After almost five years of urgent debate over housing affordability, the 2025 Colorado Legislature produced promising solutions for a bevy of affordable housing problems.
Colorado and metro Aurora residents even 20 years ago wouldn’t have taken anyone seriously who said that the metroplex would someday be like San Francisco, rife with million-dollar homes and unaffordable apartments.
That was then.
The average rent for a 700-square foot, 1-bedroom apartment in south-central Aurora is now $1,972, according to Zillow. It’s even $200 a month higher in Denver.
And while unaffordable housing has become a national problem, the Aurora metro area, and other regions in Colorado, are seeing a housing crisis as bad or worse than anywhere.
The problem of too many people having to spend too much of their money on housing has prompted all kinds of responses from state and local lawmakers, mostly just rhetoric.
During this legislative session, however, proposals have generally been more pragmatic and focused on elements of the problem.
Aurora has long been a place where seemingly endless land and water have made for numerous sprawling neighborhoods. At the same time, it’s long been a place where apartments, condos and townhomes are mixed among neighborhoods as far south and east as the city’s border.
Generally, the consensus among Democratic state lawmakers has been to build more multi-family housing as quickly as possible, in hopes of prompting the market to push rents down.
The culprit, many legislators point to, has been too many communities favoring builders of single-family homes on large lots, snubbing plans for apartments, condos and townhomes.
The theory is an oversimplification of a very complex and sprawling state. It’s impossible to overlook that Colorado, and especially the Aurora-Denver metroplex, is a victim of its own success.
Colorado is a vibrant, progressive state that easily draws good-paying employers. The growth spurred by all kinds of success stories continues to draw even more new residents to the state, and especially to the metro areas.
The handful of more-practical bills passed this year went to Gov. Jared Polis for a signature against a backdrop of relentlessly pricey rents.
Colorado’s housing affordability crisis continues to be a quagmire that is changing the communities we live in. Aurora, like many suburbs, was built as a community for middle-class laborers, fulfilling the “American Dream” for every American.
No longer. With an average single-family home sales price of nearly $500,000, fewer and fewer working-class families can qualify for a mortgage to make homeownership attainable. And with apartment rents for small families near $3,000 a month, saving money for a meaningful down payment on a house is nearly impossible.
While no single bill passed this session promises to quickly align the path to home ownership, or providing an apartment rent that allows for a car payment and groceries, a handful of bills promise to make some strides now and deliver a bigger impact later.
House Bill 1004 seeks to end the use of rental algorithms in Colorado. The state isn’t alone in trying to reel in what is essentially a national problem used to drive up rental prices across the country, experts here and in other states have testified. Basically, these services monitor and report apartment rents across communities and cities, allowing complex owners to fix prices and boost rents. HB 1004 pushes Colorado to the forefront of regulating these algorithm technologies. Coupled with a growing number of apartment units available across the region, and a subsequently growing number of vacancies, apartment rents could move down from their unaffordable highs.
The problem is creating a region where the working middle class and poor must move farther away from the metro area just to find affordable housing, or people must crowd into houses and apartments to make the numbers work.
Related to the nearly ruinous cost of housing and price fixing is an increasingly common practice among landlords of tacking on unapparent “fees” that should be covered in the cost of rent.
House Bill 1090 requires landlords and rental companies to transparently disclose all costs associated with a rental, ending so-called “hidden” fees, such as those often imposed for pest control or even weather maintenance.
Two bills that will have little immediate impact, but could work to help prevent a future housing and rental shortage that can artificially inflate housing market prices are House bills 1093 and 1273.
House Bill 1093 expands Colorado’s ban on so-called “anti-growth” measures among some counties and municipalities. Beginning in July, local governments will be prohibited from adopting zoning codes that reduce overall residential density. While it does not end local zoning and development control of cities when planning and platting developments, it does prevent exclusionary master land-use policies, leading to affordable housing in fewer and fewer communities.
House Bill 1273 helps reduce the cost of building multi-family apartments and condo complexes by allowing for single, fire-proof stairways in buildings as tall as five stories. Fire and other design officials are convinced that the single-stair buildings are safe, and they’re common in European cities. The savings are substantial, experts say. The change could prompt more builder interest in taller, denser, apartment and condo complexes.
While thousands of people and families need housing-cost relief now, no one has offered a plan that realistically can make it happen. Short of a mass exodus from the metro area, a near-impossible reality given the region’s strong and diversified economy, more building into the market will be the only appreciable solution.
In addition to these bills, state lawmakers worked again at measures to prompt the construction industry to build more condos and townhomes, filling a crucial need and shortage in the region’s housing market. But that’s a goal best realized by local city and county jurisdictions, able to create targeted incentives to land such projects.
With the constraints of the regular session out of the way, officials from the region’s cities, counties and state lawmakers should work together in the interim to find ways to work together next year to bring more condo and townhome projects to fruition.
There is no such thing as “affordable housing.” Housing essentially costs the same amount to build per square foot in any given market. What makes it “affordable” are governments taking your tax dollars to subsidize housing for other people. In some cases, builders charge you more so they can give a break to others. In other words, it is simply another welfare program paid for by you.
Another government solution is to increase the density of population by allowing more unrelated people to live in a home. This decreases the quality of life for those who bought homes in what were single family neighborhoods. All this does is buy time while more and more people move into an area they can’t afford. There are serious drawbacks to each of these solutions. I’ve seen “house flippers” remodel single family homes with walk-out basements put in 3 or more bedrooms in the basement and then advertise them as extra income properties. Buyers live upstairs and rent out basement rooms to sometimes 3 or 4 unrelated individuals. We now have a commercial property instead of a single family home.
If the chowderheads in the state house actually had any “pragmatic solutions,” they would have actually taken the measures to ensure it didn’t become a problem in the first place. These are the same idiots who said the Gallagher Amendment needed to be abolished, after all, and then acted surprised when personal property taxes exploded.
The reality is that they’re scrambling to try and cover up for their own lack of future-time orientation.
So now the Sentinel flip-flops? From your August 8 piece:
“The Sentinel staunchly supports the rights of communities like Aurora to address the needs of residents by empowering locally elected leaders to set a course for constituents that works best for them.”
Now Polis shoves these state statutes down our throats and issues executive orders threatening to withhold funding if cities don’t bend a knee and the Sentinel cheers him on — because why exactly?