In ski towns in western Colorado in 2005, risk was everywhere, but in a way that felt exciting. I liked the brag of drinking too much, and I was too naïve to notice harder drugs. Climate change seemed theoretical, and no one I knew had died in the mountains yet.

Corporate entities were just starting to binge-buy resorts while I somehow thought that living in my car was cool and I could exist like that forever.

But myths are complicated things to keep alive, and I eventually left ski towns to work as a writer, already seeing the ski-bum dream changing. I saw friends struggling to build careers, families and community while still chasing the fragile dream that a powder day topped almost everything.

So recently, I went back to see what was going on, to try to track the evolution of what had been my own obsession. I looped through mountain towns across the West, from Aspen to Victor, Idaho and Big Sky, Montana, to assess the current state of ski bums.

What I found was that everyone trying to build a life in those towns was struggling, from my old colleagues who had stuck around and wished they’d bought real estate to “lifties” fresh out of school.

“A lot of people here are living a fantasy I can’t obtain,” said Malachi Artice, a 20-something skier working multiple jobs in Jackson, Wyoming.

At the most basic level, the math just didn’t work. In most mountain towns, it’s now nearly impossible to work a single full-time service job, the kind that resort towns depend on, and afford rent. The pressure shows up in nearly everything, including abysmal mental health outcomes like anxiety and depression.

Ski towns have some of the highest suicide rates in the country, and social services haven’t expanded to meet demand. Racial gaps are also widening in an industry that often depends on undocumented immigrants to fill the poorly paid, but necessary, jobs it takes to keep a tourist town running.

On top of all that, abundant snowfall, the basis of a ski resort’s economy, is getting cooked by climate change.

And sure, you can argue skiing is superficial and unimportant, but ski towns — some of the most elite and economically unequal places in the country — are microcosms for the way our social fabric is splitting.

Ski towns face crucial, complicated questions: Can they build affordable housing and also preserve open space? What happens when health care workers or teachers won’t take jobs because they can’t find a way to live in the community they serve? Will a town willingly curb growth when that’s what supports the tax base?

There are no easy answers because the problems are entrenched in both that slow-moving nostalgia that stymies change, and in the downhill rush of capitalism, which gives power to whoever pays the most: The housing market always tilts toward high-end real estate instead of modestly priced homes for essential workers.

What we value shapes our lives, and so I think we must hold the ski industry to higher standards. If these rarefied places can find ways to support working as well as leisure-based communities, they could serve as lessons for change elsewhere.

During my tour, I saw necessary workers in the ski industry facing hard economic choices, but I also saw positive, community-scale change. In Alta, Utah, for instance, the arts nonprofit Alta Community Enrichment added mental health support when its employees reported an urgent need.

If ski-resort towns are going to survive, the lives of their workers need to matter, and that means caring about them — from affordable housing to accessible mental health support.

Heather Hansman is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is the author of Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns and the Future of Chasing Snow, and lives in Durango.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

They range from seasoned all-weather campers to a family of Venezuelan refugee newcomers wearing shorts who wandered up to VOA’s mission downtown at 2877 Lawrence St. recently – as temperatures plunged to 25 degrees. They were among the tens of thousands who found hot meals and a place to stay at VOA facilities around the state. The Venezuelans got warmer clothes, coats, and gloves.

Needs are increasing due to “the current times in Colorado and everywhere else in the United States,” VOA vice president Faustine Curry said on her way to a Christmas party with low-income seniors at VOA’s Sunset Towers on Larimer Street. “Costs of living are high. Inflation is high.”

“We have a waiting list for our Meals On Wheels programs for elderly residents who can’t easily go out. We have waiting lists at many of our affordable housing facilities.  A lot of people are looking for a place to start their lives moving in a positive direction.”

VOA’s capacity to help its clientele is increasing, too.

A  faith-based organization, VOA was founded in 1896 by Maud Booth and her husband, Ballington, who established VOA’s westernmost mission at the time in Denver at that Lawrence Street site. The facility was renovated last year. VOA’s priority has been helping older adults, children, families, and military veterans. Driven by 400 employees on an annual budget of $40 million, VOA now operates 42 facilities around Colorado, promising “a hot lunch for anyone who needs food.” The facilities provided help, including temporary housing, counseling, and other guidance, for more than 100,000 clients this past year.

Construction contractors are scheduled to break ground this month on one of VOA’s most ambitious projects to create a full-service temporary housing complex – done in partnership with the city of Denver using $17.7 million in city bond and federal funds. Launched under former Mayor Michael Hancock, this project jibes with Mayor Mike Johnston’s priority of ensuring shelter for the city’s growing population of homeless residents. Construction crews are scheduled to replace the former 1960s-era Aristocrat Motor Hotel at 4855 W. Colfax Ave., near the Xavier Street intersection, with the five-story VOA Colorado Theodora Family Hotel — a place with underground parking for up to 150 non-paying guests in 60 rooms.

The design incorporates a grassy courtyard space envisioned as a safe zone where children can play. The hotel is scheduled to open in the spring of 2025.

A public elementary school nearby can accept the children, Curry said. “Children need to be in school.”

Guests will receive hot meals delivered from VOA’s central kitchen facility in Commerce City.

