Facing outcry from local officials, Colorado Democrats this week said they would back off a plan to withhold highway maintenance funding from cities that don’t meet proposed state targets for housing density near transit stops.
But even with the biggest penalty in the bill on the chopping block, local government leaders across the Denver metro area remain divided over the legislation, the centerpiece of Gov. Jared Polis’ plans to reduce housing costs in Colorado.
House Bill 1313 would require a number of urban and suburban local governments to allow more apartments and townhomes along major transit corridors.
The Senate’s housing committee delayed a vote on the measure twice this week, with bill sponsors saying they were still working on amendments. Notably, Sen. Faith Winter, a Broomfield Democrat and main sponsor of the bill, said Tuesday she planned to strip out a controversial provision that would have punished local entities that didn’t meet the measure’s housing targets by withholding some of their highway user tax dollars, a major source of road maintenance funding for local governments.
Arapahoe County’s $9 million allocation, for instance, represents as much as 40% of its road and bridge funding, County Commission chair Carrie Warren-Gully told the committee.
The bill could still give the state tools to ensure compliance — namely the ability to seek a court order forcing local entities to follow the law if they don’t meet the bill’s requirements by the end of 2027.
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In recent weeks, the proposal received key endorsements from top city leaders, including Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett, who view it as key to addressing regional housing and transportation challenges that no single city can solve on its own.
In a statement, Johnston called the bill “a balanced approach to land use that pushes local governments in the right direction.”
“With policies like HB-1313, we can change the status quo to create a more affordable Colorado,” he said.
Johnston’s support has put the bill on stronger political footing than last year’s more expansive land use measure, which was bitterly opposed by local government officials and ultimately failed to pass in the final hours of the legislative session. But it still faces resistance from local government advocates, such as the Colorado Municipal League and Colorado Counties Inc., which view it as an affront to local control of neighborhood development.
The Denver metro area faces an estimated housing shortfall of 70,000 units, according to a 2023 study by real estate data firm Zillow. Housing experts say that lack of supply has contributed to skyrocketing rents and dwindling affordability for working class residents.
Across hours of testimony that started Tuesday evening and continued until 2 a.m., several local officials told lawmakers that the measure would force communities to zone for more housing than their infrastructure can reasonably support. More housing means more demand for costly water and sewer transmission lines and treatment. It would also mean more traffic on local roads if transit services — and ridership — don’t increase significantly.
“The densities proposed in this bill far outpace even our most aggressive plans,” said Sarah Borgers, the operations manager for the Public Works and Utilities Department for the city of Westminster. “For a community that is close to entirely built out with infrastructure built to match, there would be huge, possibly insurmountable costs to build the infrastructure needed to meet these goals.”
Supporters of the bill, though, see most local resistance to new housing as being driven by resistance from neighbors, not infrastructure constraints.
“Too often in our communities, the voices of wealthy homeowners are keeping new housing from being built across our state while other people struggle to find places to live,” said Molly McKinley, the policy director for the Denver Streets Partnership, an advocacy coalition.
Housing targets vary
The bill would offer Front Range cities and counties millions of dollars of affordable housing tax credits and infrastructure grants in order to coax them into allowing higher density housing within a half-mile radius of train stations and a quarter-mile radius of high-frequency bus routes.
The requirements would apply to 31 local governments along the Front Range, covering much of the Denver metro area, as well as Longmont and Fort Collins.
To qualify for the money, local governments would have to meet housing opportunity goals laid out by the legislation, which calls for densities of 40 units per acre in qualifying transit areas.
For context, townhomes are typically designed at 12 to 18 units per acre, according to a metro housing diversity study, while apartment buildings can have 100 units or more on the same amount of land. Cities can exempt land from their calculations where it doesn’t make sense to build housing, such as floodplains, cemeteries and airports.
“It is not one-size-fits-all,” Winter said at a hearing this week. “Each jurisdiction has a unique goal and jurisdictions have a lot of options that they can use to comply.”
It’s difficult to say how much housing the measure would actually produce. Cities don’t have to develop multifamily housing themselves — they would just have to change their zoning laws to allow higher densities, letting developers build more units. And, local governments would still have some ability to block development through the permitting process if the area lacked the infrastructure needed to support it.
Still, there’s some evidence that loosening zoning restrictions can have a big effect. A Pew Charitable Trusts study found that apartment construction boomed and rents grew more slowly in Minneapolis than in the rest of Minnesota after the city adopted a series of land use reforms, including increasing how much housing could be built along transit corridors.
Further complicating matters in Colorado, state and local officials disagree over what the bill actually requires. In Lafayette, for instance — a city of 31,000 people — city planners estimated they would have to zone for an additional 77,000 housing units under a previous version of the bill.
Lafayette’s City Council passed a resolution in March opposing the measure, saying arbitrary state-level targets “would undermine the work that the City of Lafayette and its residents have done to promote responsible development and affordable housing, despite limited support and a lack of sufficient transit opportunities.”
However, state officials expect Lafayette would only need around a third of the city’s internal estimates if the bill were to pass. There’s an amendment in the works that’s expected to clarify that transit services planned far into the future would not be subject to the state housing goals.
The Department of Local Affairs, which has been working with cities to help them calculate their housing targets, would not provide a statewide estimate to The Colorado Sun of how much additional zoning capacity the bill would be expected to produce.
The Colorado Municipal League estimates that local entities could be required to zone for at least 100,000 more units than they do today, but it varies widely from one community to the next. Broomfield expects it would be forced to zone for 7,000 more units, while Golden could need to increase residential zoning by 36,000 units, according to CML.
Some cities may not have to change their zoning rules at all. Ryan Huff, a spokesman for Denver’s Community Planning and Development Department, told The Sun that city officials believe they already zone for enough housing near transit to meet the goals laid out in the bill.
“We look forward to working with the state and other communities to follow Denver’s lead and build more housing across Colorado,” Huff wrote in an email.