In early 2023, Denver architect Sean Jursnick flew to Seattle to meet fellow architect Michael Eliason. Eliason had been publicly advocating for single-stair designs in multifamily—a concept that would allow mid-rise multifamily properties to have only one staircase for all ingress and egress—and Jursnick thought the concept would help support affordable housing development in Denver.
Two years later, Jursnick recalls the meeting as an inspiration. It sparked a nationwide movement to adopt single-stair designs and pushed several states to change their building codes. Colorado, for its part, is set to pass single-stair legislation later this year.
This story is emblematic of Denver’s collaborative effort to combat its local affordable housing crisis. While working on affordable housing developments, Jursnick saw firsthand the challenges and obstacles to affordable housing creation. His commitment to his work and the city led him to pursue viable workarounds.
Jursnick isn’t alone. Denver has become an innovation incubator for affordable housing solutions. Stakeholders across the affordable housing spectrum—from developers and architects to city officials—are all equally contributing a wide variety of solutions to boost housing supply and improve housing affordability.
These solutions have been effective in driving meaningful changes in Denver’s housing landscape. Last year, apartment rents declined as a wave of new supply came to market. Next year, with an expanding construction pipeline, Denver is on track to enlarge its housing inventory by 9 percent. The city could become a model for solutions to combat the affordability crisis and support more housing supply.
Dubious distinction
According to the Denver Post, Colorado has the second-worst housing shortage in the country, with California as the only state to surpass it. Colorado is short approximately 100,000 housing and apartment units to meet current demand. The deficit has increased the cost of housing and rent, which has affected low-income families, in particular.
The Common Sense Institute of Colorado estimates that Denver needs nearly 19,000 area median income–restricted affordable units to meet current demand. “Denver is definitely one of those cities that has become a third coast,” says Melissa McGinley Stube, senior development manager at Urban Ventures, a Denver developer. “It’s gotten really expensive.”
Denver was once known as an affordable hub in the Midwest. That changed after the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, when housing and apartment development came to an abrupt halt in the state.
Then, more people came. From 2010 to 2020, more than 115,000 people moved to Denver, expanding the city’s population by 19 percent. Today, the city’s population growth continues to outpace the national average.
Housing supply hasn’t been able to keep up. Emily Collins, senior project development administrator on Denver’s Affordable Housing Review Team, says that this dynamic has driven the affordability crisis in the city. “There’s a mismatch in supply and demand across the Denver housing market, but there is a really strong gap in housing for the low- to moderate-income residents of our community,” Collins says.
The city’s housing crisis isn’t unique, but the city’s response to it is. As developer George Thorn, president and founder of Mile High Development, notes, “We certainly have a shortage of housing that’s affordable at all income levels, like every other community in the country, but I think we’re addressing it in a really effective and responsible way.”
Thorn finds encouragement in the partnership between the city and the private sector. He explains that he can make affordable housing developments pencil in Denver, which would not be viable in other cities. “It takes a village,” he says, adding that it is impossible to develop affordable housing in a vacuum. Denver’s village is mobilized and motivated.
The city supplies support
Denver actively supports multifamily development and affordable housing development through numerous programs designed to work with nonprofit and for-profit developers in pushing housing projects forward. The city’s role and responsiveness in the creation and preservation of affordable housing has been a standout to developers. “Having a city that understands affordable housing and is willing to address it with real money and roll up their sleeves—that’s Denver,” Thorn says. “They put in place programs that specifically fund affordable housing.”
The city’s Affordable Housing Review Team, established in 2022 to address the worsening affordability gap there, is considered by many meeting participants to be among the most effective tools to push forward affordable housing projects. The review team intrinsically understands the complexities and challenges of affordable housing, and it is empowered to help developers navigate city processes to get projects quickly permitted. Denver’s review team works specifically with low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) projects, which have an extra layer of requirements to receive permitting. “The dedicated staffing team reviews those projects and . . . really provides an extra level of concierge service,” Collins explains. “We’re very available, we’re very solutions-oriented, and we’re trying to meet the developers where they’re at and work hand-in-hand with them.”
The Affordable Housing Review Team has already worked on 102 projects in Denver, including development site plans, adaptative use, and rezonings, and Collins says that the team is actively expanding. Developers have seen the benefits of the program firsthand. Thorn recently completed Northfield Flats, a 129-unit project that serves residents who earn 30 percent to 80 percent of area median income (AMI). He worked closely with the review team to permit the project and was able to get through the entitlement phase—from purchase of the site to breaking ground—in just nine months. “That is unheard of in Denver,” Thorn says.
In addition to assembling the review team, the city has pushed for a host of other reforms to support affordable housing development. The community and planning department has published modernized requirements for parking to eliminate minimum parking requirements and unlock housing choices that support increased density in residential neighborhoods.
The city has an adaptive use technical assistance team, which focuses largely on the conversion of office-to-residential buildings in downtown Denver. More help is coming, too. Through its expanding housing affordability program, the city leads focus groups and advisor committees to understand the barriers to affordable housing, and Denver is currently working to develop a 90-day review process for affordable housing projects. To help fund these efforts, Denver has a $4.5 million Pathways to Removing Obstacles–grant award from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to help reduce procedural and regulatory barriers to affordable housing.
