The suite of landmark zoning and land-use reform laws passed by Colorado lawmakers this year should help alleviate the housing crisis, national experts say, while catapulting the Centennial State into the ranks of other housing pioneers.
But those experts cautioned that the reforms seeded this winter and spring will take years to bear fruit. New laws signed in recent weeks likely will need frequent tending to ensure that they spur the building of new apartments and other residential development in line with the vision of lawmakers and Gov. Jared Polis.
“It’s important to keep reminding people: This is going to roll out over several years,” said Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution whose research focuses on housing and land use. “Take a deep breath. See how this works.”
She added: “It’s a really significant political accomplishment.”
In the coming years, Colorado will unroll five land-use measures that will allow for more density in areas with frequent transit service; more accessory-dwelling units, such as backyard cottages and garage apartments, in neighborhoods with single-family zoning; more unrelated roommates living together; and fewer parking requirements in some areas. Local governments also will face requirements for more strategic planning and housing studies. By and large, the reforms are targeted at the state’s heavily populated Front Range region.
Four national housing experts who spoke to The Denver Post said the legislation amounted to a comprehensive first package of reforms that parallel what a handful of other states have pursued — some for years, some only recently — in a bid to address their own housing crises.
But Colorado’s shiny new laws will need constant monitoring, including of local governments’ implementation of them, to ensure they accomplish their broad goal: to develop more housing across the Front Range.
While there’s no guarantee they will work, lawmakers’ intent is to push down prices and rents (by increasing the housing supply), to improve long-term planning and to bolster public transit use.
Colorado is short tens of thousands of housing units as its population has grown. The state is now among the most expensive places to buy a home or rent an apartment. Evictions hit record highs last year, and in Denver, they’re on pace to surpass that grim peak this year.
Faced with the new state intervention, local governments have taken pains to point out that they’ve pursued various housing projects of their own. They generally have opposed reforms as state overreach.
But local opposition often has frustrated the type of fundamental zoning reforms that experts say is critical to boosting supply and, in turn, lowering prices.
“There’s no silver bullet to the housing crisis, unfortunately,” said Muhammad Alameldin, a policy associate at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “This is going to take dedication and years of legislative effort. … The housing crisis can’t be solved in a year. But you have to start somewhere, and this is a much better start than California had in 2016.”
Catching up to other states
Colorado is far from the first state to force looser zoning rules in an attempt to kickstart housing development.
The growing embrace of land-use reform across the country has spanned from California to Massachusetts and Minneapolis to Tysons, Virginia. It comes as the United States grapples with a housing shortfall of millions of homes and apartments.
That shortage, experts and advocates say, is the result of chronic underbuilding since the Great Recession, coupled with restrictive local land-use regulations that prioritize large and costly single-family homes over apartments, condos, townhomes and duplexes.
Early evidence of those reforms elsewhere — particularly in Minneapolis — point to improved housing stock and lower rents, said Alex Horowitz, the project director at the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Housing Policy Initiative.
Many of the reforms elsewhere are still new. Massachusetts passed a density-near-transit bill in 2021. Florida allowed for apartments on commercial land last year. Montana passed land-use reforms last year, too, and just last week, Arizona lawmakers approved a bill allowing accessory-dwelling units, also known as ADUs, to be built on single-family plots.
Those other reforms’ DNA can be found in Colorado’s new laws, experts told The Post. But the striking thing is that the state managed to pass several major changes in one year, especially after a first attempt collapsed last year. That newfound success puts Colorado on the vanguard of land-use reform, the experts said.
Now state officials just need to ensure the policies are successful.
“What’s promising about Colorado’s response is that it is affecting a lot of different jurisdictions and affecting a lot of different types of development,” said Vicki Been, the faculty director of New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy and a former deputy mayor of New York City.
“Parking minimums affect a whole bunch,” she said, while ADUs allow for more development in low-density neighborhoods and the transit-oriented density bill is geared toward more urban neighborhoods. “So you’re seeing a more comprehensive approach.”
A need for “strong enforcement”
Colorado can learn lessons from other states, too.
California has worked for years on various reforms similar to those passed here. It has similar targeted density and housing-study laws. It’s also taken several tweaks over a period of years to improve that state’s ADU reforms.
But now California is building 28,000 ADUs per year, Alameldin said.
He and other experts said it takes enforcement, regular reporting and recurring legislative tweaks to ensure the reforms spur more housing. Most local governments in other states have complied with new land use reforms, they said. Some — now better able to sidestep local opposition — have embraced them.
But others, including in California and Massachusetts, have resisted.
That’s one reason why California had to keep updating its ADU laws, Been said: Local authorities kept finding loopholes. The success of Colorado’s laws — particularly the density measure — will come down to implementation and oversight, Horowitz said.
“What we have seen over many decades is that without strong enforcement, local governments will tend to dilly-dally,” Been added. “And they’ll be somewhat reluctant to step up and do what they’re supposed to do. But you have to balance that against the very strong desire for local control and the pushback that not having any local control can generate.”
That tension will likely be felt in Colorado.
The transit-density law was the centerpiece of the legislative package. It will require local government officials to set zoning goals allowing more housing density in transit-rich areas, generally within set distances of rail stations and higher-frequency bus routes. They’ll then need to demonstrate that they’re hitting those targets, while ensuring affordability.
Local governments have broadly opposed that and the other land-use reforms, and some experts cautioned that lawsuits may follow.
Most of the reforms passed this year won’t kick in for at least another year, if not several. The transit-density bill was stripped of two explicit enforcement mechanisms, including a provision to withhold tax money from noncompliant jurisdictions, to assuage local governments and moderate Democrats.
The law’s sponsors and backers say the state can still file lawsuits and force local governments to comply. Some opponents of the law have suggested the bill no longer has teeth and can’t truly be enforced. In a statement, Polis spokeswoman Shelby Wieman said Friday that the law was enforceable and that it was “ridiculous and irresponsible” to suggest otherwise.
“Any localities that refuse to follow the law would put themselves at major legal and financial risk for violating the laws of our state,” Wieman wrote.
Only the beginning?
The consistent refrain from the experts interviewed for this story is that the reforms will take time — time to implement, time to spur development and time to turn permits into construction.
Schuetz, from Brookings, predicted it would take at least three years before any new housing opens as a result of these reforms, and that’s only after the laws have been fully implemented. Alameldin said the true impact would depend on that implementation.
Been said officials shouldn’t panic if nothing’s changed in the next five years.
Another refrain is that lawmakers almost certainly are not done. That may mean additional tweaking of existing policies, as has repeatedly happened in California. Or it might mean a need for entirely new laws.
The embrace of land-use reforms is still so recent that, in some ways, it’s still experimental, Schuetz said, though she and others stressed that a growing body of research backs zoning changes as a means to increase supply and blunt price increases.
“Now the real work begins,” Been said. “But often it’s natural for both the legislature and the advocates to be like, ‘OK, we’re exhausted, we won. Mission accomplished.’ … But you can’t ever really say, ‘OK, we’re done.’ You’ve got to keep watching.”
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