Aurora City Council has approved a massive increase in allowable housing at Fitzsimons Innovation Community, a move intended to transform the bioscience campus into a full-fledged neighborhood.

The updated master plan raises the unit cap from 850 to 7,266 and enforces a minimum four-story height to drive density near jobs, transit and open space, the Denver Business Journal reported.

About 4,000 units are planned for mixed-use areas, and the rest will be in residential-only areas.

Fitzsimons CEO Kelly Brough called the change “an obligation” to honor the site’s history while shaping a future that attracts talent and builds community.

“We look at it as an obligation to both honor the history of this place, but also to envision a future that engages residents throughout Aurora in the new campus that has more green space than we have had, that has more housing and that has a relationship with Aurora Public Schools so that we’re truly bringing future generations onto the campus,” Brough told the DBJ.

The expansion comes as Colorado’s life sciences sector faces mounting pressure. Federal grant delays and investor hesitancy, including international pullbacks, have clouded 2025.

Nearly every company on the Fitzsimons campus relies on National Institutes of Health or National Science Foundation dollars, Brough said at a recent Bisnow panel. That funding has been slower to come under the Trump administration.

“When the going gets tough, the scrappy get going — and I think in Colorado we're a little scrappier than everybody else,” she said.

To get going, though, the plan must clear a final hurdle implemented by the city council: resolving some technical issues before building permits can be issued.

The Fitzsimons campus sits near North Peoria Street and East Montview Boulevard, just northeast of the Anschutz Medical Campus.