The idea is for temporary stays, as brief as possible, she said. VOA’s strategy for decades has been based on the idea that, once basic needs are met, people can pursue personal goals and improve their quality of life.

“Faith-based” doesn’t exclude guests, Curry added. “We are accepting of anyone.”

Facility supervisors do enforce behavioral rules. “At our new family hotel, we would love to be able to support and help more families. They need to hold up their end of the deal, which is to not use drugs and work to progress themselves forward. Then they can use our case services to get their lives into the next step – a successful plan to find permanent housing.”

Volunteers of America Colorado

Address: 2660 Larimer St., Denver, CO 80205

Number of employees: 400

Founded: 1896

Number of clients served in 2023: more than 100,000

Annual budget: $40 million

She was one of the first people who moved into a former hotel in Houston that served as a center to help homeless people navigate their way to more stability. She credits the transitional housing facility and programs launched as part of “The Way Home,” the large Texas city’s nationally recognized homelessness-reduction strategy, for the fact that she now lives in an apartment she loves, alongside her adopted dog, Violet. It’s also where she decided to tackle her alcoholism, getting sober.

“You don’t ever want to be in those shoes under a bridge — going through a hurricane, going through the cold, going through the winds, going through hot weather, you name it,” recalled Eddins, 63, of her life in 2021, while sitting on her living room couch. “It’s a nightmare. It really is.”

New Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has invoked Houston as “the best model in the country” and an inspiration for his own plan to move the city’s homeless population off the streets in much larger numbers than his predecessors achieved, starting with 1,000 people by the end of this month. To better assess just how well Houston’s system has worked, The Denver Post visited the city and spoke with the leaders responsible for its 11-year-old strategy — as well as both people who have been helped and those who are still waiting for a hand up.

The Post found that while broad elements of Houston’s plan are similar to Johnston’s emerging playbook, there are key differences in the approaches and the timelines. Houston’s focus is on getting people into permanent housing while Denver largely is relying, at least for now, on temporary options.

Metro Houston’s leaders built the political will, along with reprioritizing the city and federal money long poured into homelessness, to pursue a uniform strategy with the area’s nonprofit providers. The city has weathered sometimes-fierce neighborhood pushback against new homeless housing, but The Way Home has been lauded by homeless advocates as a data-driven prototype for success.

Houston’s system places some hurdles in front of people who are homeless before they can get into permanent housing, and the system isn’t perfect: Street homelessness is still part of the landscape, especially among people who struggle with addiction or mental health problems.

But as city leaders from across the country try to build momentum for real change, they’ve looked for lessons from Houston’s reduction of unsheltered homelessness by about 63% in a decade.

“You can design a better process, and Houston did,” said former Mayor Annise Parker, who began leading the strategy shift in 2011.

On a warm early October afternoon, downtown Houston, the center of the nation’s fourth most populous city, wasn’t devoid of homeless people, but visible signs were far less apparent in the bustling core than they are in Denver. Tents were set up in a couple of places and small clusters of people were living under highway overpasses, but those largely were occurring a good distance from retail storefronts and businesses.

In and near downtown Denver, entire blocks this year have had tents and personal belongings scattered along the sidewalks, sometimes in front of businesses or apartment buildings — though the city has cleared several under Johnston’s House 1,000 initiative, with their residents relocated to hotels temporarily.

Houston’s progress has hit some snags. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey’s destruction pushed more people into homelessness. And during and after the pandemic, the economic pressures facing most cities, including rising rents — even in relatively affordable Houston — resulted in more people living outside after the city had achieved its lowest level of street homelessness.

In the last two years, through October, the city “decommissioned” more than 113 encampments where a combined 700 or so people lived, said Marc Eichenbaum, the special assistant for homeless initiatives to current Mayor Sylvester Turner.

What enabled those moves was the opening of the city’s navigation center, first piloted at a hotel — where Eddins passed through — and then, at the start of this year, moved to a converted former school with 100 beds spread in dorm-style bedrooms. Eichenbaum said federal pandemic aid helped pay for the nearly $7 million facility, which serves as a place for residents to stay while providers find them more permanent housing options. The nonprofit group Harmony House operates it.

Photos of past guests line the walls in the hallway, many of their faces beaming. That’s how Eddins said she felt when she walked into the first navigation center in late 2021, after leaving the bridge.

“I felt like I was in heaven. It’s like your feet are lifted up off the ground,” she said.

From crisis point to maximizing “the life boat”

A dozen years ago, Houston’s homeless population was at a crisis point, ranking as the sixth largest in the country. The annual point-in-time count for the Houston region found an estimated 8,538 people, or 1 in every 300 residents, were homeless — more than half of them unsheltered.

The next year, in 2012, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development named Houston a priority community for addressing homelessness. The designation brought federal funding and technical assistance, along with a mandate to follow a research-supported strategy called “housing first.”

That meant getting people who were chronically homeless and living on the streets a place to live as quickly as possible, ahead of all other concerns. Support services such as addiction treatment or mental health counseling — if the tenants wanted them — would follow. The model, which has its critics, is based on the concept that people can’t meaningfully change their lives if they don’t first have a safe, stable place to live.

It didn’t take much to get Parker on board. She’d already seen the fruits of a federally backed program that Houston participated in, successfully moving 101 homeless veterans into housing in 100 days — an initiative the city would later scale up.

