Aspen Grove, the open-air shopping center anchored by Alamo Drafthouse at 7301 S. Santa Fe Drive in Littleton, has new owners. Nuveen, the asset-management subsidiary of financial giant TIAA, purchased the 33-acre mall earlier this month for $55 million, a steep discount from what the previous owner paid nearly a decade ago.
That price is about a third less than the $82 million California-based Gerrity Group paid for the property back in 2016, according to BusinessDen. Gerrity had plotted a partial redevelopment of the mall that would have added housing while shrinking its retail footprint, but the outlet reports the project never broke ground.
The sale closes the book, at least for now, on one of Littleton’s longest-running redevelopment sagas. Gerrity’s vision wasn’t small: the open-air center totals about 270,000 square feet, per BusinessDen’s 2016 coverage of the original purchase, and the city later signed off on plans that would have reshaped a huge chunk of that space.
A City Council Vote That Nearly Failed
Back in November 2021, the Littleton City Council narrowly approved plans for what it described as the 32.7-acre mall property, voting 4-3 to allow up to 2,000 residential units to be built on site, according to the Denver Post. That acreage figure differs slightly from the 33 acres cited in this month’s BusinessDen report on the Nuveen sale, though both describe the same Santa Fe Drive property…