Seven years after first land buy, Tennyson apartment project breaks ground

The development site sits on Tennyson Street just before its intersection with 44th Avenue. (Matt Geiger/BusinessDen)

Nearly seven years after buying the first piece of land for an apartment building along Denver’s Tennyson Street, Lenny Taub finally broke ground last month. 

“It was by far the longest approval process I’ve ever gone through on any project,” he said.

The real estate veteran is head of his own firm, First Stone Development. It spent $2.6 million in two purchases, in 2018 and 2020, acquiring a third of an acre at 4345-4353 Tennyson St. 

Taub is constructing a three-story, 34-unit apartment building with ground-floor retail. Marcus & Millichap helped arrange $15.85 million in financing for the project, per a press release from the firm.

Two months after Taub bought the land for the development, COVID hit.

“Everything came to a halt,” he said.

Lenny Taub

The combination of the pandemic and drawn-out city permitting process added years of delays. In early 2024, he applied for a construction loan to get his vision off the ground.

But the lending market wasn’t what it once was. 

“While we were going through due diligence with the lender, the parameters changed, I guess the economy changed, …  and we needed more leverage,” Taub said. 

He went back to the drawing board, trying to raise more money on his own to appease lenders. The process took him a year. 

“I think part of the reason we were successful in getting this done is that we’re right in the epicenter of Tennyson, that was a big plus,” Taub said. 

The developer expects to finish construction by late summer 2026. The project has a semiautomated parking system that allowed him to squeeze seven more units into his project.

“The parking takes up less space because we’re putting one over the other as opposed to one next to the other,” Taub said.

It’s also the technology that got him into real estate in the first place.

In the late ’90s, Taub was working in New York City, installing similar systems in buildings around the Tristate area. He saw value in the properties themselves and shifted into real estate — ultimately developing and owning about 500,000 square feet of mixed-use residential and commercial space in the Big Apple, according to his firm’s website.

His business came to Denver in 2016 and is now working through the planning phases of his Hilltop West project at 50 S. Colorado Blvd., which consisted of demolishing a “blighted” church at the edge of Hilltop and Cherry Creek. He’s looking to replace it with a small gated community of about 20 roughly 3,000-square-foot homes. He expects to break ground before the end of the year.