Parker, the mayor from 2010 to 2016, says not every aspect of Denver’s developing homelessness strategy under Johnston can look like Houston’s, though Johnston also is aiming for a housing-first approach. But Parker believes every U.S. city can significantly reduce its homeless population by learning from the sustained improvements in Houston.

“In dealing with housing and homelessness, we’re all passengers in the Titanic,” Parker said, analogizing the sinking ship to cities’ attempts to get everyone housed in the face of larger societal forces. Among those are an insufficient supply of affordable housing; too little access to mental, behavioral health and substance use treatment; and inadequate supports for young adults leaving the foster care system.

“What I was able to do in Houston is maximize the use of the lifeboat,” Parker said.

And she had a lot of help. All the players from local governments and nonprofit groups came together to assess what was working and what wasn’t in metro Houston’s past approaches. That included service providers having to “put some of their egos aside” and altering their programs’ approaches, said Mike Nichols, CEO of the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County.

The coalition was appointed by a steering committee as the lead coordinating agency. Having a nonprofit lead came with advantages, Nichols said, such as being able to raise money from private donors, recruiting volunteers who could donate their professional services, and advocating for housing solutions on multiple fronts. Nonprofits also can pivot quickly during crises, such as the pandemic, without as much political interference.

“This is a model for solving social problems,” Nichols said of Houston’s homeless response system. But, he added, “this doesn’t happen overnight.”

Parker said she took advantage of the powers given to her office to push initiatives. She said she tried to follow the data and to ensure everyone understood the plan — and if providers wanted a piece of the city’s allotment in federal funding, they had to follow it.

“At that point, I just brute-forced it and used up a lot of political capital,” she said.

Programs see success — along with challenges

With more programs now in place, Houston’s The Way Home includes rapid rehousing options for people who need short-term assistance, often due to economic conditions, and who don’t have a disability preventing them from working. And it provides permanent supportive housing for the “chronically homeless.”

It’s this latter group that’s targeted for the most help, but they also face high hurdles. Not just anyone can get in line for an apartment. And once there, a small portion of their income contributes to the rent. In Eddins’ case, she pays a portion of her Social Security money.

To be considered chronically homeless under federal funding guidelines, a person must be able to prove that they’ve experienced homelessness for at least a year continuously, or for a combined 12 months over the course of three years, and also have a disabling condition.

Outreach workers from several participating agencies and partners use a standardized assessment to rank each client’s needs. The goal of the system, according to the coalition, is to ensure that “any door is the right door” — meaning that a person goes through the same intake process, and has access to the same housing or other help, no matter which provider they come in contact with.

The Way Home also offers programs aimed at shoring up families facing housing instability to prevent them from becoming homeless.

Before a bus took Eddins from the small bridge encampment to the navigation center two years ago, she’d spent nearly four months living under the structure, she said. She has had medical problems since she was young, and after her parents died, she lost the home she had shared with them and spent years living in various temporary accommodations.

She ended up under the bridge in 2021 after being discharged from a hospital following treatment for a problem with her bladder, she said.

Four other people were living on Eddins’ side of the bridge at the time. One person had left before outreach workers could take him to the navigation center, while another left the center and went back to living on the streets, according to The Way Home’s data-tracking system. The other two, like Eddins, moved into permanent housing and remain housed.

“I’m extremely proud of myself,” Eddins said of her newfound stability in an apartment, one that’s full of plants that spill out onto the balcony.

She and the others are among the success stories the homeless coalition cites for The Way Home’s continuum of programs. In 2022, about 81% of the people who were placed in permanent housing remained housed after a year. In rapid rehousing programs, the data shows, 83% of people who were placed had not returned to homelessness within two years, and at least two-thirds of them ended up in permanent housing after their time-limited stay ended.

Getting people enrolled requires significant legwork. For several hours on an October day, Fernando Torres and Otha Rice drove around to various parts of the city, trying to track down specific people they’d been assigned through their outreach work with an organization called Avenue 360.

As they made their way through the city, Torres reached in his pocket, grabbed his phone and texted a man he’d been working with for months on getting his documentation ready to get into permanent housing. But he couldn’t reach him. He tried to call him — no luck there, either.

So the outreach workers drove to an encampment known as “The Grove,” where at least 100 tents were scattered across a grassy area downtown, just blocks from Minute Maid Park, the Houston Astros’ stadium.

With a photo of the client in hand, they struck out.

Later, Torres was able to find another person he was helping to verify his 12 months of homelessness so the man could get on the list for permanent housing. The man met Torres at a convenience store, where the clerk attested that she had known the man to be homeless for at least three months. It was progress.

They drove the man back near the street where he was staying. The white outreach van, labeled “Street Outreach Mobile Unit” with a red, blue and yellow wrap depicting houses, made multiple stops that day, including at an underpass where the workers searched for a client. The outreach workers also met new people living on the streets or under bridges, listened to their stories and figured out whether they could connect them to programs for help.

Addressing homelessness and its complexities is a challenge for many cities, and Rice said part of the problem is that “people are dealing with it like it’s a political issue, and it’s not. It’s a humanitarian issue.”

Navigating through local resistance

But Houston’s mayors have run into plenty of local politics as The Way Home has developed. Local resistance has also been a challenge at times for nonprofit leaders whose organizations build affordable and supportive housing.

