1040 E Colfax Avenue
If you've been avoiding Colfax lately, you might not have noticed the progress at 1040 E Colfax Avenue. Route 40 has gone vertical.
The seven-story development from Consolidated Investment Group will deliver 210 apartments, 5,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, and a rooftop pool deck with views of the State Capitol. Boka Powell designed it, Symmetry Builders is putting it up, and Gables Residential will manage it once units start delivering in 2027.
Sitting at the corner of Colfax and Corona, Route 40 fronts three streets: Colfax, Corona, and Downing. As the structure climbs, the scale is becoming hard to ignore on a stretch of corridor that has been defined by low-rise buildings and surface lots for as long as most people can remember.
It is also not building alone. Directly next door at 1150 E Colfax, The Vixen, a 344-unit project by Kairoi Residential, has already delivered and is leasing now. Studios start around $1,450 and units go up to three bedrooms. Combined, that is over 550 new apartments on a single block of East Colfax. A decade ago, that kind of concentration on this corridor would have sounded absurd.
Then there is the BRT. Denver's Colfax Bus Rapid Transit line, branded Lynx, is under construction along the same corridor right now. The $280 million project will run center-lane, dedicated-lane service from Broadway to Yosemite, connecting to Union Station and the R Line at I-225. Revenue service is expected to begin in January 2027, roughly the same window Route 40 starts handing over keys. A BRT platform is going in at Colfax and Downing, directly in front of the Route 40 site. Future residents will have a front-door connection to high-frequency transit across the city.
None of this is coincidental. East Colfax has been creeping toward densification for years, but the BRT investment is changing the math. A dedicated transit line running 10-minute headways rewires the underwriting calculus for residential projects, especially on a corridor sitting on as much untapped density as Colfax still has. Route 40 is expected to deliver in 2027, and the corridor is not slowing down.
