does not have utilities (so no locker rooms or bathrooms). They are hoping to get annexed into the city so that they can develop some of the area (roughly 120 of the acres) for either academic buildings or housing (they are currently doing studies to determine what the University needs).
As you can imagine this is a complicated process, but part of it involves CU giving the city 80 acres for flood detention/mitigation as part of the hopeful annexation deal. The city had many opportunities to buy this land in the past and chose not to so now CU would like to move forward with some development. I found this map useful to see what they potentially have planned. The area in blue is where they could consider putting housing and or academic buildings (limited to the city’s 55 ft height limit). The scope of the project could see 1100 residential units though there are no plans as of right now. If that many units are added that would be 2.5% of the city’s housing stock. That is not an insignificant numbers. The light green (OS-O) area would be open space.
My sense is that CU is working hard to make this area a win-win for the University and our community. To find out more check out all the details here https://bouldercolorado.gov/bvcp/cu-south