Young Colorado renters need to choose if they’ll pay the landlord, the hospital or grandma

They try their best to divvy up the little that remains for a long list of other living expenses: utilities, credit card payments, car insurance, health insurance and medical appointments.

“Those expenses, especially when you are just getting into the adult world, can really rack up sometimes,” said Wilson, 22, a junior at Colorado State University Pueblo majoring in psychology. 

Sticking to their budget is a precarious, penny-by-penny balancing act. When their dollars simply won’t stretch far enough, Wilson’s boyfriend’s grandma gives them money to fill in the gaps. And the young couple uses government assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to stock their pantry and fridge.

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Their struggles as renters reverberate far across Colorado, where increasing rent costs have burdened many tenants, stretching them beyond their means and even forcing some to give up health care or cut way back on groceries. A younger generation heeds their elders’ calls to go to college, but then graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and few resources to pay an apartment deposit.

Since 2020, when the pandemic escalated financial hardship for many households across the state and country, rents have increased as much as nearly 30% in some Colorado cities. The most dramatic rise came in 2021, with rents jumping at double-digit rates as landlords dialed up pricing after a year of a pandemic eviction ban. They’ve largely eased up on rent increases this year, with some cities even seeing rents cheaper than last year.

Still, trying to make rent is a monthly battle for many young people across the state, often leaving them “feeling pretty stilted by their opportunities here,” said Natasha Berwick, political director at New Era Colorado, a nonprofit that seeks to involve young people in public affairs. 

Berwick worries about whether communities will be able to maintain their vibrancy should they lose young residents she said are a big part of powering local economies.

“You lose a vision of the future for your community,” Berwick said. “You lose an investment in that community. Young people are the driving force behind cultural change.”

For Wilson, housing has repeatedly determined whether she could continue on with school. She started classes as a freshman at CSU Pueblo in fall 2020 but had to suspend her studies the following spring, when she couldn’t afford to pay tuition, largely because of the thousands of dollars her room and board cost her.

She has since had to prioritize working while paying for school with her own money and scholarships. During summer 2021, she was selected to be a resident assistant on campus, supervising first students living in campus apartments and later a dorm floor in exchange for free housing. This school year, Wilson spreads herself among three campus jobs, at least 15 credits of classes and leadership roles for multiple student organizations. She also squeezed in substitute teaching during the first half of the year, picking up shifts that fit her schedule at a nearby elementary school to bring in more money for rent and food.

LEFT: Wilson and Rogers tackle schoolwork in their one-bedroom apartment Dec. 14. The students can barely afford rent on top of their other monthly expenses. RIGHT: Government assistance cards that Wilson uses to buy food hang on a bulletin board. (Erica Breunlin, The Colorado Sun)

Meanwhile, her boyfriend, Daniel Rogers, 27, also juggles a handful of campus jobs and leadership positions while working toward a master’s degree.

Wilson said they both feel pangs of guilt when they have to ask Rogers’ grandma for financial help.

“We should be doing this ourselves,” she said, noting that it’s easy to see why more people have found themselves without housing.

“Wow, if I can’t even afford to live by myself out here,” Wilson said, “no wonder there’s so many people on the street.”

Renting in Colorado right now is “pretty abysmal,” said Berwick, of New Era Colorado, which hears a refrain among young renters that they simply cannot afford monthly rates.

“It makes me feel sad that I know that people across the state are working really, really hard in order to maintain a living and they can barely afford to keep a house over their head,” Berwick said. “And it makes me feel angry because this has clearly become a mandate for people in positions of power to solve.”

“How do we decide how much suffering people have to go through before we do something?” she asks.

Colorado lawmakers did step forward with $30 million in financial assistance for tenants during a special session convened in November after a ballot measure aimed at easing rising property taxes failed. Additionally, municipalities can pour funding into emergency rental assistance.

“But that’s really more of a stopgap solution for renters who are facing eviction at that point to help bridge the gap so they can stay housed but not a long-term solution to the challenge of landlords increasing rents at whatever rate they wish,” said Alex Georgiadis, co-chair of the policy and research subcommittee within Colorado Homes for All Coalition.

The statewide coalition is made up of 23 groups that joined to advocate for affordable housing and is pushing for three major policy changes to better the lives of renters. The group aims to repeal the decades-long statewide ban on rent stabilization, which prevents individual communities from controlling local rent rates, as well as then work with individual municipalities to pass local rent stabilization policies. 

“We know that our folks are struggling to keep up with oftentimes what we would name are egregious rent increases and that wages are lagging behind the cost of rent, especially for working-class families,” said Cesiah Guadarrama, co-chair for Colorado Homes for All Coalition.

Rents have dramatically outpaced wages over the past few years, Georgiadis said.

Colorado workers earning minimum wage, $14.42, would need to work 94 hours per week to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent and not pay more than 30% of their income, she noted, citing information from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the National Low Income Housing Coalition. 

Minimum-wage employees looking for a one-bedroom apartment would need to work 77 hours a week, she said.

And in order for a tenant to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent without paying more than 30% on housing, they would have to make an hourly wage of $32.13.

Meanwhile, about 350,000 renters — nearly half of Colorado’s renting households — pay more than 30% of their income on rent, qualifying them as house burdened, Georgiadis said, citing data from the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority.

Nathaniel Addison, who rents the basement of a home in Greeley for about $900 a month, often feels like they have to relinquish all control to their landlord and sometimes their upstairs neighbors. Addison can’t adjust the temperature of their apartment and must ask the neighbors to crank up the heat.

“You don’t have full autonomy over your own space,” said Addison, who is queer and uses they/them pronouns. “It is very frustrating. I feel very powerless. I feel very much like I have to deal with it because of my financial circumstances, that this is the best I got.”

Addison, 28, works three jobs to cover rent and other living expenses — bartending, coordinating events for Fort Collins nonprofit The BIPOC Alliance and trying to sell homes as a newly minted Realtor.

They also find little ways to pare down expenses, including by sticking to the same meals every day, foregoing real estate classes that would advance their career and scaling back on seeing friends to prioritize work.

Each sacrifice inches Addision closer to one day owning a home, where they can have a design studio where they can sew costumes for queer and drag artists — a passion that bloomed during the pandemic. But with such a limited income, the reality of homeownership is a long way off.

It’s doubly hard because of the longtime discriminatory housing practices against people of color that are still visible in neighborhoods today, said Addison, who is Black and Japanese. Homes of Black people have often been appraised for significantly less, they noted, while real estate agents in recent years have steered people toward or away from certain neighborhoods because of their demographics.

“The makeup of your neighborhood is by design,” Addison said. “If there isn’t any person of color in your neighborhood, that is the system. If people of color aren’t able to move into your neighborhoods, it’s meant to be that way.”

For now, renting is the only option.

Sometimes, the idea of leaving Colorado feels easier to Addison, who previously struggled to get by while living in Texas and Washington.

“I jokingly say, ‘What state should I move to to experience being poor next?’” Addison said.

Design by Danika Worthington.