Most recently, the opening of the city’s navigation center in Houston’s low-income Fifth Ward neighborhood was delayed because of neighborhood pushback.

“People don’t want this in our community — we’re up against enough,” resident Sandra Edwards told the City Council last year, according to the Houston Chronicle. The people in the low-income neighborhood were already struggling, she said.

City leaders put a pause on the project as they called community meetings and promised improvement projects in the neighborhood as part of the development package. They also promised that any services available to formerly homeless people in the center also would be offered to community members in the area.

That reduced some of the opposition, but others stood firm. The center opened early this year.

“Even after educating folks, there are going to those folks who will never change their mind,” said Eichenbaum, Mayor Turner’s special assistant for homeless initiatives. “And so then it takes political will to say, ‘I’m going to go in a direction that not everybody is 100% supportive of so I can get everybody the results that they want.’ ”

In Denver, Johnston has weathered neighborhood opposition to plans for a series of temporary micro-communities of tiny homes or other shelters. His House 1,000 plan also is making use of former hotels.

Denver’s position now, with Johnston declaring homelessness an emergency, shows how progress can recede over time as new challenges arise — in this case, the city’s skyrocketing rents as people flocked to Denver in the 2010s.

Officials and providers in Houston recalled viewing Denver’s data-driven approach to homelessness as a model more than 15 years ago. Joy Horak-Brown, the executive director of an affordable housing development nonprofit called New Hope Housing, said she visited Denver in 2007 and remembered stopping by old apartments above retail spaces that had been made available to the homeless.

Now it’s Denver and its neighbors that are sending delegations to Houston.

Over the last three years, Denver’s homeless population increased by more than 48.5%, according to the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative. The city’s 2023 point-in-time count, which occurred over a single day in January — and which advocates say likely misses people — reported 1,423 unsheltered people in Denver, with another 4,395 in various forms of shelter. Metro-wide, the respective totals were 2,763 and 6,302.

Johnston, who took office in July, has pledged to end street homelessness in Denver by the end of his term in 2027. But while temporary solutions are rolling out, few details have been fleshed out publicly for later plans for permanent housing.

Getting people into permanent housing

Houston officials have commended Johnston’s ambitions, but they say both temporary and permanent housing should be in place to maximize the impact.

“The Catch-22 is that building temporary facilities is on the assumption that you have long-term housing for them to exit and go into,” Eichenbaum said. “… Putting people into a temporary facility takes lots of resources, time and money — and you’re not getting any reductions in homelessness” without the permanent housing.

In an interview, Johnston countered that Denver was making progress on that front, securing 500 housing vouchers through a partnership program for people who will transition out of the micro-communities. The city also is developing plans to provide more rapid rehousing — paying at least some portion of a person’s rent for three or four months to help them recover financially until they can become self-sufficient.

“Those are the times you need the most services,” Johnston said. “It’s once you’ve applied for that job, gotten it worked for three or four weeks, saved some money, reconnected to your family, gotten some help for your mental health needs — now you’re ready to actually go out to your own unit.”

Still, he acknowledged that in higher-rent Denver, finding permanent housing for people who leave shelters will be the biggest challenge.

In Houston, some of The Way Home’s programs are aimed at spurring more permanent housing — including new apartment complexes — while others enlist existing apartments and homes scattered across the area.

The coalition and its partners established the “Landlord Engagement Team” in 2019 to work with rental owners and property managers. The coalition pays market-rate rents, with the cost covered by vouchers and a portion of a tenant’s income.

About 70% of the properties signed up are multi-family buildings or communities, and the other 30% have individual landlords, according to the agency’s data. There are still too few available rental units to meet the demand in a tight market, but officials say it’s an important part of Houston’s response.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when college campuses closed, Jamil Hasan found himself in a predicament: He was losing money on vacant apartment units that he previously had no trouble filling. About 80% of the more than 70 apartment units he and his wife had acquired and renovated near Texas universities sat empty, a situation that persisted as college students returned to classes remotely.

Then Hasan learned about the coalition’s landlord program.

“My model was a perfect fit,” he said. Now most of his properties, which are split-level homes divided into apartments, have a mix of formerly homeless tenants and students.

Denver’s mayor has a similar idea in the works. His administration last month announced a $400,000 partnership with a nonprofit called Housing Connector that uses Zillow and other tools to find apartments in the city that are open. Plans call for the organization to reach out to landlords and negotiate lease rates and contracts for those willing to house formerly homeless people.

Cara Conrad, one of Hasan’s tenants in Houston, said the housing program changed her life. She’d been homeless for more than three years — a trajectory she attributed to multiple factors, including being sexually assaulted as a child, addiction problems, time spent in jail, medical challenges and family losses.

She got help, and in July she was able to get a housing voucher.

“It’s still emotional,” Conrad said. “I’m really proud of myself. … I had to go through a lot to get to where I am right now.”

Conrad said she’s not going to do anything that would jeopardize it and put her back on the streets. Talking about her apartment and the new stability she’s found, she mentioned her favorite spot: her bedroom closet.

The first thing she did when she moved in, she said, was hang up a shirt — taking satisfaction that she finally had found a safe place for her belongings.