Dealing with lot sizes
City programs and partnership can go a long way toward supporting the development of affordable housing, but Denver has additional logistical challenges that have posed barriers. A typical lot in Denver is 4,000 square feet (370 sq m), only 50 feet (15 m) wide, and served by an alley. These lots are difficult to develop to the density needed to supply affordable or, often, even middle-income housing projects.
When Jursnick, an associate at SAR+ Architects, went to Seattle to meet with Eliason in 2023, he was searching for a solution to Denver’s challenging lot sizes. “There are thousands and thousands of lots in Denver that are zoned for five or six stories, but they’re small lots that are only 40 or 50 feet wide, so you’d never be able to build to the density that’s being encouraged by zoning,” explains Jursnick.
The single-stair concept would help developers utilize narrow lots and build to the allowed density. In Jursnick’s vision for Denver, denser multifamily projects could be built on the same streets as single-family residential houses to create a mixed-density and mixed-income environment. “It is another tool [in] the tool belt [to] unlock these small lots that are all over the city for us and really encourage diverse housing in the city, in the places where it is in demand,” he says. To promote the concept, Jursnick launched a single-stair design challenge by asking fellow architects worldwide to design a single-stair building on a narrow Denver lot. The competition received more than 200 entries and got the attention of Colorado governor Jared Polis, who has fervently supported the code update.
Building materials
Although single stairs have taken the spotlight, Jursnick isn’t the only architect seeking solutions to Denver’s housing crisis. There was also a deep analysis of building materials and styles to reduce construction costs—well known to pose obstacles for affordable housing development. Terra Mazzeo, a design leader at Stantec and a Denver native, has explored the use of prefab accessory dwelling units (ADUs) on challenging, undeveloped, dense urban lots. “We have a lot of undeveloped urban lots, within the city center and in central neighborhoods, that are really ripe for housing development, but they are too expensive to develop,” Mazzeo says. “We need more density to make them pencil.”
A member of Stantec’s research and development team, Mazzeo is looking at ways to maximize the density of urban lots by testing low-rise concepts with such features as alley access, shared amenities, and—echoing Jursnick’s work—exterior staircases. “There is a real focus on how to mix uses . . . in a way that can create . . . microcommunities at the block scale,” she says.
Mazzeo’s team is also working to standardize prefabricated modular designs for Denver-specific ADUs and eliminate barriers to their development. The latter aim also has city support from an ADU task force that has been effective at removing regulations and streamlining development of such structures. Mazzeo is working with a manufacturer situated 200 miles north of Denver to build the ADUs there and then deliver them to their respective development sites.
Modular development has even broader applications beyond ADUs. Adam Berger Development is likewise focusing attention on all-modular designs to develop affordable housing. Last year he delivered West Holden Place, a 77-unit, all-modular apartment building in Denver’s Sun Valley neighborhood for residents making 80 percent to 120 percent of AMI. This year, he is expanding the pipeline with one new project in Englewood, near two hospital systems, to create more housing for health care workers. By leveraging modular development, he is able to deliver these projects in less than a year.
Developers increase investment
Developers are also responding to the call for increased affordable housing. In 2023, apartment development surged in Denver to place it among the top cities in the nation for new apartment construction. That year, for the first time in the city’s history, more multifamily units were delivered than were single-family homes; with another 45,000 units in the pipeline, multifamily construction will continue to outpace single-family. Last year, the city delivered a record 18,248 units, which increased completions by more than 50 percent year-over-year—the highest delivery rate in the country. Of those units, 1,500 were AMI-restricted affordable ones.
This year, the market is expected to cool as it absorbs the spike in new deliveries—which have temporarily increased the city’s apartment vacancy rate to 7 percent. But even with the slowdown, the market is expected to deliver roughly 17,000 units this year, according to research from Yardi Matrix.
Beyond volume, developers are taking an innovative approach to project planning. Some are working with the community land trust to develop affordable for-sale condos; building a capital stack with funding provided by the State Affordable Housing Investment Fund; or even working closely with the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity, as Urban Ventures did on ARIA Denver, a 17.5-acre (7 ha) mixed-income and mixed-use community.
McGinley Stube says that an affordable housing organization called Housing Colorado has routinely sold out its annual retreat, a sign that developers are pursuing solutions and opportunities for affordable housing projects. “I believe it is going to take a lot of different pieces to solve our affordable housing crisis. One thing is not going to solve all of our affordable housing problems,” she says. “No way, but it’s going to be a piece of the pie.”
Denver’s multifamily community is conceiving, testing, and providing those pieces of the pie, and it is providing a collective solution to the city’s affordability crisis. Several cities have asked Thorn to come develop affordable projects like the ones he is bringing to market in the Denver area—but he says that, without a city’s support, it’s not as easy to do in other markets. “I can get an affordable housing development done in Denver, I can get it done in Aurora, I can get it done in Lakeland,” Thorn says. “So, I take the path of least resistance.”
