The median home price in the Denver metro has more than doubled in a decade, pushing teachers, firefighters, and service workers into distant suburbs. Is this a policy failure, an inevitable market reality, or both?
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Add your commentBorn and raised in Globeville. My parents bought their house in 1987 for $62,000. It's worth $580,000 now. They can't afford to give it to me because they need the equity to retire. Think about that. The wealth is there, right in front of us, and it's completely inaccessible to the next generation unless you already have a foot in the door. This isn't a market. It's a trap.
My firefighter husband applied to Station 26 in Park Hill. Dream job. We did the math — we'd have to live at minimum 40 minutes away to afford anything on a single Denver Fire Department salary. He turned it down. Denver lost a good firefighter because Denver can't house its own public servants. How is that not a crisis.
my sister is a Denver public schools teacher. 14 years in the classroom. she drives 47 minutes from Commerce City every morning because thats the closest she could afford. we talk about how much we value teachers and then we make it literally impossible for them to live near the kids they teach. its embarrassing.
used to rent a 2br in Baker for $875 back in 2012. just looked up my old address. it's listed for $2,400 now. same unit. same slightly-uneven floors. probably same haunted boiler. I dont even feel nostalgic anymore, i just feel tired.
Hot take: the people most loudly complaining about affordability are also the ones who showed up to every zoning meeting to block the apartment building on their block. NIMBY-ism from existing homeowners is the single biggest policy failure here. Full stop.
Can someone explain to me why we keep approving luxury apartment towers on South Broadway and calling it affordable housing policy? A 'workforce housing' unit at $1,850/month is not workforce housing. That's just regular expensive housing with a PR spin slapped on it.
The RTD light rail expansion was supposed to spark affordable transit-oriented development. Instead it sparked luxury transit-oriented development. Every station area from Union Station to Englewood is now full of $3,200/month apartments. We literally built the infrastructure for density and then let the market capture all the value. Classic Denver.
Actually Denver does NOT have rent control — Colorado state law preempts municipalities from enacting it. So that's factually backwards. And the free market alone clearly hasn't solved it either since we're having this conversation. The answer probably involves public land trusts, inclusionary zoning with actual teeth, and funding for community land banks. None of which are glamorous or headline-grabbing, which is why no politician wants to champion them.
I grew up in Westwood and my whole crew has scattered. One friend is in Aurora, another moved to Pueblo, one left Colorado entirely for Kansas City. The actual neighborhood I grew up in, the culture, the people — it's gone. New coffee shop on every corner though, so at least there's that I guess.
okay so fun fact: Colorado actually has one of the highest rates of housing cost burden in the entire mountain west. over 35% of Denver renters spend more than 30% of income on rent. that's not a blip, thats structural. calling it 'inevitable market reality' is just a polite way of saying we decided this outcome was acceptable.
Actually the real culprit here is Airbnb and short-term rentals pulling thousands of units off the long-term market. Denver has something like 4,000+ active STR listings at any given time. That's 4,000 homes that could house actual residents. The city's STR ordinance has been a complete joke in terms of enforcement.
Anyone else notice how this debate always centers homeownership as the goal? What if we just made renting not miserable and insecure instead? Strong tenant protections, longer lease terms, limits on no-cause evictions. You can have a stable community without everyone owning property. That's how most of Europe works and nobody's crying about it over there.
I want to push back on the person saying supply fixes everything. Japan has loose zoning and Tokyo is affordable, yes, but Denver also has geographic constraints — mountains to the west, military installations, flood plains. You literally cannot build in every direction. The supply argument is real but it's not magic.
Moved here from Chicago two years ago and honestly the entitlement around this conversation is wild. Every city goes through this. San Francisco, Austin, Nashville. Denver is not special or uniquely victimized. Supply went up too slow for decades because locals kept voting down density. You made your bed.
Nope. Hard disagree with the doom and gloom. Denver has more housing units under construction right now than at basically any point in its history. The pipeline is finally there. Give it 5 years and the market corrects. Panicking and calling it 'permanent' is premature and honestly a little dramatic.
Honestly I think people are forgetting that Denver's population grew by like 20% in ten years. That's not a policy failure, that's people voting with their feet because Denver is a genuinely great place to live. What would you have the city do, build a wall? The demand is real and it's not going away.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure Denver has had rent control in place for years and it still hasn't helped much. Which proves regulation doesn't work and the free market is the answer.
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