Typically, Olander would let the soil rest through the winter months, but in recent years he’s begun experimenting with new varieties of barley that have been specifically adapted to withstand cold temperatures. Growing in the winter means the crops will absorb precipitation through the spring, a vital advantage as weather in the Western U.S. continues to get hotter and drier.

As the proprietor of both Olander Farms and Root Shoot Malting, which supplies Colorado breweries and spirit makers with locally grown and malted grains, Olander has to innovate to sustain his family’s 97-year-old farm. About five years ago, he began taking proactive steps to prepare for what he expects to be the next big challenge: the water crisis.

That looming threat was enough to begin cultivating the winter-friendly Lightning, Thunder and Buck barley without yet having customers for them.

“I can see the writing on the wall just with everything going on with water in Colorado. There’s a possibility of a reduction in our allotment and also the possibility of not having runoff we typically see from snowpack,” Olander said. “That’s why I’m trying to be ahead of the game.”

As the Colorado River continues to dry, local barley growers and maltsters are seeking out creative solutions to sustain their businesses in the face of climate change. Some are embracing nontraditional and drought-resistant grains while others are investing in technology to become more efficient. Their innovations aim to reduce water usage and bring the supply chain for craft beer and spirits closer to home, in hopes of ultimately building a resilient ecosystem that supports farmers, brewers and distillers in Colorado.

In 2022, local farmers grew 4,440,000 bushels of barley, the sixth most in the nation, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. A large portion of that is purchased by Coors Brewing, which contracts with around 800 growers in the Western states and Canada, according to the company’s website.

But Colorado is also home to several craft malthouses that kiln and roast barley for smaller brewers and distillers to use in making beer and liquor. Still, buying local has yet to become the norm since craft malt usually fetches a premium price.

Brewer Eric Larkin has been working with Troubadour Maltings in Fort Collins to procure custom malts since he opened Cohesion Brewing Co. in Denver two years ago. It’s not the cheapest option, but it works because the brewery specializes in specialty Czech-style lagers.

Larkin’s other options would be to import malt from Europe or use European-style malts grown in the U.S. While sourcing local might present unique challenges, the benefits of keeping his dollars in the local economy outweigh any potential downfalls, Larkin said.

“Every crop I get from Troubadour, the malt changes and I have to make adjustments in the brewhouse,” he said, acknowledging it’s easier for a small operation that focuses on a limited portfolio of styles to do that. “Keeping your dollars with local and small producers, the impact it can have really multiplies. It stays a little closer to home. That idea has always been really valuable to me from an economic standpoint and environmental standpoint.”

Spreading the gospel of local grain

The nonprofit Colorado Grain Chain aims to spread that ethos more widely with a variety of projects that connect local producers and makers, and incentivize collaboration. For example, the organization is currently building a digital marketplace where farmers can connect with companies or entrepreneurs seeking to purchase locally-grown grains.

Project manager Lisa Boldt, who also co-owns Primitive Beer in Longmont, sees a unique opportunity to amplify the Grain Chain’s message in the beverage space. That’s why the organization recently offered $4,000 “microgrants” to brewers and distillers who used novel grains in a new product.

Cohesion and WeldWerks Brewing Co. in Greeley received one grant to team up on a special release, Foamies Czech-style pale lager, using custom malts from Troubadour. The beer debuted in August and a second batch is due for release in November.

WildEdge Brewing Collective in Cortez earned a grant to experiment with a Munich wheat from Root Shoot Malting, with which it created a Dunkelweizen-inspired beer called From the Fields. Steamboat Springs’ Routt Distillery, another grant recipient, leveraged a trial batch of barley grown in Montrose by Proximity Malts for its new West Slope Sarvis Gin, which also features locally foraged sarvisberries.

Perhaps the most intriguing microgrant project came from Dune Valley Distillery in Mosca, which will release a vodka made from quinoa in January. The distillery, which opened this summer in the historic Mosca Community Hall and Gymnasium, shares a campus with a local food hub and a potato and quinoa processing plant. It specializes in making potato vodka specifically because of the resources at its disposal, said managing partner Nicholas Chambers.

“The local food approach is that you learn to consume what’s grown right near you,” Chambers said. “We are at literally the center of North American quinoa right here. It’s such a good crop for us because of low water use and it fits with our valley.”

Reducing water usage

One underutilized opportunity Audrey Paugh, marketing and networking specialist at the Grain Chain, sees for beverages is in millet. Colorado is the country’s top producer of proso millet, a gluten-free and drought-tolerant ancient grain. The state is also home to Grouse Malt House, one of the few U.S. maltsters dedicated to gluten-free grains.

Twila Soles founded the company with her late partner in 2013 after years of having celiac disease and being dissatisfied with gluten-free beer options. Malting even gluten-free grains requires a lot of water. Recently, Soles upgraded her system to include a steep tank that uses up to 40% less water than her original equipment.

