Littleton's Biggest Construction Site Just Stopped Being a Costco Story

If you drive West Mineral Avenue near South Broadway with any regularity, you've watched the same fenced lot for the better part of two years. First the old Lumen Technologies office campus came down, the 130-foot Qwest Tower included, a structure that started life in 1970 as part of a tire manufacturing facility before it spent decades as call-center office space. Then came the excavators, the dirt piles, the slow crawl of a 63-acre demolition that removed roughly 800,000 square feet of outdated buildings. For most of that time, the mental shorthand for the site has been simple: that's where the Costco is going.

That shorthand is no longer the whole story, and the piece that's missing is a lot stranger than a warehouse club.

The Costco part, which is real but slower than advertised

Start with what's confirmed, because it hasn't changed in substance, only in timing. Costco is building a 159,000-square-foot warehouse store at 700 W. Mineral Ave., complete with a gas station and tire center. It will be the retailer's 17th location in Colorado and Littleton's first Costco. Construction is underway right now, and as of a mid-September report from 9News, the opening target has shifted from 2026 to 2027.

That slip matters if you've been mentally circling a date. Earlier reporting on the project, including material from Littleton's own visitor site, had 2026 penciled in. The most recent public update pushes that back a year. If you've been planning a membership card and a shopping list around an early opening, the honest answer right now is 2027, not this year or next.

The anchor nobody was expecting

Here's the part of the story that changed everything, and it happened quietly enough that a lot of regular commuters on Mineral Avenue haven't caught it yet. On September 15, Littleton City Council approved an economic incentive agreement with Scheels, the employee-owned sporting goods retailer, for a flagship store at Mineral Place that will sit alongside Costco as the project's second major anchor.

This isn't a modest addition. The planned store runs more than 300,000 square feet, larger than the Costco itself, and Scheels says it will house more than 80 specialty shops under one roof along with more than 500 jobs. The company is framing this as an entertainment destination as much as a retail one. According to Scheels' own announcement, the Littleton store's current plans include:

• A 60-foot hubless Ferris wheel
• Rollerball bowling lanes
• An interactive arcade
• A 16,000-gallon saltwater aquarium
• Dedicated departments for bike, ski and snowboard, golf, baseball and softball, archery, and fly-fishing

If that sounds more like a small theme park than a sporting goods store, that's consistent with how Scheels builds its larger-format locations elsewhere in the country. This would be the company's 38th store, and the target opening is 2029.

So the site that most residents have been tracking as a one-year wait for Costco is actually running two separate clocks. Costco in 2027. Scheels two years after that. If you've been assuming the whole project wraps up around the same time the warehouse club opens its doors, it doesn't. The corridor will be a construction zone, in some form, for the better part of this decade.

What else is going up, and what's still blank

Retail anchors get the headlines, but Mineral Place also includes a residential piece that's already further along. The Sullivan is a 370-unit apartment community being developed by Embrey Partners, and it's designed with the kind of amenity list that signals who the developer expects to live there: a private clubhouse, a high-tech WiFi lounge with conference space, a resort-style pool with cabanas, a fitness center, a yoga studio with an adjacent outdoor patio, a pickleball court, and a bike wash and repair station tied into the surrounding trail network.

Beyond the two big anchors and the apartments, roughly nine smaller retail pads are planned along the northern portion of the site near West Mineral Avenue and Southpark Terrace. None of those tenants have been finalized publicly. Early in the process, a pre-application filing surfaced for a Portillo's Hot Dogs drive-thru and in-store location, though no complete application had been filed as of that point, so treat that as a name that was floated rather than a confirmed opening. The practical takeaway is that the identity of this corridor is still being written in real time, well past the two headline stores.

The scale of the whole thing is why city officials have been unusually blunt about it in public meetings. Littleton's economic development manager, Brian Garner, called Mineral Place the biggest project the city has seen in probably decades and described it as an economic engine for Littleton. Mayor Kyle Schlachter, in a release tied to the demolition milestone, put it this way:

"This demolition marks a significant step towards reimagining this former industrial site."

That kind of language from a mayor's office usually means the city put real money behind getting the deal done, and in this case it did. The retail portion of the project carries a sales-tax shareback agreement worth up to $29.5 million over as much as 10 years, paid out of tax revenue the retailers themselves generate rather than as an upfront cost to the city. The apartment community next door didn't qualify for a similar incentive, which is one reason the retail side of the site has moved faster and drawn more public attention than the residential side.

The part that isn't glossy renderings

Not every detail here is a groundbreaking photo op. As crews cleared land in early 2025, a nearby resident, coincidentally also named Sullivan and with no connection to the apartment community that shares his name, distributed close to 2,000 flyers and collected about 200 signatures opposing the removal of mature trees and a landscaped drainage swale along West Mineral Avenue. The city's response was that nearly all of the removed trees sat on the developer's private property rather than public right-of-way, and that the site plan calls for more than 950 new trees, a net gain of 670 even accounting for what came down. Officials also noted that many of the removed trees were ash, a species vulnerable to emerald ash borer, and that the replacements are better suited to hold up in an urban setting long term.

Nobody involved would call that argument fully settled, and it's worth knowing about if you live close enough to the site that landscaping changes along Mineral Avenue affect your daily walk or drive. It's the kind of friction that shows up on any redevelopment this size, and it's part of the honest record of how this corridor got built, not a footnote to skip past.

What this actually changes if you live nearby

For anyone whose daily errands run through the Mineral and Santa Fe area, the practical picture now looks like this: a Costco opening in 2027 that will finally end the drive to an out-of-neighborhood location for bulk shopping and gas, followed roughly two years later by a Scheels that's shaping up to be a genuine destination rather than a quick stop, complete with a Ferris wheel and an aquarium inside a sporting goods store. In between, expect ongoing construction traffic, an apartment community filling in ahead of the retail, and a handful of smaller retail spaces that haven't announced tenants yet.

The site you've been driving past for two years was never just a Costco lot. It's turning into one of the larger mixed-use projects Littleton has taken on in a generation, and the most interesting piece of it is the one most residents haven't clocked yet.

If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's actually happening in this corner of Littleton before it shows up in a headline, that's the kind of local read Whitney Cain keeps close tabs on. Reach out anytime you want the real story behind what's changing in your neighborhood.