How Kroenke's Long Game At Ball Arena Won It The Chance To Remake Downtown Denver

Monday’s approval of an exemption allowing Kroenke Sports & Entertainment to build skyscrapers around Ball Arena in downtown’s historic view plane sets up a generational change to downtown Denver and is the result of roughly half a decade of effort on Kroenke’s part.

That strategic lead-up is an important part of the reason the Denver City Council agreed to alter the city’s view of Colorado’s iconic mountains, and it sets up further phases of the project for success, according to a University of Colorado Denver public policy professor who studies the interplay between cities and the sports teams that call them home. Critically, the exemption only needed a handful of votes in favor rather than tens of thousands. 

In other words, it is easier to convince a city council than a city of voters.

“The spread between those supporting and those not supporting is really tiny,” CU Denver associate professor Geoffrey Propheter told Bisnow. “You have a much greater chance of being rejected when your facility — or, in this case, the facility-related ancillary development — requires the convincing of a majority of 13 and not 2,000 or 200,000.”

While Ball Arena will in effect anchor what one council member called “another downtown” with 6,000 housing units and a 3-acre public park, the 25-year project also promises a new 5,000-seat venue and ensures that the championship-winning Avalanche and Nuggets stick around until 2050. 

The difficulty of getting a stadium project or a development adjacent to a stadium through a vote of the public has been highlighted by other teams’ efforts in recent years. The highest-profile example was the rejection of a sales tax measure in Kansas City, Missouri, that would have helped fund maintenance and improvements to the stadiums housing the city’s professional baseball and football teams.

Not even the threat of losing one of their teams, including the NFL’s Chiefs, just off their second consecutive Super Bowl win at the time of the vote in April 2024, was enough to convince voters to pass the measure. In the end, 58% of voters rejected the tax. 

Similar proposals have met resistance in other cities. A project similar in spirit to Denver’s, though smaller in scope, was shot down by voters in Tempe, Arizona, in 2023. Their rejection of a new 16,000-seat hockey arena anchoring a 46-acre mixed-use entertainment district with 2,000 apartments was a major blow to the state’s NHL team. The Arizona Coyotes were purchased by the owners of the NBA’s Utah Jazz in April for $1.2B and now call Salt Lake City home.

That doesn’t mean Denver voters would have rejected the Kroenke plan. Often the love for a team wins out: American voters said yes to 61% of the 57 proposed stadiums or arenas put in front of them from 1990 through 2023, according to Propheter.

But the KSE Arena Development has things going for it beyond two Ball Arena-based championship teams in the last five years, Propheter said. First, the Kroenke team has been at work on this proposal for years, with evidence going back at least as far as 2019, when the city of Denver agreed to give Kroenke Arena Co. control of the land beneath Ball Arena. 

“That’s five years of groundwork, and who knows how long before 2019 this was actually being planned,” Propheter said. “I’m more impressed by the process. That stands out looking across the country: ‘I’m not going to turn this into a sprint. I’m going to make it a marathon.’”

Kroenke’s ownership of the land, building and teams feeds into another favorable reality, which is that Ball Arena is privately owned and operated and generates tax revenue and economic activity for the city and other businesses. Plus, KSE Arena Development comes with the promise of new housing, something badly needed in Denver and the surrounding area.

“From a political playbook standpoint, even if you disagree with the outcome … this was done pretty well,” Propheter said. 

The main point of political disagreement on the exemption approved this week came from the change to the city’s decades-old view plane, which protects an imaginary triangle of downtown from having its views impeded by tall buildings. With the approval, KSE will get to include towers reaching 30 and 40 stories in its new development, most likely blocking views for some downtown residents.

Only one city council member voted against the measure. Some were convinced by the fact that Auraria Higher Education Center already has buildings taller than allowed by the rules, The Denver Post reported. They were built by an exempted state agency years ago. 

The project will take years to get underway and fully complete, by nature of its size and scope alone. It could be 2026 before KSE breaks ground, Denver's CBS affiliate reported.