by Solomon Greene, Executive Director and Research Professor, University of Denver
In Colorado, a full-time worker must earn $36.44 an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment without spending more than 30% of their income on rent, according to a recent report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The state’s minimum wage is $15.16 — someone earning that would have to work 96 hours a week, more than two full-time jobs, to cover rent. The report ranks Colorado as the 12th-least-affordable state in the country for renters.
In July 2026, Congress offered state and local leaders a new set of tools to expand housing supply when it passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the most significant federal housing legislation in decades. It authorizes relatively little new spending. Instead it offers competitive grants and technical assistance to state and local governments that ease the local rules that slow housing construction.
I direct the Center for Housing Research and Innovative Solutions at the University of Denver, where we study how Colorado and states across the Mountain West can expand housing supply and lower housing costs. Before that, I led the Office of Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which evaluates proposed housing legislation, during the years when many of the ideas behind this new law were being developed and debated.
Housing costs are now central to Colorado politics. In a statewide poll in spring 2026, voters were more likely to call the cost of housing “a very big problem” than any other cost they were asked about. Whoever wins the governor’s race in November will inherit that problem along with a new federal law that could help address it.
Much of the federal act rewards changes that Colorado has already spent several years making. One provision authorizes competitive grants for local governments that revise parking mandates and minimum lot sizes or streamline permitting and environmental review for new construction. A 2024 Colorado state law eliminated parking requirements near transit, and Denver has since dropped them entirely.
Colorado also legalized accessory dwelling units statewide in 2024, letting homeowners build small backyard or garage apartments without needing a special hearing or approval. What that law could not supply was money. The federal act now lets Federal Housing Administration home improvement loans finance these units, pairing permission the state already granted with financing that has been hard to find.
The same pattern appears in construction rules. Colorado is one of four states that have legalized single-stair apartment buildings, a design that allows small apartment buildings to be served by one stairwell rather than the two that American building codes have long required, freeing up floor space and making it possible to build apartments on narrow lots. The new law directs federal officials to issue guidance for these buildings and authorizes grants to test their safety and cost.
Financing rules are shifting too. Banks are the main investors in the federal low-income housing tax credit, the largest subsidy for building affordable apartments. Developers sell those tax credits to banks in exchange for cash to build with. But federal regulators cap how much of a bank’s capital can go into such investments. The act raises that ceiling from 15% to 20%, letting banks buy more credits and put more equity into each deal, just as state housing subsidies shrink.
Housing subsidy in the United States is fragmented, and assembling it consumes time and money that could otherwise go into buildings. The ROAD Act does not eliminate that fragmentation, but it trims some federal requirements that make stacking subsidies expensive, and it gives states a reason to make their own programs easier for developers to combine.
Colorado has been chipping away at this problem. In 2025 the state, its housing finance authority and the city of Denver launched Housing Hub Colorado, a single portal that aligns their application timelines and requirements; a shared application accepted by all three is expected later this year. The portal grew out of the Colorado Housing Consortium, a coalition launched in 2025 that brings together more than 120 people from state and local government, developers, lenders, philanthropies and nonprofits, who surveyed the field and ranked the barriers driving up construction costs.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