Soles sources most of her grains within 200 miles of the malting facility in Wellington and has seen her producers weather unpredictable and sometimes devastating growing seasons.

“Using a crop (such as millet) that takes less water to thrive is important now and will be even more important as climate change continues to impact weather patterns,” said Soles, whose biggest Colorado client is the gluten-free Holidaily Brewing Co. “I’m hopeful that the use of more drought-tolerant crops for craft beer grows.”

In Alamosa, Jason Cody knows the value of diversifying crops and revenue streams. Cody saw firsthand the desire for local, craft malts when he opened Colorado Malting Co. in 2008. At one point, Cody had more than 100 breweries waiting for the opportunity to buy his products. The venture saved his family farm, which first began growing barley for Coors in the 1990s.

But business has slowed amid economic pressures and larger companies cashing in on demand for cost-effective malts. So these days he focuses on serving a niche base of distillers and brewers.

Water usage is always top of mind for Cody, who manages the 300-acre farm his ancestors purchased nearly a century ago. In 2018, Cody began making original beers at his Colorado Farm Brewery, which highlights sustainable practices from grain to glass. He grows and malts his own grains, uses an original strain of yeast and recycles all the water from the brewing process to irrigate his farm.

“Every single gallon of water we use in the brewery that goes down the drain, goes out to the center pivot irrigation sprinklers and is injected into the line that the sprinkler is running on,” Cody said.

An added bonus: The brewery’s wastewater repeatedly tests high in nitrogen, sulfur, potassium and other compounds that reinvigorate soil, so he needs fewer fertilizers to keep the ground healthy.

Back in Berthoud, Olander has yet to malt last year’s winter crop, so he doesn’t know what it tastes like or if brewers will be interested in using it. Olander is hopeful Lightning in particular will be an apt pilsner-style product and catch on, but he’s not waiting for feedback to continue his experiment.

Last year, he planted 15 acres of Thunder, 15 acres of Lightning and seven acres of Kernza. This year, he planted 20 acres of Lightning and 10 acres of Buck.

“We decided, let’s roll the dice and go with Lightning,” he said. “Hopefully winter treats everything well and they’ll survive.”

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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 a surreal, unprecedented moment when Colorado Ballet canceled its entire 2020-21 season, given the COVID shutdowns and complications. But when the refreshed production debuted during the 2021 holiday season — it typically runs for a month, or about 25 performances — a Denver tradition was reborn.

This year’s 63rd installment is, as in the past, a boon for the state’s marquee ballet, as sales made up more than half of its annual revenue, which totaled $15.5 million last year. That’s one of the main reasons the pandemic was so devastating to arts nonprofits, and why “Nutcracker” and other holiday performances are so vital to nonprofit arts companies.

But with ticket prices rising for all kinds of entertainment options, how are they faring for this Christmas tradition?

The Denver Post took a look at tickets for the Colorado Ballet’s “Nutcracker” going back to 2000, and what we found was heartening: The cheapest tickets to the show have resisted inflation over the last quarter century, increasing only $22 in that time to a current price of $40. With U.S. inflation rates generally up — last year’s was 8%, a 3.3% increase from 2021, according to public data — that translates to actual value for fans of the state’s biggest holiday production.

U.S. consumers have seen a cumulative price increase for goods and services of 69.95% since 2000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whereas the cheapest tickets to “The Nutcracker” have increased only 45%.

So how do they stay so relatively low?

“Our sales tax is included in the price of the ticket, whereas many other performing arts organizations and concert/performance venues and businesses charge sales tax on top of the ticket price, in addition to many fees,” wrote Rachel Perez, Colorado Ballet’s marketing director, in an email.

“We have very minimal fees,” she said, “and if patrons purchase tickets online with mobile delivery options there’s absolutely zero fees, so they will literally only pay the listed price of the ticket — which in today’s world of excessive ticket fees and service fees — is a very nice benefit.”

This year’s run of 28 performances began Nov. 25 and continues through Dec. 24. The cheapest tickets were $40, while the most expensive were $175.

Leaders set prices by looking at the number of years at the current price without changes or increases; relevant comparable ticket prices; other shows in the Denver Performing Arts Complex, economic trends, and supply-and-demand, Perez said.

Yes, ticket prices for the ballet and other top-tier performing arts events can run above $100 (and much more on the after-market), but so can those for concerts and sporting events. To watch “Nutcracker” prices stay low, even as metro area cultural demand and population have ballooned, feels like some kind of miracle.

“Last week, we ran our first pay-what-you-can for a limited number of tickets to our Sunday night performance of ‘The Nutcracker,'” on Nov. 26, wrote Perez, who also noted the ballet’s student-pass discounts (see coloradoballet.org/student-pass). “They were available on a first-come, first-served basis. We plan to make a pay-what-you-can program a part of our initiatives in the future again and promote it broadly.”

