Opinion: Building more housing won’t lower prices; demand is just too large

What got me started on this topic was a July 21 Hotline from Boulder’s deputy mayor Nicole Speer to the council, city staff and citizens of Boulder discussing the Denver Regional Council of Government’s draft Regional Housing Needs Assessment. This is DRCOG’s attempt to provide a quantitative picture of future growth in the Denver Metro area. Per the quotes that Speer pulled, it says that the region will need 511,000 more housing units by 2050 to accommodate current needs and projected future growth, and that 300,000 of these will need to be affordable to households earning 60% or less of area median income.

When I read this email, the first question that came up was, where did these numbers come from? In particular, how does DRCOG know that 511,000 new units will magically meet demand? So I read the full report to see how these numbers were determined. As it turns out, DRCOG hired a consulting company to do the work, and they based their analysis on data provided by the Colorado State Demographer’s Office, part of the Department of Local Affairs, which is under Gov. Polis.

When I was on the council, I served six years on the DRCOG board, and became familiar with their work. In my experience, the State Demographer’s Office does excellent work on providing current data. But they are not focused on the national picture; their projections, as best as I could determine, are pretty much done by extending current trends into the future. They apparently did not specifically consider, e.g., the national shift to remote work, the increasing un-livability of many larger metropolitan areas and external factors such as immigration.

Relative to that issue, an aside, Wednesday’s New York Times covered Texas’s dealing with immigrants coming over its 1,254-mile border with Mexico. Apparently, between early 2022 and early 2024, over 62,000 immigrants who came into Texas were planning to go to the Denver metro area. Over a quarter of these were bussed here by Texas’s Gov. Abbott.

But the really big numbers are people from all across the U.S. who would like to move here. As I discussed in a previous piece, according to an October 31, 2023, Forbes story, 17% of Americans want to live in the Denver area, more than want to live anywhere else in the United States. 17% of 339 million (U.S. population minus the Denver area’s) is almost 58 million. Even if only one in ten could pull off this move, that’s 5.8 million. The Denver area’s current population of around 3.2 million would nearly triple to 9 million!

Under that scenario, DRCOG’s 2050 forecasted need for 511,000 more housing units is just a drop in the bucket. The real number is more like 2 to 3 million more units. The budget for the additional water, highways, transit, affordable housing, libraries, parks, rec centers, etc., would be staggering. Air quality would be way worse. And, of course, the ability to enjoy the mountains, go skiing, etc., would be very severely limited by massive overcrowding and traffic congestion.

That’s why I refer to another survey I’ve previously cited, called Disappearing Colorado. To quote their lead-in, “Anti-growth is a 90-to-10 voter issue in Colorado that almost no elected, corporate or civic leaders in the state are talking about. 90% desire a future in which far fewer people move into the state. Nearly three of every five voters (59%) prefer either a complete stop to population growth or a decline in the current population size of Colorado.”

Besides, adding housing into such a market won’t make much difference in price. Economists call it “inelasticity,” when no reasonable amount of supply increase will come close to satisfying demand. It would be nice if our politicians, both at the state and local level faced up to these realities — what people really want for Colorado’s future, and how ineffective, unpleasant and costly adding so much housing will be — and had some serious discussions about alternative paths.

On our local level, among other things, this relates to the redesign of Iris Avenue. Apparently city staff’s “preferred option” — shrinking the arterial to one lane each way plus a center turn-lane and a two-way bike path on the north side — will add 58 seconds to “most trips” (with “slowest trips” increasing by 2:09). I drove it on Wednesday around 9:15 AM; it took 2:25 going west and 1:45 going east. Fifty-eight seconds represents a 40% to 55% increase. And that’s now, without the thousands of new housing units the council is planning to allow.

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