The Urban Land Institute has selected its Colorado council as one of the first groups to work with its newly established Workforce Housing Partnership.
The ULI has made workforce housing one of its priorities. The effort recently gained momentum when Ron Terwilliger, chief executive of Atlanta-based Trammell Crow Residential, granted the ULI $5 million to establish the ULI Center for Workforce Housing in Washington, D.C.
“It is my hope that we can eventually develop a program to work with ULI district councils to help states and regions build as much workforce housing as possible,” Terwilliger said. “It’s intended to cover service workers such as teachers, firemen and policemen who can’t afford housing near where they work now.”
Terwilliger said he’s also exploring the creation of a fund that would make loans to private developers for workforce housing projects.
“The concentration of poverty resulting from the projects built in the ’50s and ’60s is a disaster,” Terwilliger said. “It isolated the poor away from jobs in areas with terrible school systems.
“Hope VI has rebuilt a lot of these projects into mixed-income housing but not nearly enough.”
ULI Colorado has formed a housing committee co-chaired by Susan Powers of Urban Ventures and Jamie Fitzpatrick of Corum Real Estate Group.
The committee’s first task is to work with five communities in metro Denver: Aurora, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver and Lakewood, said Michael Leccese, executive director of ULI Colorado.
One in nine low-income Denver households spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing, often at the expense of other necessities such as food, clothing and health, according to the Enterprise Foundation. In 2005, Forbes magazine named Denver one of the 10 most overpriced places to live.
“We want to be a city that maintains income diversity so we have a range of people,” said Karen Lado, director of the Colorado office of the Enterprise Foundation, a nonprofit affordable-housing advocate.
“We want people to live and work in Denver so they spend their tax dollars here. We want these people so we don’t become a city of haves and have-nots,” she said.
“The challenge we have around that entry-level, moderately priced homeownership in Denver is that what we can offer may not be as attractive a package as what people can get if they go out to the suburbs,” she said. “If we’re not competitive as Denver, we run the risk of losing these folks.”
Terwilliger is the keynote speaker at the 2007 Housing Conference hosted by the Frank lin L. Burns School of Real Estate and Construction Management at the University of Denver and co-sponsored by ULI Colorado.
The conference begins at 7:30 a.m. Feb. 16 at Belmar Center, 405 S. Teller St., Lakewood.
In addition to Terwilliger, speakers and panelists include Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper; Mike Rinner, senior analyst with the Genesis Group; Gordon Von Stroh, professor of management at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business; Kathi Williams, director of the Colorado Division of Housing; Tony Salazar, director of West Coast Operations for St. Louis-based McCormack Baron Salazar; and Gene Myers, president and chief executive of Denver-based New Town Builders.
Staff writer Margaret Jackson can be reached at 303-954-1473 or mjackson@denverpost.com.