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“It is a slower-growth story. There are positive nuggets in there. We aren’t forecasting a recession and we expect a continued abundance of job opportunities for people,” said Brian Lewandowski, executive director of the Business Research Division at the University of Colorado Boulder Leeds School of Business, which puts the Outlook together each year.

The Outlook, based on input from 130 individuals across a variety of industries, as well as a sophisticated computer model, forecasts employers in the state will add 42,000 nonfarm jobs. The state’s unemployment rate will average 3.4%, not far off the 3.3% rate reached in October.

Adding 42,000 jobs translates into a job growth rate of 1.4%, below the 2.2% growth rate estimated for this year. Initial employment reports through October put Colorado at a 1.1% annual pace, so reaching the expected rate will depend on some big revisions.

“We went from being roughly a top 10 state to being a bottom 10 state for job growth. How could we be so wrong and do we need to revise down our employment numbers?” Lewandowski said of the questions the Outlook panel asked as it tried to prepare its 2024 forecast.

The team essentially did the equivalent of throwing a red flag in football and challenged the initial statistics, which are based on employer surveys and later adjusted based on the actual headcounts reported in quarterly unemployment insurance premium reports.

Other indicators were showing a much stronger economy than what the job numbers were suggesting. And helping with that decision, Ryan Gedney, a senior labor economist at the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, has consistently argued employment growth this year will end up much stronger than initially reported. Revisions for the first two quarters so far are backing up his view.

That said, layoff announcements have been rising in Colorado as the year comes to an end. DISH Network, which has been expanding rapidly to build out a new national cellular network, last month announced it would let go of 499 workers in Littleton and Englewood.

Broadcom announced it would cut about 2,800 jobs at VMWare following an acquisition of the company. That includes 184 workers in Broomfield, according to a letter filed on Nov. 27 with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.

VF Corp., a sportswear and footwear maker behind several top brands, said at the start of the month it would let go of 500 employees, including just under three dozen at the company’s headquarters in Denver.

Some of the strongest hiring this year has come at local governments and at hotels and restaurants, which aren’t the highest-paying places in terms of wages, said Richard Wobbekind, an associate dean and a senior economist at Leeds.

The strongest job gains next year are forecast to come in professional and business services, where positions are mostly on the upper end of the pay scale. Education and health care should contribute to employment growth, and governments are expected to keep hiring, aided on the local level by higher property taxes.

Higher interest rates, however, will remain a major headwind for the economy and are expected to contribute to job losses in construction, finance and real estate. Manufacturing and information, which includes tech, are also forecast to see declines.

Wobbekind isn’t in the camp of economists expecting a sharp drop in interest rates next year, saying they will stay elevated for longer than expected. Homebuyers holding out for a 5% rate on a 30-year mortgage should be looking for things to stay closer to 6%.

A huge reckoning continues in commercial real estate, and while it is playing out slowly, loans made under now unrealistic assumptions will have to be reworked. Banks continue to tighten their lending standards as they try to build up their reserves against losses, and venture capital remains scarce.

Yet the economy can continue to move forward as long as consumers hold in there, which they have shown a willingness to do.

“Our committee members are expressing optimism in a slow environment,” Wobbekind said. “We will be resilient. We will continue to have growth.”

But Wobbekind also concedes the Outlook, which calls for U.S. GDP to gain 1.4% next year, is among the more optimistic ones out there. On Monday, the National Association for Business Economics forecasted that U.S. economic growth would slow to 1% by the fourth quarter of next year. About three out of four of its economists surveyed put the odds of a recession next year at 50% or lower, which was an improvement from the sentiment in the October survey, but still not a ringing endorsement.

Marcel Arsenault, CEO of Real Capital Solutions, offered a more dire view of what is coming, shaped in part of his understanding on what is going on in commercial real estate, which was the focus of a keynote panel that followed the Outlook forecast.

“In our shop, we are worried about a recession,” Arsenault told the crowd gathered at the Grand Hyatt Denver. He predicted Colorado would likely lose jobs next year and that the vacancy rate for apartments, which are being overbuilt, could reach 15% next year, or triple the current rate.

Consumer spending, which accounts for about 70% of economic activity, will be key in determining how quickly the economy slows next year and whether it tips into a recession. And inflation, both real and perceived, could influence the willingness of consumers to spend.

The Outlook calls for consumer inflation in the Denver area to average 3.2% next year, which is below the 5.4% annual rate measured in September. But views diverge on how quickly inflation can get below the 2% level the Federal Reserve is targeting, which would allow it to start lowering interest rates.

Inflation in metro Denver has run substantially hotter than in the country as a whole, driven by larger jumps in rents and other housing-related costs, which account for more than 40% of the weighting in the Consumer Price Index. More volatile gasoline prices in the region are also causing consumers in the region to fork over more money.

Ron Throupe, an associate professor of real estate associate professor at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business, said the way the federal government calculates housing inflation contributes to a long lag that distorts the overall inflation number.

