Brad Buchanan and his planning department have convinced Denver City Council to bring 23,000 planned housing units back to life.
“Itap a strategic, tactical, right-minded response to whatap going on in the marketplace today to support our housing goals,” said Buchanan, the executive director of Denver’s Community Planning and Development department.
The council voted unanimously Monday evening to give projects that received approval of their site development plans before the end of 2025 another three years to obtain building permits.
Currently, developers have 30 months from the time their projectap site development plan is approved to obtain building permits to begin construction. Otherwise, their SDP expires, and they must resubmit it if they hope to build.
“I don’t see one council district thatap not impacted by this proposal,” Councilwoman Amanda Sandoval said at the meeting. “And that was what was appealing to me to put this forward.”
“If we could put 23,000 more units into Denver, I’m all about that,” she added.
Denver’s apartment market is out of equilibrium. A record number of apartments have been constructed over the past few years. The most came in 2024, when the city added 10,500 units, according to the Apartment Association of Metro Denver. That represents a nearly 7% increase in the city’s entire apartment supply.
As a result, Denver’s vacancy has increased rapidly over the past two years, from 4.8% in the first quarter of 2022 to 8.3% at the same time this year — the highest since 2010. Rents, meanwhile, are the lowest they’ve been in five years. That environment, coupled with high interest rates and construction costs, has slowed new groundbreakings to a crawl.
Buchanan said these factors pushed him into action.
“This is a unique moment in time,” he said. I’ve been working in Denver for over 40 years. I’ve never seen an opportunity like this before for us to help the market, to support the creation of housing sooner and to avoid the inevitable reality of rent spikes if we don’t act.”
Many of the projects given a lifeline by this week’s vote were submitted in the months before the July 2022 implementation of the city’s Expanding Housing Affordability ordinance, which requires new residential projects to reserve between 8% and 15% of their units for people making below the median income or pay a large fee.
“This is an opportunity for us to evolve into a mature marketplace where rent is increasing at a rational rate of a percent or two a year, and mirroring wage growth so that real estate investment is profitable and our residents can afford their housing,” Buchanan added.
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