It was the fourth and, so far, the largest action at an encampment yet as part of Mayor Mike Johnston’s House 1,000 homelessness initiative. With another mass relocation planned in the coming days at an encampment near East 48th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard, administration officials say the city is on track to shelter more than 500 people by the middle of next week as part of the effort that has been Johnston’s primary focus since he was sworn in in July.

“After we bring people indoors from these two encampments, we will be more than halfway to the mayor’s stated goal,” Johnston spokesman Jose Salas said.

The online dashboard tracking the administration’s progress showed that 317 people had been moved off the streets and into shelter or housing as of Thursday afternoon. That will be updated in the days ahead once the relocation work is complete, Salas said.

The Johnston administration previously carried out an encampment closure in the area of 20th and Curtis streets, relocating 61 people in that effort, which concluded Nov. 1, according to a new release at that time. Thursday’s action area was much larger, covering rights of way on both sides of 20th from Stout Street to Curtis and both sides of Curtis from 20th to Broadway. A map included as part of a legal notice providing residents with seven days’ warning of the action also showed 21st Street between Champa and Curtis as part of the cleanup area.

The city is still working on a final tally of how many people living in tents and other makeshift shelters in the area were relocated Thursday. Derek Woodbury, a spokesman with Denver’s Department of Housing Stability, said three bus trips were required to move everyone who accepted the shelter offer.

“Outreach staff worked in this area over the past several days. During this time, we identified well over 100 individuals for the move, and staff visited the encampment daily to provide housing-focused services as well as behavioral health, substance misuse, harm reduction and emergency medical services,” Woodbury said in an email.

The residents were moved to a former DoubleTree Hotel at 404 Quebec St. in Councilwoman Shontel Lewis’ District 8. Lewis appeared alongside Johnston Thursday morning at a news conference

Lewis repeatedly has highlighted that her district is carrying a heavy share of the load of the House 1,000 effort, with multiple hotel properties being used as noncongregate shelters and a forthcoming micro-community in the parking lot of one of those hotels.

Next week, the administration will relocate people living on the streets in her district when buses pull up to the encampment near 48th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard. Lewis said she personally informed some of the people there they were going to be given shelter and said some shed tears of joy.

“You know, there are folks who have been living unsheltered in that particular encampment for months or even a year in some cases,” she said. “There’s a person in the encampment who has cancer. There is an individual within the encampment who is a veteran, who served this country.”

Lewis said temporary shelter is an important step, but she is looking forward to the city taking on new approaches to developing more housing next year including via a study of social housing that will be funded through the 2024 budget.

Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.

The “Roadmap to Colorado’s Future: 2026” lays out six broad objectives, largely targeted at increasing housing supply and affordability while seeking to dovetail those efforts with improved access to transit and the state’s climate goals. Polis unveiled the plan at an affordable apartment complex near a transit stop in Lakewood, highlighting the connection he’s made in developing more transit and more housing.

Though the governor repeatedly stressed the roadmap as a vision for the state to pursue, the 34-page document further cemented Polis’ broader desire to reform land use and zoning across Colorado, along with calls for more strategic growth to maximize resources, prepare for wildfires and protect the state’s outdoor areas.

Zoning reform and coordinated strategic planning are policy solutions that the governor and other Democrats see as a panacea to several of the state’s current and future ills, from climate change to housing and transit development to water limitations. The roadmap comes seven months after Polis’ marquee zoning proposal collapsed in the Capitol and four weeks before legislators return to Denver to debate the issue at length once again.

“We have too many obstructions that get in the way of building more homes, especially starter homes — homes in the 200 (thousand), 300 (thousand) range, multifamily and apartments,” Polis said in an interview. His office previously released similar roadmaps to address climate change. “What we’re really seeking to do is create a vision, a compelling vision, for Colorado’s future that’s more livable, more affordable, protects our water and our open space.”

The plan, which is pegged to the state’s 150th birthday as well as the end of Polis’ second term in 2026, details a list of worrying data points about Colorado’s present and future: The state, Polis’ office wrote, is the 12th most expensive for renters and sixth most expensive for homebuyers. Nearly three-quarters of renters making less than $75,000 spend more than 30% of their income on rent. Crop land is decreasing. Homelessness has increased.

What’s more, the report notes, the state is going to continue growing. Thirty-five thousand new households are expected to move here each year through the end of this decade.

“Unless we direct this growth in thoughtful ways, and build enough housing in existing communities and near job centers, this reality will drive up the cost of housing and put additional pressure on open space, our quality of life, affordability, and our environment,” Polis’ office wrote.

Collaboration with local governments

To hit the broader vision, the roadmap calls for eliminating exclusionary zoning practices and promoting a mix of housing types, a nod to the need for condos and multi-unit buildings, as opposed to single-family homes. Polis specifically called out making it easier for Coloradans to build accessory-dwelling units, also known as carriages houses or granny flats. ADUs are regulated differently across the state. Polis set aside money in his budget proposal to subsidize ADU construction, and a bill to allow for the building of more ADUs is expected to be introduced in the coming legislative session.

Other strategies include updating housing regulations and modernizing “regulatory and zoning policy”; supporting expedited local government permitting and housing construction; and focusing on more walkable neighborhoods and development near existing and future transit corridors.

While acknowledging that more renewable and electric energy will be a “major” part of the state’s climate change strategy, the roadmap argues that “the design of both buildings and transit systems over the coming years will have pollution, traffic and cost-of-living implications for decades, further emphasizing the importance of expanded transit and smart building design.”