Shelter in inflation, as reported in the CPI for Denver, was running 8.4% in September. But other rent indices were capturing much smaller increases this fall. Apartment List, for example, has Denver apartment rents down nearly 1% over the past year through November. Eventually those declines will make their way into the official CPI numbers, Throupe said, causing them to show sharp decreases.

“We are going lower as far as I can tell,” he said, even raising the possibility that deflation could emerge. He expects the Federal Reserve could start cutting interest rates next summer, sooner than what many economists expect.

Two other economists speaking on the same panel as Throupe on Monday argued for more persistent inflation going forward.

“Let’s get to 2% before we start talking about deflation,” said Gedney, who noted that an aging population and tight labor market are likely to keep upward pressure on wages well into the future.

Even before the recent surge of inflation coming out of the pandemic, labor shortages were causing wages in Colorado and elsewhere to surge above the long-term trend, Gedney said. He estimates that average weekly wages in Colorado in 2022 were about 20% higher than would have been the case if they had followed the trend that existed between 2000 to 2016.

Wage gains have mostly kept up with inflation, but so far this year workers are behind by 1.7% in real terms, in part because of the higher inflation rate in the region.

“Above 2% in 2024 and probably again in 2025,” said Emily Dohrman, an economist with the Colorado Legislative Council, adding that a negative rate would likely require a big downturn in the economy.

Arsenault argued people should prepare for the scenario the Outlook calls for — slower growth with no recession — while also being ready for the possibility of a more severe downturn.

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While some business owners aren’t sweating it, John Agnew has a less sanguine view of the effect REI’s presence may have on his snowboard and outdoor gear shop on Main Street once it opens in early 2025. The Seattle-based chain has 181 locations and reported nearly $4 billion in revenue last year.

“They’ll eat up a lot of goggle, helmet and snowboard sales,” said Agnew, who founded The Boarding Haus in downtown Durango in 1995. “I had to fight for many years to get the brands I want.”

REI, which has several locations in Front Range cities, has expanded its mountain market footprint in recent years, opening outposts in Dillon and then Glenwood Springs. The next-closest REI to Durango is an older location in Grand Junction, 170 miles away.

In the eyes of Kendrick Williamson, who oversees operations at Gardenswartz Outdoors just a couple of blocks south of Agnew’s store, the opening of REI there is not a direct threat to his nearly century-old downtown business.

“We’re not going to be losing a lot of customers — there’s not a lot of overlap,” Williamson said, as customers browsed a wide selection of fishing poles, Stetson hats and knives on an early fall afternoon. “People are pretty loyal to the local concept here.”

Gardenswartz sells hunting rifles and ammunition, which are not available at REI. Plus, Williamson noted, the new REI location will be on Durango’s south side — away from the tourist-heavy Main Street in the city of 20,000.

“They’re not in the epicenter,” he said.

The epicenter is the 10-block stretch of shops and restaurants, where hundreds of people empty out of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad depot daily in the warm season to stroll and shop in the city’s historic district.

Tim Walsworth, executive director of the Durango Business Improvement District, said he’d been monitoring the situation on behalf of the businesses his organization represents.

There are more than a dozen sporting goods stores already in the city, which is surrounded by square mile upon square mile of wilderness that beckons campers, anglers, rafters, skiers and hikers.

The improvement district recently crunched the sales numbers for the sporting goods sector in Durango. It found that more than $23 million worth of merchandise was sold last year, down just slightly from $24 million-plus in 2021, Walsworth said. Those figures compare to less than $19 million in pre-pandemic 2019.

The state’s outdoor recreation industry generates $37 billion in consumer spending each year and contributes 511,000 direct jobs, according to data from the Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade.

“Our existing local sporting goods stores are concerned, of course, but also have spent many years cultivating their customers and providing good service and products,” Walsworth said. “They know they will have to step up their game.”

Similar competitive concerns cropped up when Walmart and Home Depot came to Durango, but Walsworth said the two national chains “did not cause local businesses to close.”

“We are worried that this could impact the viability of some of our existing sporting goods stores,” he said. “But again, they have years of local experience and tons of local customers, plus better visibility by being located in the heart of our town.”

“Even so,” Walsworth said, “we expect REI to take some market share due to their name recognition and that they already have members here.”

When the improvement district first heard about REI’s interest in Durango, it reached out to a sporting goods store in Flagstaff, Arizona, and learned that REI claimed about 20% of the market during its first year in town — and about 10% annually after that.

REI currently has 9,000 members in the Durango area, according to REI spokeswoman Megan Behrbaum. Durango will be the co-op’s 10th location in Colorado.

“Product assortment will broadly include camp, cycle, run, climb and snow sports — also similar to other stores in the state,” Behrbaum said. “The store will also have a section dedicated to Re/Supply, our used gear and apparel offering.”

REI can co-exist peacefully in markets with established outdoor retailers, she said.

