The YMCA of the Pikes Peak Region’s redevelopment of its downtown Colorado Springs property remains on hold, more than four years after it was announced with great fanfare and embraced by city and community leaders as a high-profile part of the area’s ongoing public and private renaissance.

The organization hasn’t scrapped the makeover of its property, which sits on a downtown block bounded by Nevada and Platte avenues and Bijou and Weber streets, said President and CEO Boyd Williams. Likewise, the redevelopment of the property remains a priority for the YMCA’s senior leadership and board of directors, he said.

“We’re embarking on a new vision for the downtown Y,” Williams said.

Still, he was vague about the project’s direction. The YMCA is reworking its original project, but it’s premature to say what a revamped concept might look like and whether elements of the original plan might find their way into that new vision, Williams said.

There’s also no timetable to announce a revised project, he said.

“We’re not back to square one at all,” Williams said. “Am I disappointed? No. Things happen for a reason. And I think in the long run, we believe that this new vision will better serve the residents and constituents here in the downtown community.”

In December 2019, at a news conference attended by city and community leaders in the parking lot of a boarded-up service station on YMCA-owned property at Platte and Nevada, organization officials showed off color renderings and laid out details of the redevelopment.

At the time, they envisioned a three-story building with a state-of-the-art recreation and wellness center to be constructed on the northwest corner of the block and directly north of its existing facility.

Several stories of so-called workforce housing would top the building and fill a desperate need for lower-cost apartments for teachers, public safety workers and others who can’t afford pricier properties, officials said.

During the building’s construction, the YMCA’s existing facility, built in 1972, would have remained open to members. After completion of the new building, the existing facility was to be torn down and the site redeveloped with additional new uses that were to be determined, YMCA officials said at the time.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, however, caused an initial delay, Williams previously has said. As recently as late 2022, he said rising construction costs and interest rates were creating challenges for the project.

Now, the YMCA and Chicago-based Celadon Partners, an affordable housing developer that was to have secured the project’s financing, amicably ended their business relationship last year, Williams said.

Those same soaring construction costs and interest rates are the primary reasons Celadon no longer is involved, he said.

“They just couldn’t make the numbers work,” Williams said. “Increased cost of money, capital and increased costs of construction that hit Colorado over the last several years. They just couldn’t get the numbers to work.”

Celadon co-founders Scott Henry and Aron Weisner said they embraced the YMCA’s concept and believed the project would have provided sorely needed affordable housing in downtown Colorado Springs.

“We were incredibly excited about doing it, being able to get it done,” Weisner said.

But Henry and Weisner agreed the skyrocketing costs of borrowing and building made the project’s cost prohibitive at this time, and they and the YMCA mutually agreed to part ways.

Celadon, however, remains open to rejoining the YMCA’s project, they said.

“We’re hopeful, with the rate cuts coming, if there’s an opportunity to revisit the project in Colorado Springs, we would love to,” Henry said. “It was just sort of a perfect storm of costs that really impacted (the project).”

YMCA officials don’t yet have a price tag for a reimagined project, Williams said; in 2019, they said the cost could have approached $150 million. The organization now is seeking to identify those costs, how much fundraising it will have to do and what other entities might be involved, Williams said.

Williams acknowledged the YMCA is talking with multiple parties, local and outside the area, that would help study options for the organization. He declined to identify those parties and said it’s premature to say if any are candidates to partner with the YMCA on its downtown project.

“Right now we’re having conversations on what we believe could be the future of the downtown YMCA,” Williams said.

“We have a trajectory and a path that we think will be great for the downtown community,” he added, “but there’s still some pieces that need to be put in place.”

One thing for sure: the YMCA has hired a demolition crew to raze the shuttered service station at Platte and Nevada, which is surrounded by a chain-link fence and has been a target of vandalism. That work will take place “in the not too distant future,” Williams said.

Because the YMCA project remains on hold, the Downtown Partnership has removed it from a list of the area’s construction and investment projects that’s part of the advocacy group’s annual State of Downtown report released Thursday. The value of those projects — completed, under construction or planned — totals $2.3 billion since 2013.

Susan Edmondson, the Downtown Partnership’s president and CEO, said her group wants the estimated value of its development pipeline to accurately reflect projects that are in the works. The YMCA was de-listed — for now — as a result, she said.

Edmonson, however, said she’s optimistic the YMCA will be back with a project that will be “something incredible” that will help enhance the area. Over the last several years, downtown has seen the addition of hundreds of new apartments as well as the opening of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum and the Weidner Field multipurpose stadium.

“I have a lot of confidence,” she said.