In a way, the Lakewood development where Polis unveiled the plan Thursday is a perfect synthesis of land-use reformers’ ideals. The building charges $950 a month to rent a one-bedroom unit, and it’s available to people making 30% to 60% of the area’s median income. It’s near public transit and neighborhood schools. It also has baked-in requirements to keep it available for lower-income renters. Affordable housing advocates have repeatedly said they support land-use reforms, so long as they include affordability requirements.

Local governments, meanwhile, were strident critics earlier this year of the governor’s proposed land-use reforms, which would’ve legalized ADUs across the state and eased zoning restrictions in transit areas. They promise to be similarly opposed in 2024, arguing that zoning decisions are best made by local officials.

Polis said his plan doesn’t focus solely on zoning reform and noted that he was seeking to collaborate with local governments, including with millions of dollars in incentives to make reforms more palatable. His roadmap includes several examples of local governments’ own efforts to improve housing, and he and other speakers pitched the roadmap as a collaborative vision.

“Your skepticism is not just valid — it’s essential,” Peter LiFari, who runs Adams County’s housing authority, said of reform skeptics. “…How do we navigate growth without forsaking the essence of our Coloradan identity?”

Polis and other proponents of reform have argued that the housing crisis — and the broader climate and water challenges facing Colorado — don’t care about city or county boundaries and that coordination, including on a statewide level, is required to provide more housing and improve transit.

“Move as fast as possible”

Polis pitched his vision as a roadmap not just for the coming decades but for the rest of his term, though he said Thursday that there weren’t specific benchmarks to judge if his roadmap is coming to fruition.

Proponents acknowledge that land-use reforms take time to bear fruit. But there’s an urgent need in Colorado for renter relief now: Evictions are surging across the state and have already hit record levels in Denver. Polis’ roadmap encourages interventions to prevent and reduce homelessness, but it otherwise focuses on his preferred, supply-side solution to the housing crisis of development and strategic growth.

“We are going to partner with the legislature and with local government to implement this roadmap,” the governor said. “We believe that Colorado needs to move as fast as possible and, in a perfect world, we would have moved a couple of years ago on this route, but it’s not too late.”

Echoing what land-use reformers have long advocated, the roadmap argues that improved transit availability can cut down on car pollution and ease congestion. Polis’ office argues that the state “should be on the forefront of rail infrastructure in the United States,” and Polis touted the $500,000 in seed money that the state will receive from the federal government to bolster a Front Range passenger rail system.

The roadmap calls for increasing transit options; improving new and existing networks while planning for new ones; and promoting a complete and connected system.

“Zoning is a part of any discussion, but it’s a lot broader than zoning,” Polis said. “It’s about tax credits for placemaking, including art spaces. It’s about reforming and investing in transit. It’s about Front Range rail. It’s about the kind of Colorado that we want to live in. That saves people time and money, reduces traffic improves air quality, and it’s fundamentally more affordable.”

Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.

Buyers closed on 2,664 homes and condos last month, a 15.9% drop from the 3,169 homes sold in October. November closings were down 14% year-over-year and through the first 11 months of 2023, with the overall sales volume is down by nearly a fifth.

Properties took longer to sell last month, with the median number of days a listing spent on the market shooting up from 16 in October to 22 in November. A year ago, the median was 21 days.

There were 6,684 active listings available to buyers at the end of November, which is down 10.7% from October’s 7,482 and up 6.9% from the inventory available a year earlier. At the current pace of sales, the market has about 2.5 months of supply of listings.

In one of the bigger declines in the report, new listings, a signal of how motivated sellers are, dropped 29% from October and they are flat with November 2022 levels.

“It’s not that sellers don’t desire to sell their current home and move, it’s that they don’t desire to part with a low APR rate on their current mortgage and trade it for a rate that could be three to four times higher,” said Susan Thayer, a member of the DMAR Market Trends Committee member and area Realtor, in comments accompanying the report.

“Sellers who desire to sell and price their homes accordingly will find there are still plenty of buyers out there – even in the top price range of our market,” she said.

The median or mid-point price of a single-family home sold in November was $625,000, which was down 3.1% from the median price of $645,000 in October. Even with that decline, the median sales price remains up 1.6% from a year earlier.

For condos and townhomes, the median sales price was $418,475, down 1.14% from October’s sales price of $423,300. Measured annually, the median sales price remains up 2.1%.

Libby Levinson-Katz, chairwoman of the DMAR Market Trends Committee and an area realtor, said that a drop in interest rates last month helped spur activity and that continued drops will boost demand going forward.

“Depending on where rates trend, we may see bidding wars return before we know it,” she predicted in comments accompanying the report.

Get more real estate and business news by signing up for our weekly newsletter, On the Block.

“It was very traumatizing,” Sadler said of the midnight fire about a year ago. “I would have dark moments of depression. We cried it all out in San Antonio and then we left.”

Left for Denver, where Sadler’s brother and sister-in-law live. Soon after arriving in the Mile High City, the 38-year-old mother of kids ranging in age from 10 to 18 was referred to Jewish Family Service, a 151-year-old human services organization based in southeast Denver, for help finding work and a home.