“We don’t believe it is a simple scenario of big retailers driving out smaller retailers, but we do recognize our presence can create competition,” Behrbaum said.

Corry Mihm, a project manager with the Summit Economic Partnership in Summit County, said the opening of REI in Dillon in 2017 has produced no definitive negative impact on local outdoor recreation businesses.

“We have seen a couple of mom-and-pop sporting goods stores close, but it is difficult to say exactly why — it could be pandemic impacts, aging and tiring of the owners or landlord renewal issues,” Mihm said. “We have seen all of these issues impact local business but don’t have specific store-by-store information.”

But Agnew, The Boarding Haus owner, cringes at yet another big-box retailer setting up shop in Durango, which sits just a half-hour north of the New Mexico line.

He worries about what it’s doing to Durango’s character — and to its sense of self-identity.

“Part of the charm was the mom-and-pop businesses,” Agnew said. “This is another tick towards wiping that out.”

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But for 2024, the company’s travel experts have recommended one place in Colorado that should be on every vacationer’s bucket list.

Boulder is one of 24 places to land on Fodor’s “Go List” for 2024 and one of just two destinations in the United States. The other is Cannon Beach, Ore.

Fodor’s praised Boulder’s accessibility to recreation and nature, enticing outdoor enthusiasts with 30,000 acres of city-owned open space for hiking, mountain biking, climbing, and tubing. The story also noted the allure of Pearl Street’s al fresco dining options, the majesty of the Flatirons and the innumerable craft breweries worth their pint.

All that and a nod to Coach Prime, who led the University of Colorado football team on a nationally spotlighted journey this season. (We’ll give Fodor’s a pass for perpetuating the myth about Colorado’s 300-plus days of sunshine since we agree there’s nary a bad time of year to visit.)

“Whether you’re an outdoor enthusiast or simply looking to flock to a beautiful city nestled amidst nature, Boulder needs to be on your list,” the publication said.

Other places Fodor’s thinks travelers should visit in 2024 include Nelson, British Columbia; Botswana; Cape Verde; Franschhoek, South Africa; Ifrane, Morocco; Coron, Philippines; Sri Lanka; George Town, Malaysia; Kakaban Island, Indonesia; Stanley, Tasmania; Queenstown, New Zealand; Albania; Bergen, Norway; Rouen, France; Sighișoara, Romania; Copan Ruinas, Honduras; Negril, Jamaica; Puerto Escondido, Mexico; Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Costa Rica; Cartagena, Colombia; Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay; and São Paulo, Brazil.

On the other side of things, Fodor’s suggested in its 2024 No List that people stay away from nine over-touristed areas of the world, including two in the United States: San Gabriel Mountains National Monument in California and Lake Superior in the Midwest.

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The latest federal numbers on the industry also show that Colorado’s outdoor economy grew by 19.9% last year, the sixth largest increase nationwide.

For the first time since the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis has released data on outdoor recreation, the industry’s sales crossed the $1 trillion mark.

“This is a historic day for the outdoor economy,” Chris Perkins, vice president of programs at the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, said in a Nov. 17 news conference.

Perkins said ORR, a national coalition that represents more than 110,000 outdoor businesses, had a sense from members’ reports and anecdotes that 2022 was a good year. The federal numbers released last week confirm that, he said.

The recreation covered by the economic review includes bicycling, boating, hiking, fishing, hunting and snow sports. Other outdoor activities focus on motorcycles, all-terrain and recreational vehicles.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis in the Commerce Department issued its first-ever report about the outdoor recreation industry in 2018. Former Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner was a sponsor of the legislation that directed the Commerce Department to issue the report, which goes out annually.

Jessica Turner, president of ORR, said the economic numbers help buttress the industry’s efforts to gain congressional support for money and new policies aimed at growing the outdoor recreation economy.

“I think we’ve always known that this industry is special. It connects people with nature. It makes them healthy and happy. It connects people with family and friends,” Turner said. “But having the actual economic data that takes our industry from a nice-to-have on the weekends to a need-to-have for community jobs has been transformational.”

The new federal analysis found that outdoor recreation supported almost 5 million jobs nationwide, or 3.2%, of U.S employees, in 2022. The numbers in Colorado were 129,773 employees for 4.3% of the state workforce and roughly $6.9 billion in wages.

“We are grateful to the BEA for gathering this data showing clearly that the outdoor industry is a critical economic driver and source of jobs for both Colorado and the country,” Conor Hall, director of Colorado’s Outdoor Recreation Industry Office, said in a statement.

Hall said the state continues to promote stewardship, more equitable access to the outdoors, a healthy workforce and “sustainable growth of the industry.”

Many outdoor businesses were hurt when the coronavirus pandemic first hit because ski resorts, campgrounds and other venues were closed or restricted. Manufacturing of equipment, boats and other goods were affected.

