Denver’s poorest residents have a hard time renting apartments or buying homes because of a shortage of affordable housing, according to a report released today.
Still, the city provides proportionately more affordable housing than the counties surrounding it, says the report, which was commissioned by the city and prepared by BBC Research & Consulting, a Denver-based firm.
The report offers a broad review of metro-area housing available to various buyers and renters based on their income levels. It will be used to shape the city’s housing policy now and in the future.
“We’re not short on housing, but there is an imbalance in the for-sale market for those people at the lowest end of the economic spectrum,” said Mike Rinner, senior analyst with the Genesis Group, a consulting firm that provided some of the data for the study.
That problem, others say, also extends to the rental market.
During the first quarter of 2006, 35 percent of all the rental units affordable to households earning less than 30 percent of the area median income were in Denver, the study found. Thirty-three percent of the rental housing affordable to those households was in Arapahoe County, 13 percent in Adams County, 11 percent in Jefferson County, and 9 percent in Boulder County and Broomfield. There is no affordable rental housing, as defined by the study, in Douglas County.
Since 2001, rents have consistently been lowest in Denver and highest in Douglas County.
Slightly more of the affordable for-sale housing is available in Arapahoe County. About 43 percent of the housing affordable to households earning less than 30 percent of the area median income is in Arapahoe County, with 40 percent in Denver, 12 percent in Adams, 6 percent in Jefferson and 1 percent in Boulder.
Broomfield and Douglas counties don’t have any affordable for-sale housing, the report said.
“Denver is going to set its own plan, but it’s obvious in some of these areas we need some regional cooperation,” said Kathi Williams, director of the Colorado Division of Housing.
“A lot (of communities) have done market analysis and needs assessments, but there are two big hurdles afterward: One, do political leaders and community leaders believe the information is accurate? And two, what are they willing to do about it?”
Denver’s renters earning less than $60,000 a year have a hard time finding housing to purchase because less than half the units in the market are affordable to them, the report said.
Most of the houses they could afford to buy are about 1,100 square feet with two or three bedrooms and one or two baths. They mostly were built in the 1950s and 1960s and are located in west and northeast Denver.
Morever, current homeowners earning less than $40,000 would find it difficult to move within the city because of appreciation in home values in recent years.
In the Denver metro area, said Rinner of the Genesis Group, there aren’t many attached houses under $100,000 available or stand-alone single-family homes for less than $150,000. The city of Denver, he said, should ask itself whether it wants to try to turn low-income residents into homeowners.
Williams said she was most surprised by the region’s ethnic makeup.
The majority of Denver’s residents – 71 percent – are white, according to the report. The next largest racial categories are black at 11 percent and “some other race” at 12 percent. A little more than a third of the city’s population is of Hispanic decent. Jefferson and Boulder counties are the least diverse.
The Division of Housing intends to use the information in the report when it kicks off its effort to help minorities buy homes, Williams said.
“Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and HUD have been encouraging us to get more proactively involved in minority homeownership, but because of the foreclosure numbers, I’ve been reluctant to go there,” she said. “Some of those who have been taken advantage of with loan products have been more on the minority side than the non-minorities.”
Staff writer Margaret Jackson can be reached at 303-954-1473 or mjackson@denverpost.com.