Jewish Family Service, which is part of The Denver Post’s Season to Share program, found Sadler’s family a place in Lakewood to rent, and the organization covered the $1,750 rent out of the box. But Sadler said she has been covering a larger portion of it every month over the last year and plans soon to take on the burden fully.

“I’m really confident now. I know I’ll be able to pay my rent,” she said. “If you’re not willing to put in that much, you’re not going to prosper.”

Jewish Family Service serves an average of 32,000 people a year across more than 30 programs ranging from mental health support to aging services to housing stability to a refugee resettlement program. Last year, the organization helped 68 Afghan evacuees, finding them safe housing and matching them with “cultural mentors” to teach them to grocery shop, navigate public transportation and enroll in Medicaid.

“Our numbers have skyrocketed because of all the migrants coming into Colorado,” said President and CEO Linda Foster. “We serve everyone in need, regardless of their religious beliefs and circumstances.”

Jewish Family Service also has a food pantry that Foster said has been getting heavy use of late.

“Food insecurity is huge,” she said. “The first thing you have to do to help people is get food on the table and a roof over their heads.”

For Sadler, that roof is a home in Lakewood. She has landed a job working for Catholic Charities and is feeling stable in a way she hasn’t in years. She credits that to Jewish Family Service.

“They actually care and they take the time to see what your family needs,” she said of the organization. “They are in it for the right reasons.”

JEWISH FAMILY SERVICE

Address: 3201 S. Tamarac Dr., Denver, CO 80231

In operation since: 1872

Number of employees: 185

Annual budget: $19.6 million

Those relocations will happen “in the next couple of weeks,” city spokesman Derek Woodbury said Friday. A specific timeline is being kept under wraps to protect the safety and privacy of people living in the encampments, city officials say.

If those actions — which Johnston and his team call encampment closures — are successful, it would more than double the number of people the administration has gotten off the streets in three prior cleanup efforts. It would also move Johnston significantly closer to the 1,000-person sheltering goal he set on his second day in office and has made the overwhelming focus of his work as mayor thus far.

The online dashboard tracking the progress of Johnston’s House 1,000 homelessness initiative on Friday morning counted 311 people as sheltered or housed through that work. That leaves 30 days to move close to 700 people off the streets, a goal the mayor continues to say is deliverable.

“We are delighted to bring more than 200 Denverites into housing, help close encampments and reactivate public spaces all around the city,” Johnston said in a statement Friday. “Every individual we get into housing is a life changed and every encampment that we close is a neighborhood transformed.”

Media members are being asked to stay away from the encampments so that the city can carry out its relocation and cleanup work “with minimal disruption.” The locations of the converted hotels where people will be moved are also being kept confidential.

The city has already carried out one encampment closure in the area of 20th and Curtis streets. That effort, which concluded on Nov. 1, moved 61 people to shelter and resulted in the area bordered by Broadway, Curtis, 20th and Arapahoe streets being “permanently closed to any camping,” according to an announcement at the time.

In that action, dozens of people camped around the post office at 951 20th St. — on the east side of Curtis Street —  were not moved. Woodbury confirmed that the action announced Friday will focus on the encampment in front of the post office.

Converted hotels have emerged as the primary form of shelter fueling Johnston’s effort. His proposed micro-communities — collections of tiny homes or other temporary shelter units set up on vacant land or surface parking lots — have faced delays and opposition from wary neighbors.

The administration announced on Nov. 24 that a former Embassy Suites hotel at 7525 E. Hampden Ave. was being eyed as a shelter for families, transgender and nonbinary individuals. A lease agreement for that hotel was pulled from a City Council committee agenda next week to give officials more time to finalize details, Woodbury said, but the administration still hopes to bring an agreement before the council before the end of the year.

City Councilwoman Shontel Lewis — whose District 8 in the northeast part of the city is home to three hotel properties that are either already being used as shelters or are being prepared to serve that purpose — has repeatedly raised concerns about her district bearing the brunt of the sheltering effort while people living on the streets there have not been prioritized for shelter spaces. The 48th and Colorado encampment will be the first in her district closed as part of the House 1,000 work.

“While there is no magic wand that can be waved to eliminate homelessness, we know that offering stable housing works more than any other approach,” she said in a statement on Friday.

Johnston’s team is not seeking additional shelter sites in District 8 at this time, officials say.

As the administration gears up for a final push toward the mayor’s 1,000-person goal, the city is seeking volunteers to help prepare shelter sites for new arrivals. The first volunteer opportunity will begin at 10 a.m. Saturday at the former DoubleTree hotel at 4040 N. Quebec St., officials say. More information is available at denvergov.org/volunteer1000.

Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.

Reducing property taxes is part of our overall effort to save people money. That’s why you’ve been hearing recently about the vigorous debate around how to reduce property taxes. I’m pleased that a successful special session of the legislature last week passed historic property tax relief that, combined with previously passed property tax relief, will subtract $55,000 per home from state property tax valuation and reduce the residential assessment rate to 6.7%.

Coloradans living in a $500,000 home will save an average of about $505 on their 2023 property tax bill. But while these savings will certainly help, property tax bills will still go up for most Colorado families, which is why I am asking local governments to provide additional savings by reducing their property tax rates.

I recently wrote to every local government board chair asking them to take action: “With the historic rise in property values, most districts can make significant rate cuts and still maintain strong revenue growth at or above the rate of inflation…I urge you to reduce your mill levy as much as possible.”