But outdoor recreation boomed in Colorado and across the country during the height of the pandemic when COVID-19 restrictions limited other activities. In the summer of 2020, the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable pitched outdoor recreation as a way to help rejuvenate the economy.

And recreation organizations and advocates continue to champion outdoor recreation as a means of diversifying local economies, especially in rural areas. The bipartisan America’s Outdoor Recreation Act has passed the U.S. Senate and is scheduled to be heard Nov. 30 by the House Natural Resources Committee.

The legislation would, among several things, invest in modernizing campgrounds; increase access to public lands for recreation; and provide technical and financial  help to rural communities near recreation areas.

Turner with the recreation roundtable said the act includes proposals for reservation and data systems to better manage recreation sites.

“We need better policies and better management tools to ensure that the overused, highly visited places are getting the management they need to control that and help with resources and that the underused, amazing landscapes that people don’t know about are getting visitation,” Turner with the recreation roundtable said.

Updated at 10 a.m. Nov. 23 to correct amount of wages of the outdoor recreation industry in Colorado in  2022.

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As Thornton filed its latest application for a water pipe permit with Larimer County on Monday, officials had hope that they would face less resistance this time. But forces that have lined up against the city in recent years have no intention of dropping their fight against a 42-inch-wide pipe that would run across the county — arguing the project holds the potential to negatively impact landowners while doing nothing to improve the health of the Poudre.

They want Thornton to leave its water in the Poudre, allowing it to flow through Fort Collins before it’s taken out.

The issue will once again land in the laps of Larimer County’s three commissioners, who could either approve or reject Thornton’s new pipe alignment in a vote expected by March.

A no vote would jeopardize long-term growth plans in Thornton, Colorado’s sixth-largest city, for years to come by hampering the ability to access water it bought the rights for decades ago.

“Though it has been frustrating all these years, I firmly believe this is a better project with all the community feedback,” said Brett Henry, executive director of utilities and infrastructure for the city of Thornton. “It’s more clear about what to expect. There are less unknowns.”

Larimer County is the linchpin in Thornton’s $500 million, 70-mile water pipe project.

Adams and Weld counties already have given their blessings, and Thornton has built and buried seven miles of pipe near Windsor and Johnstown. It is scheduled to construct another 16 miles just north of the city over the next two years, at a cost of $64 million.

Thornton says the pipe’s new proposed alignment through Larimer County holds several advantages over a route the county rejected in early 2019. It would take 16 fewer miles of pipe in the county than the original route called for, and the project’s western terminus would avoid a number of neighborhoods that had raised concerns around construction disruption.

The city is also willing to move a proposed pump station well apart from homes. The station would be used to divert the water shares Thornton owns in the Poudre to a collection of reservoirs northwest of Fort Collins.

The pipe would then traverse 22 properties in Larimer County before crossing into Weld County and turning south. City spokesman Todd Barnes said Thornton already has begun discussions with most of the landholders about obtaining easements for the pipe.

“It’s all rural farmland and Thornton owns two of the properties,” he said. “We’ve consulted closely with Larimer County and we feel we’ve gotten as much feedback as we could. We’ve let the community’s input guide our process and our design.”

That’s not so, said Save the Poudre executive director Gary Wockner. The community wants the water left alone rather than fed into Thornton’s “zombie” pipeline, he said.

“Save The Poudre’s position will be, again, that the water should stay in the Poudre River all the way to Windsor,” Wockner said. “Using the river as the conveyance is cheaper, faster, smarter and restores water to the depleted Poudre River through Fort Collins and Larimer County.”

K.A. Wagner, who heads opposition group No Pipe Dream, said her organization once again will get people involved in fighting Thornton’s plans.

“When the Board of Commissioners denied the first application, they noted that Thornton had not explored ‘all reasonable alternatives,’ as required by” the local land use regulations, Wagner said. “They also expressed disappointment that the future of the Poudre was not considered.”

But Barnes said courts have ruled that Larimer County can’t force Thornton to keep the water it owns in the Poudre River. And doing so would be counterproductive for those who will rely on it in coming decades, he said.

“Why would we willingly put our high-quality drinking water down the Poudre River past three wastewater treatment plants and all the urban runoff?” Barnes said.

Henry, Thornton’s infrastructure chief, said “no engineer would tell you to pollute or degrade the water before you treat it.”

Thornton expects to bring an average of 14,000 acre-feet of Poudre River water to the city each year. An acre-foot of water, or about 326,000 gallons, is what two average families of four use in a year. The city currently draws the bulk of its water from the South Platte/Lower Clear Creek system, at 26,500 acre-feet per year, and from Standley Lake, at 6,000 acre-feet.

If Thornton can’t secure its future water supply, the failure could stymie long-term growth plans for the city of 150,000. Barnes said the city already had a 10,000-plus residential unit backlog due to “water uncertainty.”

Barnes suggested the water stakes went beyond Thornton, potentially preventing the city from playing its part in helping to alleviate metro Denver’s affordable housing crunch.

