Colorado communities can’t thrive if residents can’t afford housing

Housing affordability is one of the defining challenges facing Colorado. Colorado is now the third most expensive state in the country, and working families are struggling to pay rent. More than half of renters statewide spend over 30% of their income on housing, and too many Coloradans can no longer afford to live where they work.

In the Roaring Fork Valley, the residents of Cavern Springs Mobile Home Park are in a multi-million-dollar bidding war with private equity investors trying to buy their homes. At Mountain Voices Project, we are supporting over 100 families as they try to buy their park and keep their community affordable and stable.

That fight is a small part of a much broader crisis.

At the Community Economic Defense Project, we support the tens of thousands of Coloradans facing housing instability because their rents are too high. Through our work providing emergency financial assistance, legal assistance, and wraparound support to help prevent homelessness, we see the worst consequences of our state’s affordability crisis. It takes very little — a medical bill, job loss, or unexpected expense — to put housing out of reach.

Colorado cannot build thriving communities or a strong local economy if the people who keep this state running can’t afford to live here.

That is why we joined education groups, labor unions, housing advocates and community organizations through Coloradans for the Common Good, to host a recent gubernatorial candidate forum. More than 400 people came from across the state to ask questions grounded in shared priorities.

All gubernatorial candidates were invited. Attorney General Phil Weiser and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet attended and answered questions.

Community leaders asked about preserving and expanding funding for homelessness prevention, rental and mortgage assistance, and legal services that help families stay housed. They also asked about annual caps on mobile home park lot rent increases and making Proposition 123 preservation funding more effective and accessible for mobile home communities.

During the forum, both candidates expressed support for all of these priorities.

The issues raised at the forum matter, because they speak directly to the pressures facing Colorado families and communities. Funding for rental assistance, legal services and resource navigation gives families a chance to stay housed when unexpected costs or financial setbacks threaten to push them out of their homes.

Similarly, stabilizing rents in mobile home parks helps protect one of the last sources of affordable housing in many Colorado communities. When parks are sold, often to out-of-state private equity investors, rising lot rents can quickly displace longtime residents and destabilize entire workforce communities.

The forum also highlighted the importance of making Proposition 123 preservation funding more accessible and responsive for mobile home communities. Preservation dollars can help residents respond to a pending sale before affordable housing is lost, but only if funding processes move quickly enough for communities to act in time.

This election will not solve Colorado’s housing crisis overnight. But the forum showed what is possible when communities organize around clear, grounded solutions and ask candidates to answer directly. It also reflected a broader belief shared across our coalition, that Colorado’s housing future should be shaped by the common good and by the people most directly affected by the crisis.