Denver City Council is getting ready to “preserve” affordable housing, which in Denver usually means the city has found a new way to wrap a housing shortage in six layers of process, slap a compassion sticker on it, and act shocked when rent still eats people alive.
According to The Denver Gazette, council will consider an affordable housing preservation ordinance tied to HB24-1175, the state law giving local governments a right of first offer and right of first refusal to buy residential properties for long-term affordable housing. Long-term, in this case, means rent limits lasting 100 years.
A century. Denver can’t keep a bike lane clear through one snowstorm, but sure, let’s have City Hall make 100-year housing promises like it’s carving commandments into stone tablets.
Here’s the twist: the resolution would waive Denver’s rights of first refusal and first offer under state law, while Denver updates its own Preservation of Affordable Housing Ordinance to align with that law and serve as the city’s prevailing policy.
So the city is basically saying: we love this tool so much we’re not using it, because we have our own tool, which is like the state tool, but more Denver, meaning probably slower, foggier, and somehow involving a stakeholder process with pastries.
Proponents say the ordinance will stop older apartment buildings from being demolished and turned into “luxury rentals.” Opponents say it will slow new development Denver desperately needs.
And there’s the Denver housing debate in one miserable nutshell: one side wants to freeze buildings in amber, the other wants to build enough housing to keep people from moving into their Subarus, and City Hall wants to schedule a meeting about whether the amber is equitable.
Nobody normal in Denver is confused about the problem. Rent is brutal. Buying is fantasy cosplay. Neighborhoods that used to house regular working people now look like they were designed by an architect who only communicates in matte black fixtures and $19 cocktails.
But Denver’s ruling class keeps treating housing like the supply part is optional. They create scarcity, delay projects, bless every new rule as moral progress, then act like greedy developers personally invented math.
Yes, tearing down older apartments and replacing them with high-end units can wreck affordability. Also yes, choking off new housing because every project must survive a bureaucratic escape room makes affordability worse. Two things can be true at once, which is apparently illegal inside Denver government.
The city’s housing policy often feels like watching somebody try to put out a kitchen fire by forming a committee to preserve the smoke. Every delay has a noble name. Every restriction has a compassionate slogan. Every failure becomes proof that taxpayers, builders, landlords, neighbors, or capitalism itself must be punished harder.
And while council weighs that, the same agenda includes rolling over $715,000 in unspent funds for the Colorado Nonprofit Development Center, also known as the Harm Reduction Action Center, to buy a permanent facility for “health access services” for more than 4,000 people a year. There’s also a $225,000 Denver Police Department liability settlement, multiple proclamations, zoning hearings, and a possible year-long moratorium on data centers waiting in the wings.
That is peak Denver: unaffordable housing, unspent nonprofit money, police settlements, zoning fights, proclamations, and a data-center moratorium all crammed into one civic casserole of expensive dysfunction.
Meanwhile, normal people are just trying to live here without needing a trust fund, three roommates, or a municipal acronym decoder ring.
Denver doesn’t need more housing theater dressed up as moral courage. It needs officials who understand that you cannot preserve affordability by strangling supply, worshiping process, and pretending every new ordinance is a rescue mission.
If City Hall could build apartments as fast as it builds excuses, everyone in Denver would have a damn penthouse.
Source: The Denver Gazette
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