"It's just a matter of making sure that the lender on this would say it makes sense."
That's Kevin O'Neil, the developer behind OneVela, Colorado Springs' approved-but-unbuilt 27-story apartment tower, talking to the city's Urban Renewal Authority Board in the summer of 2026. Not a neighborhood group. Not a zoning skeptic. The man building the thing, explaining to a public board why the most institutionally backed residential project downtown has ever seen still hasn't put a shovel in the ground more than a year after it cleared its last legal hurdle.
If you're shopping for a condo in downtown Colorado Springs right now, that sentence is worth more than any median price you'll find on a portal. It tells you what the market's most sophisticated capital is actually waiting on, and it's the same math a lender will run on your loan.
The building everyone's been watching
OneVela is the tower that has dominated downtown planning conversations since 2024. Proposed by the O'Neil Group with Missouri-based VeLa Development Partners, it's slated for a one-acre site at Sahwatch and Costilla Streets, near the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum. At 27 stories, it would rise between 295 and 312 feet depending on what counts as the top point, finally surpassing the Wells Fargo Tower, which has held the city's height record at 16 stories and 247 feet since 1990.
City Council approved the project in April 2025 on a 6-1 vote, rejecting an appeal filed by Dianne Bridges, who chairs the city's Historic Neighborhoods Partnership and had pushed to put building height limits to a citywide vote. Council member Dave Donelson cast the lone dissenting vote, and his reasoning is worth sitting with:
"It's the impact it has on the skyline and the fact that it is opening the gate."
That was the fight in 2025. Here's what happened next, or rather, what didn't. As of a July 2026 report from the Colorado Springs Gazette, construction still hadn't started. Developers told the city it was another four to six months out. The project's own team now estimates completion in 2029 or 2030, roughly five to six years after the design was finalized in 2024.
A fully entitled, politically cleared, 400-unit tower with a name recognized by everyone who follows downtown planning is sitting on a vacant lot. That gap between approval and groundbreaking is the story.
The real reason for the wait
O'Neil didn't blame the appeal, the zoning fight, or city process. He pointed at capital markets and, more specifically, at the numbers a lender checks before releasing money. Those numbers have been moving in a direction that makes a 400-unit bet harder to underwrite.
Average monthly rents across the Colorado Springs area fell from $1,446 in the first quarter of 2024 to $1,389 in the first quarter of 2026, according to data from 1876 Analytics cited in the Gazette's reporting. Vacancy told a similar story. It peaked at 8.3% in the fourth quarter of 2025, the highest quarterly rate in six years, and was still at 7.3% in the first quarter of 2026, up from 7.2% in the same period two years earlier.
This is the mechanism a buyer needs to understand. A downtown condo purchase gets valued the same way OneVela gets financed: against comparable rents and comparable sales, not against a rendering. When the region's own multifamily data is soft enough to make an institutional developer pause on a fully approved project, that's a more honest read on near-term appreciation than any brochure describing downtown's growth trajectory. The tower isn't stalled because downtown demand disappeared. It's stalled because the spread between what a 400-unit building costs to build and what it can currently rent for doesn't clear the bar a lender needs to see. Your appraisal will run into some version of that same math.
Why most of downtown can never get a OneVela next door
Here's the detail that should actually change how you shop, and it's the one most buyers never ask about: geography, not politics, decides whether a building like OneVela can happen near you.
Colorado Springs adopted a form-based zoning code in 2009 that put height limits in place across the vast majority of the city. Downtown is the exception, but only a sliver of it. The code removed height limits for less than half a square mile of the downtown core. Everywhere else, including most of what buyers picture when they say "downtown condo," height restrictions still apply.
That's also why Bridges' 2025 appeal was notable on its own terms. It marked only the second direct appeal to City Council since that 2009 code took effect. Height fights at this scale simply don't come up often, because most parcels aren't eligible for a project like OneVela in the first place.
For a buyer, this reframes the question entirely. The risk isn't "will downtown get overbuilt." The risk is parcel-specific: is the building or lot you're considering inside that narrow no-limit pocket, or outside it? A condo two blocks outside that boundary has a structural protection that no HOA disclosure or insurance policy can offer. It cannot legally face a 27-story neighbor. A unit inside the pocket, especially one near an underused surface lot or aging low-rise building the way OneVela's own site once was, carries a different kind of exposure. That's a five-minute question for the city's planning department before you write an offer, and almost nobody asks it.
The supply question hiding behind the tower
While OneVela waits, other supply hasn't. The Pikes Peak Regional Building Department issued permits for 64 new condos across the city in 2025, the most in a single year since 2007, according to reporting from Colorado Politics on the department's year-end totals. That volume is arriving in the same window rents are softening and vacancy is elevated.
For anyone eyeing new construction or a pre-construction unit downtown, that combination matters. New supply landing into a softening rental market tends to compress the appreciation story that pre-construction marketing leans on. It doesn't mean new product is a bad buy. It means the "scarcity equals appreciation" pitch deserves more scrutiny right now than it would in a tighter rental market.
Older, already-built condo stock outside the no-height-limit zone sits in a different position. It isn't competing with brand-new lease-up concessions the way a resale near active construction might, and it carries the same view-corridor protection described above. That's a real, if unglamorous, advantage over anything still on paper.
Before you write an offer on a downtown unit, it's worth asking a few questions that have nothing to do with square footage:
- Does this building or parcel sit inside the sub-half-square-mile zone where height limits don't apply, or outside it?
- Are there large surface lots or underused buildings nearby that could become redevelopment sites the way OneVela's did?
- If you're buying pre-construction, what's the developer's actual timeline history, given that OneVela moved from a 2024 design reveal to a 2029 or 2030 completion estimate?
- How has rent performance on this specific building or block tracked against the citywide average, rather than assuming downtown moves as one market?
What this means if you're weighing downtown against everywhere else
None of this is a case against buying downtown. It's a case for treating downtown as a set of very different micro-markets rather than one neighborhood with one trajectory. The zoning code already drew that map for you. A tower that took two years to go from proposal to a still-empty lot is telling you the easy money for new supply has gotten harder to find, which is exactly the environment where an already-built, well-located, height-protected unit holds its ground better than the newest rendering on the block.
FAQ
Will OneVela block my view if I buy downtown? Only if your building sits within the specific sub-half-square-mile zone near Sahwatch and Costilla Streets where the 2009 code removed height limits. Most of downtown falls outside that boundary and is not eligible for a project of OneVela's scale.
Does the construction delay mean downtown demand is falling? It means the numbers a lender checks, primarily area rents and vacancy, have softened enough to make a 400-unit project harder to finance as of mid-2026. That's a signal about new-construction economics specifically, not a verdict on downtown as a place to live.
Is now a bad time to buy a downtown condo? That depends entirely on which building and which block. Softer citywide rent and vacancy numbers can mean less competition on resale units, particularly ones outside the zone where a future high-rise is even possible.
Downtown Colorado Springs isn't one market. It's several, and the line between them runs through a zoning map most buyers never look at. If you want a read on where a specific building or block actually sits before you write an offer, Innovative Moves is a good place to start that conversation. Let's Connect.
