The Colorado legislature is poised to pass a suite of marquee land-use reform measures that promise to reshape housing development along the Front Range, delivering a significant win to Gov. Jared Polis and legislative Democrats a year after their first reform attempt collapsed.
On Tuesday, the penultimate day of the legislative session, the Senate passed House Bill 1313. It requires Front Range local governments to set density goals near transit-rich areas and then demonstrate they’re hitting those targets. The bill is the centerpiece of the five-part land-use package, and — after winning a swift procedural vote in the House later in the day — it’s now headed to Polis for full passage into law.
“This is a tremendous victory for affordable housing in Colorado,” said Rep. Steven Woodrow, a Denver Democrat who was among several sponsors of the bill. “We’ve known for some time that we need denser zoning by transit, and this bill delivers.”
Late Monday night, 12 hours before the transit density bill passed, the Senate also gave final approval to House Bill 1152, which generally allows for accessory-dwelling units like garage apartments and granny flats to be built on single-family properties in Front Range cities. That measure awaited a procedural vote before moving to the governor’s desk.
Polis has already signed House Bill 1007, which bans local residential occupancy limits that aren’t safety related. He’s also expected to sign House Bill 1304, which limits how much parking local governments can require for developments near certain public transit corridors and routes.
The final piece of the land-use package is a bill requiring local governments to undertake regular housing studies. It’s still moving through the House, though that measure, too, was expected to clear the legislature before the session ends Wednesday night.
This year’s legislation still faced a wringer as the bills moved through the House and Senate. But while vocal opponents didn’t back down, they weren’t able to keep the bills from passing.
Kevin Bommer, the executive director of the Colorado Municipal League — which has broadly opposed most of the reforms — said in a statement Tuesday that he was grateful the density bill was pared back. But it “remains to be seen,” he said, “how the program will actually work and how municipalities choose to respond” to the bills.
Polis, zoning reform advocates and environmental groups have backed state-level land use intervention as a broad-spectrum antibiotic for a host of the state’s present and future ills: More housing stock, they argue, will bring down rents and prices. Pairing density with transit ideally will cut down on car use and air pollution.
And denser development, they argue, will maximize water and utility usage in a state that’s expected to continue growing.
“The reality is,” Polis said in a statement, “that building more housing near transit, giving homeowners the freedom to build an ADU on their property, eliminating costly parking requirements above and beyond what people want, and ensuring that every community is planning for the future and working together will reduce housing costs so more Coloradans can afford to live where they want.”
The package’s impending passage comes almost exactly a year after a broader first attempt to reform the state’s local land-use policies fell apart on the final day of the 2023 session.
That was a major blow for Polis. He’d eschewed more progressive interventions for the housing crisis in favor of a supply-side approach that was focused on circumventing local zoning rules to kickstart denser, faster development.
After the first attempt collapsed, lawmakers and the coalition of affordable housing and environmental groups broke the policies into separate bills this year. They did so to increase the chances that at least some would survive and so that they could debate each measure independently.
They also were more transparent with the bills’ contents for months before the session began. And they scaled back the package’s breadth and paired it with transit reforms and funding.
To ensure support from affordable housing groups and progressive lawmakers, the transit-centric density bill also requires local governments to select affordability and anti-displacement strategies — such as incentivizing subsidized housing units or larger apartment units — to ensure existing communities aren’t displaced when their urban corridors suddenly become lucrative targets for development.
Local governments, legislative Republicans and a corps of moderate Democrats opposed the package as infringing on land-use decisions that long have been controlled by city councils, county commissions and planning boards.
That opposition scuttled last year’s effort, and the package’s passage this year was not assured.
Legislative debates resulted in concessions: The most sweeping of the provisions apply only to the Front Range. The parking measure was scaled back. To ensure the density bill’s passage in the Senate, millions in tax credits were pulled and moved elsewhere.
That bill was also stripped of its sharpest teeth: a provision that would have withheld tax money from local governments that resisted implementing the bill, plus language saying that a state agency could sue those same intransigent municipalities.
But even without those provisions, the state still could pursue legal action against local governments that refuse to comply in the coming years.
Because the land-use package generally seeks to bolster development, its full effects will likely take years to set in. Still, supporters hailed its passage, particularly after last year’s failures.
“It’s a step forward. It’s not perfect, but very little that comes out of this building is,” said Kinsey Hasstedt, the director of state and local policy for Enterprise Community Partners. “It’s a real step forward with meaningful affordability and displacement mitigation for Colorado.”
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