I also reminded our hardworking local leaders that I signed legislation this year that allows districts to temporarily reduce mill levies without risking a permanent loss of revenue in an uncertain future.

I further directed the Department of Local Affairs to provide a helpful toolkit of options for districts to lower rates this year while preserving budgetary flexibility. Across the state, the district directors and commissioners we elect will make decisions in the next few weeks and I urge them to take action to keep communities across our state affordable.

Colorado’s overall economy remains strong, unemployment is low, and our state has a healthy budget surplus in case of an economic downturn. However, families are still burdened with a higher cost of living through no fault of their own. Prices have gone up faster than income for most families these last few years.

And while in-state gas prices are now hovering around $3.00/gallon, among the lowest in two years, the largest cost most families experience is their rent or mortgage. These costs continue to go up, largely driven by high-interest rates and a scarcity of homes to rent or buy near job centers.

My focus on more housing now seeks to remove barriers to increase housing supply, especially for the more affordable types of housing including apartments and condos, accessory dwelling units – also known as ADU’s or granny-flats – multiplexes, and homes near transit.

One factor that contributes to the cost of rent and homeownership across the board is rising property taxes. The perfect storm of the repeal of the Gallagher Amendment along with a record increase in home values, about 40% average across the state, was based on the two-year period ending in June 2022, which unfortunately was the peak of the housing market. This has led to an impending rise in property taxes due next year. Hardworking people in Colorado simply cannot afford a 40% increase in their tax bills, or even a 20% increase. Wages have simply not kept pace with the rising cost of living – especially housing – and high inflation and interest rates are creating an affordability crisis for many Colorado families.

Thousands of local elected officials in our state can help avoid an affordability crisis.

I want to applaud the Colorado Mountain College district, which encompasses Eagle, Grand, Jackson, Lake, Garfield, Pitkin, Summit, and Routt counties. Already one of the more expensive areas to live in the state, and with an average increase in home prices exceeding the state average. Colorado Mountain College plans to reduce its mill levy to keep revenue growth near inflation (5.7%). That’s a big deal, and I am grateful for the actions of their elected trustees and other districts that are taking action to reduce their levies.

Now that I have urged our local elected leaders to reduce their mill levy as much as possible, I encourage you to reach out to your local taxing districts as well. Your local elected officials need to hear from you. Ask them to reduce the property tax rates this year to make your community more affordable.

Jared Polis is serving his second term as the governor of Colorado.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

The money, passed by lawmakers during a special session last week, will nearly double the $35 million already available in the current fiscal year for state rental aid. It bolsters the state’s ability to keep people in rental housing after the hundreds of millions of dollars received by the state in federal pandemic-era aid funds has run dry.

“The state’s investment in emergency rental aid will help nearly 6,000 households avoid eviction,” estimated Zach Neumann, the co-founder of the Community Economic Defense Project, which distributes rental aid for at-risk tenants. “It’s a meaningful commitment to keeping our neighbors housed.”

Under the legislation, the state must spend the money by June 30, when the fiscal year ends.

The $30 million approved by lawmakers and Polis will provide $10 million more than the state would have spent under Proposition HH, the property tax relief ballot measure rejected by Colorado voters in the Nov. 7 election. The state’s new investment comes as Denver, facing a record-breaking eviction wave, has budgeted nearly $30 million next year to help local tenants through a city rental assistance program.

The new state money will be sent to the state’s Department of Local Affairs. It will contract with nonprofit groups across the state to distribute money to landlords who have low-income tenants facing eviction.

“While we continue to work on long term solutions to lower housing costs and reduce evictions, this is a critical way we can get immediate relief directly to the families that need it most,” Sen. Janet Buckner, an Aurora Democrat, said in a statement. She co-sponsored the bill with fellow Democratic Sen. Julie Gonzales and Reps. Leslie Herod and Mandy Lindsay.

After Proposition HH failed and Polis announced a mid-November special session, progressive lawmakers and their allies had prioritized a boost in rental aid as part of a broader effort to deliver relief to lower-income earners. Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat, told fellow Democrats before the special session that an “overarching theme” from Proposition HH’s failure, in her view, was a “need to address support for renters.”

Other legislators and housing advocates pointed out that policymakers had rushed to insulate property owners from the same cost increases that renters have weathered for years.

In Denver, city officials expect eviction filings to surpass 12,000 this year, the most since at least 2008, which is as far back as the city keeps records. Statewide, evictions are higher than before the pandemic.

The rental aid bill was one of seven approved during the special session. As the four-day session ended Nov. 20, Polis signed four bills, including the marquee measure aimed at blunting the impact of expected property tax increases coming early next year by changing residential deductions and assessment rates. Others will provide uniform refunds under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, which will increase the returns for most taxpayers; will expand the Earned Income Tax Credit; and will increase staffing to support a tax deferral program.

On Tuesday, Polis signed the rental measure and two other bills: one signing the state up for a federal program that will provide summer meals for children and another that will create a task force to study long-term property tax solutions.

“This special session was about delivering relief for hardworking Coloradans,” Polis said in a news release.

Polis and legislative leaders say the task force, which is set to include several county commissioners, will begin meeting in December and will report its recommendations to lawmakers by March 15.

Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.