Award winning
We are honored that our Arroyo Village community in West Denver has earned the 2020 Jack Kemp Excellence in Affordable and Workforce Housing Award through The Urban Land Institute (ULI) Terwilliger Center for Housing. This prestigious national award is given to just six projects across the United States.
Arroyo Village is a joint development affordable housing community and shelter created by Rocky Mountain Communities and The Delores Project which combined two existing sites to create a new development. The building was designed by Shopworks Architecture. BlueLine Development, Inc. was the development consultant.
Per the press release ULI distributed, “Arroyo Village is a first-of-its-kind project in Colorado that encompasses a continuum of care for people experiencing housing instability that includes a homeless shelter of 60 beds, 35 one-bedroom apartments for permanent supportive housing and 95 affordable apartments under one roof. The project is thoughtfully designed for the residents, including the use of Trauma-Informed Design for the permanent supportive housing, which centers on the belief that spaces should be designed for healing, especially as it relates to mental health.”
Arroyo Village opened in July 2019. It is Denver’s newest affordable housing community and the first newly constructed shelter for people experiencing homelessness that has been built since the 1980s.
ULI established the Jack Kemp Excellence in Affordable and Workforce Housing Award in 2008, naming the award in memory of Jack Kemp, former secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development who had served as a Terwilliger Center national advisory board member. The award is given annually to affordable and workforce housing developments that represent outstanding achievements in several areas, including affordability, innovative financing and building technologies, proximity to employment centers and transportation hubs, quality of design, and involvement of public/private partnerships. Developments competing for the Kemp Award may be fully affordable, with all units designated for low- to moderate-income residents; or they may contain a mix of affordable and market-rate units.