AURORA —The Brent Eley Foundation has begun construction on a second long-term housing and support center for pediatric cancer patients and their families that will help alleviate the need for more space and services.

Since 2009, Brent’s Place in north Aurora has provided a temporary home away from home for children and their families who are going through treatment for cancer at the Children’s Hospital of Colorado and need to be as close as possible to their doctors before and after treatments like chemotherapy or bone marrow transplants.

Brent’s Place originally opened in Denver in 1998 and relocated to Aurora 11 years later after Children’s Hospital moved to the Anschutz Medical Campus.

“We currently have children here all the way from 6 months old to 18 years old,” said Allen Browning, family services director for Brent’s Place. “With our offsite partners, we have a total of 28 apartments and two hospitality suites … but we always need more.”

Currently, Brent’s Place can serve about 40 percent of the long-term housing needs of qualified pediatric patients.

The new building, called Brent’s Place Too, will house more Children’s patients, and it also opens the door to serving patients from Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children and University of Colorado Hospital.

Last year, Brent’s Place started working with 21 Fitzsimons, the new apartment complex on Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority property, to house some of its adult clients. That partnership was expanded last month to include three children and family apartments as well as to help deal with the growing waiting list to get in to Brent’s Place.

“I have about 12 people on my priority list who can move in tomorrow, but I don’t have the space,” Browning said. “So we have to prioritize based on how far away they are, what their process is, how long they need to be here, and work with the hospital team to determine their unique need.”

The new building will double the number of patients seen annually at Brent’s Place to about 200. It will include 17 family apartments that each have two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room and a balcony; four studio suites; a movie and game room, play areas, outdoor recreational space, a kitchen and laundry rooms on every floor. There is no cost for the families to live at Brent’s Place while their child is receiving treatment.

The new Brent’s Place Too will be built directly behind the existing Brent’s Place at 11980 E. 16th Ave. The buildings will share a common outdoor courtyard. There will also be a playground and ball court for older children.

Browning said there are conceptual plans to build a third Brent’s Place on the same lot, as well as a fourth building that would serve as a general community space for things like appreciation and family events and maybe administrative offices. Those projects are dependent on separate capital campaigns.

Right now, the $8 million Brent’s Too project is more than half way funded, but the Brent Eley Foundation still needs about $2.5 million to ensure the finishing touches — TVs in every apartment, cable, Internet, beds, blankets, food, paint — are in place before families can begin to move in around June 2017.

Brent’s Place Too is being built by Prescient, a Denver-based company that assembles the vertical structure of projects offsite and then takes them to be assembled like building blocks once construction is nearing completion. It will take 15 days to assemble the building on site once the pieces are fabricated.

“For us, that was a good fit, because our families can’t be around a lot of dust, and so offsite construction will minimize that greatly,” said Rebekah Wells, Brent’s Place development director. “There won’t be loud hammering outside their windows, it will be clean and discrete while enabling us to expand.”

Megan Mitchell: 303-954-2650, mmitchell@denverpost.com or @Mmitchelldp