This story was first published at Colorado Newsline.
DENVER | The two leading candidates for Colorado governor broadly agree on the need to streamline construction and supercharge the state’s housing supply to bring down costs for renters and first-time homebuyers.
But U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Attorney General Phil Weiser used a candidate forum focused on the issue Saturday to spar again over whose experience and approach would better position them to deliver those results as governor.
The two Democrats shared the stage at a forum focused on housing and transportation at the Denver Athletic Club, where hundreds gathered to hear the candidates answer detailed policy questions posed by representatives of the groups YIMBY Denver and Greater Denver Transit.
“Working with our state takes too long,” Weiser said of his approach to housing policy. “I’m going to have one chief housing officer report to me to make sure that we’re part of the solution, not part of the problem — and we’ve got to get local governments on the right page, with respect to starter homes.”
Bennet called his housing platform the most ambitious plan proposed by any candidate for governor in the country. He dismissed the idea of “adding more bureaucracy to the state,” promising instead that as Colorado’s chief executive, he would be its “housing czar.”
“We have to build housing for working people and for people that are joining our workforce — and we have failed to do it, I’m sorry to say, with Democratic administrations in Colorado for the last 15 years,” said Bennet. “We need to put a governor in who will make this their number one priority, and it’s mine.”
Colorado ranks among the 10 least affordable states for housing, as measured by the percentage of households spending 30% or more of their income on housing costs, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. State demographers estimate that Colorado’s housing shortfall — measured as “underproduction” of housing units — exceeded 100,000 units as of 2023.
The winner of the Democratic primary between Weiser and Bennet, scheduled for June 30, will be heavily favored to win the general election in November. Coloradans have elected only one Republican governor in the last 50 years.
Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, who is term-limited, made “more housing now” a signature policy objective in his second term, but legislative progress on the issue has been uneven. At the same time, a cooling housing market — driven by high interest rates, slowing in-migration and other factors — has dampened the rate at which new Colorado homes are being permitted and constructed.
During the 2023 legislative session, Polis backed an ambitious housing and land use bill, Senate Bill 23-213, which would have largely abolished single-family zoning in Colorado’s most populous communities. The bill faced strong opposition from local government groups and moderate Democrats representing suburban and mountain resort communities, who first watered down the bill substantially, and then killed it all together.
Since then, parts of SB-213 have been revived in piecemeal fashion, with lawmakers passing bills to legalize the construction of accessory dwelling units in most Colorado communities, require higher-density housing near public transit hubs, abolish minimum parking requirements and more. But some municipalities have failed to comply with the new laws, and Aurora and five other cities have joined a lawsuit alleging the state has infringed on their local land use authority.
Neither Bennet nor Weiser answered directly when asked whether local governments should face “consequences” for failing to pursue the state’s housing-supply goals.
“There is so much goodwill and so much leadership in our state, among the county commissioners, among the mayors, in the private sector — all over the state of Colorado,” Bennet said. “They just feel like they’ve been totally ignored.”
“We’re going to have to figure out how we create regional cooperation, regional planning, regional commitments, where everyone is part of this work,” Weiser said. “You’ve got to make sure you’re creating the right incentives, the right oversight, the right forms of accountability.”
After years of steep increases, rents in the Denver area have remained relatively flat since 2024, thanks to a surge in new apartment construction that largely predated the Legislature’s reforms. The number of new units under construction has declined sharply since then, causing analysts to predict that rents will begin to increase again this year.
Both candidates said they would sign a bill to ban algorithmic rent-setting, which Polis vetoed after its passage by Democratic lawmakers last year. Weiser touted his work as attorney general suing landlords that allegedly used those algorithms to fix prices, and a separate suit over deceptive advertising and junk fees.
Bennet said that while he supported many of the same policies to protect renters, Weiser’s focus on those lawsuits was a “cheap talking point.”
“I admire the work that Phil has done as attorney general,” he said. “We are not going to sue our way to more affordable housing in the state. … We are not going to sue our way to making this state a place where the next generation of Coloradans can call home.”
Bennet’s housing plan centers on a goal to make Colorado a state “where no one is forced to spend more than 30% of their income on housing.” About a third of all Colorado households — more than half of renters and 21% of homeowners — currently exceed that percentage, according to a 2025 report by Mile High United Way.
Bennet also faulted Weiser’s housing platform, which calls for the addition of 40,000 new “attainable owner-occupied housing units,” for promising only half of what the state needs.
“As I worked on my plans to say how much housing we could build, yes, I didn’t pick building all 80,000 units that we needed. Because I looked at it and said, getting half of that was an incredibly aggressive goal,” Weiser replied. “Government needs to think hard when we make promises. Can we keep them?”
As the supply of housing failed to keep up with Colorado’s 2010s population surge, the total market value of all residential property in the state rose from $483 billion in 2013 to over $1.3 trillion today, according to data from the state’s Department of Local Affairs.
Bennet acknowledged that for many of the roughly two-thirds of Colorado households that own their homes, the state’s housing crunch has represented a financial windfall.
“The reality is that people of my generation, and Phil’s generation, have benefited from a ridiculous increase in our asset prices, and we have rolled up the carpet on everybody else,” Bennet said.
Both he and Weiser criticized comments by President Donald Trump, who said earlier this month that he wants “to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes.”
“I’ve said very clearly up here today where I’m going to put my priority, which is making sure that we are building housing for working people in our state, and for the next generation of Coloradans,” Bennet said. “Even where that comes at the cost of seeing some equity value erode for the people in the biggest houses who … may have benefited over the last 10 or 15 years.”
Weiser called Colorado’s housing shortage an example of “market failure,” emphasizing the need to reduce permitting costs and incentivize the construction of lower-cost starter homes.
“What has happened in the last 16 years, since the Great Recession, (is that) the market got broke. We’ve got to fix it,” Weiser said.
“I don’t think Phil understands how the market works,” Bennet replied, stressing the role the state can play to intervene with affordable housing programs and “imaginative financing” to increase supply.
“We know what the market will do in Colorado, which is build housing for rich people,” he added. “The market has created the massive asset inflation that has made it impossible for young people and working people in our mountain communities to live there. It has made it impossible for teachers and working people in the Denver metro area to live here.”