Case in point: Maiker Housing Partners has paused the development of two affordable housing projects in Thornton due to the “uncertainty over future water delivery,” the head of Adams County’s housing authority told The Denver Post.

“As soon as the water is available, we will eagerly resume pre-development activities the following day,” said Peter LiFari, Maiker’s CEO.

But Wagner accused Thornton of employing smoke and mirrors with its water portfolio. It can still access all the water it needs without disturbing the residents and the landscape of Larimer County, she said, while also bolstering the health of a critical river segment in a part of the West beset by worsening drought.

“Instead of lamenting its backlog of building permits, Thornton should acknowledge climate change, respect the natural resources of Larimer County and plan for the unrelenting drought affecting the North Front Range,” she said.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Inflation in the United States slowed last month in a sign that the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes are continuing to cool the consumer price spikes that have bedeviled consumers for the past two years.

Tuesday’s report from the Labor Department showed that prices either fell or rose only slowly across a broad range of goods and services, including gas, new and used cars, hotel rooms and housing. Overall inflation was unchanged from September to October, down from the 0.4% jump the previous month. Compared with 12 months ago, consumer prices rose 3.2% in October, down from the 3.7% rise in September and the smallest year-over-year increase since June.

Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core prices also weakened unexpectedly. They rose just 0.2% from September to October, slightly below the pace of the previous two months. Economists closely track core prices, which are thought to provide a good sign of inflation’s future path. Measured year over year, core prices rose 4% in October, down from 4.1% in September.

October’s milder-than-expected price figures could make it less likely that the Fed will impose another interest rate hike. Fed officials, led by Chair Jerome Powell, are considering whether their benchmark rate is high enough to quell inflation or if they need to impose another rate hike in coming months.

Powell had said last week that Fed officials were “not confident” that rates had gotten sufficiently high to tame inflation. The Fed has raised its benchmark interest rate 11 times in the past year and a half, to about 5.4%, the highest level in 22 years.

But the Fed has raised its key rate just once since May. Since its last meeting on Nov. 1, a government report showed that hiring cooled in October compared with September.

The central bank’s rate hikes have increased the costs of mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and many forms of business borrowing, part of a concerted drive to slow growth and cool inflation pressures. The Fed is trying to achieve a “soft landing” — raising borrowing costs just enough to curb inflation without tipping the economy into a deep recession.

The rate increases have had some impact: Year-over-year inflation has dropped from a peak of 9.1% in June 2022, the highest level in four decades, to 3.7% in September.

Prices first accelerated in 2021 as consumers stepped up spending amid a fading pandemic. Much greater demand ran headlong into snarled supply chains, which led retailers and other companies to quickly jack up prices. Inflation has since eased as supply chains have improved and higher borrowing rates have weakened some industries, notably housing.

But in his remarks last week, Powell said that further reductions in inflation might require a cooldown in spending in addition to further improvements in supply networks — a distinction that potentially points to further hikes.

Economists are keeping a close eye on several inflation metrics, including the cost of rent and housing, health insurance and services such as dining out, entertainment and travel. Starting with Tuesday’s price report, the government is altering how it calculates health insurance costs, and the changes are expected to result in higher overall inflation rates in the coming months.

Many economists say a key reason why most Americans hold a gloomy view of the economy despite very low unemployment and steady hiring is that the costs of things they buy regularly — milk, meat, bread and other groceries — remain so much higher than they were three years ago. Many of these items are still growing more expensive, though more gradually.

Time will tell if the slowdown is temporary, as state demographers predict, or the start of a new trend. But Colorado’s ability to attract newcomers carries huge implications for its economic future, from filling open jobs to providing care for the surging number of older residents.

“If we don’t see population growth, if we don’t see that net migration, we will absolutely have a decline in our working-age population,” said Colorado State Demographer Elizabeth Garner at the 2023 State Demography Summit, which was held this month in Littleton.

Colorado gained 26,442 residents in the 12 months through July 1, 2021, and another 27,710 through July 2022, according to the demography office’s Vintage 2022 Population Estimates. Last decade, population gains averaged above 70,000 most years with a peak gain of 98,939 in 2015.

“We are seeing the lowest growth rates on record for Colorado,” said Cindy DeGroen, the state’s projections demographer.

Over the last two annual counts, the rate of population growth in Colorado has been running closer to 0.5%, under a fifth of the 2.5% rate averaged in the 1990s. But DeGroen expressed optimism that growth would rebound, getting back above a 1% rate in the middle of this decade and holding there until at least 2035.

“We do anticipate an increase from those record low rates back to where we would have been prepandemic,” she said.

For that to happen, net migration will need to rebound and stay strong for the remainder of the decade. Migration is needed because not enough children will be born in the state to compensate for the rising number of deaths expected in the decades ahead.

Between 1970 and 2020, net migration, the difference between those moving in and those moving out, averaged 40,000 people a year in Colorado’s favor. Between 2022 and 2032, the demography office forecasts that it will average 42,000 people a year before slowing due to slower population gains both nationally and internationally.

Net migration in Colorado last year was 14,924, but international migration drove that. Colorado lost 9,324 people to domestic migration, the movement of people from state to state.

Colorado still is attracting Californians, with a net gain of 13,243, and continues to hold the upper hand in drawing residents from New York, Idaho, Illinois and Virginia.

It lost residents to all adjacent states — Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Arizona — as well as many southeastern states, including a net outflow of nearly 10,000 people to Florida.

Forecasting international migration, which is tied to conditions in the countries that send out migrants, as well as immigration and border policies that can change from administration to administration, can be complicated.

“The number one factor of uncertainty is the international migration number,” Garner said. The flow of refugees to the state has increased from places like Afghanistan and Venezuela.

Colorado is a second-tier state, meaning it isn’t a typical entry point for those arriving from abroad like California, Texas, New York and Florida are, she said.

Forecasts of a rebound in net migration assume Colorado can maintain strong job growth, which the state has struggled to do this year. Advances in automation and artificial intelligence have the potential to displace large numbers of workers in higher-paying fields. But more manufacturing is returning to U.S. shores, which could boost growth.

The forecast also assumes Colorado retirees age in place and don’t cash out the huge pile of home equity they have built up in recent years and move to somewhere warmer and more affordable.

Higher housing costs make Colorado less attractive to young adults looking to relocate to start their careers as well as the companies looking to hire them. And it hinders the ability of those transplants, not to mention natives, when it comes time to start a family.

Colorado is now home to the four most expensive metro housing markets outside a coastal area — Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins and now Greeley, according to the real estate research firm Zonda. But one upside of slower population growth is that the state has chipped away at its housing deficit, which fell from around 127,000 units in 2019 to 101,141 in 2021, according to a study from the advocacy group Up for Growth.

“We have been on a big bull market (in construction) since we came out of the Great Recession. Did we sell so many homes between 2017 to 2022 that we borrowed from future demand?” asked Ted Leighty, CEO of the Colorado Association of Home Builders, while speaking on a housing panel at the demography summit.

When it comes to categories like luxury apartments in downtown Denver, too much supply might be a short-term problem. But Phyllis Resnick, executive director and lead economist of the Colorado Futures Center at Colorado State University, argues housing demand could remain strong for years to come, preventing home prices and apartment rents from getting aligned with incomes.

Millennials, the largest generation in the state, are aging into homeownership, with just over half owning a home, contrasted with a homeownership rate of 74.1% for Gen Xers and 81.2% for Baby Boomers. Millennials are starting families and buying homes at a later age, which will provide a source of home-buying demand for years to come.

And although it doesn’t get discussed as much, high housing costs have also pushed more households to double up. There are about 680,000 unique households hidden within primary households, Resnick estimates.

“We have folks in this state who are really stressing. They are living on the edge of economic stability and are the ones struggling the most to be stably housed,” she said.

Another important trend remains the aging of the population. Assuming migration can get back on track, over half of the population gains expected this decade will come among those aged 65 and over. The next biggest surge will be among those aged 25 to 44. The number of residents aged 0 to 17 is expected to fall.

If high home prices and a lack of jobs keep young people away, then almost all of the state’s population gains this decade will come in the 65-plus category. In the next five years, 200,000 workers in the state are expected to retire and Colorado will need new workers to fill those vacancies, on top of the jobs being added as the economy expands.

Jefferson County provides a foreshadowing of impacts on what the state’s aging population might look like. Although counties across the Eastern Plains have long struggled with population losses, they have now shown up in heavily populated Jeffco, which has lost an estimated 7,000 people since 2020.

Although out-migration can explain some of the shrinkage, Nancy Gedeon, a demographer with the state, said the county has an older population, adding point blank that deaths are driving the decrease.

The municipalities adding the most residents last year were Windsor, Colorado Springs, Erie, Castle Rock and Boulder.  In percentage terms, Keensburg was the state’s fastest-growing municipality with a 19.4% rate of growth, followed by Mead, Deer Trail, Severance and Tinmath,

Greeley and Commerce City, despite being much smaller, both added more residents than Denver, which had a 0.2% growth rate.

DeGroen predicts that the state’s current population of 5.8 million will reach 7.5 million by 2050. Starting around 2030, the state will begin to see a rapid decline in its natural increase, or births minus deaths, leaving it even more dependent on migration.

Of the 1.7 million people the state is forecast to add between 2020 and 2050, 1.5 million will be located along the Front Range, with 54% of population gains going to metro Denver and Boulder; 26% to Weld and Larimer counties, and 20% along the southern Front Range, primarily El Paso County.

The Western Slope is expected to gain 170,000 residents by 2050, with Mesa, Garfield and Eagle counties the biggest gainers.

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