The median price of a residence sold in the first half of the year is running at $599,950, according to the .

In a refrain that Talking Heads fans can appreciate, that matches the $600,000 median sales price in the first half of 2025, the $595,000 median in the first half of 2024 and the $600,000 median price in early 2022.

Outside 2023, when prices dipped a little more, the median sales price band has stayed in a very tight range over the past four years.

What has moved around more are condo prices, which are down about 5% or $20,000 compared to the first half of 2022, according to DMAR counts.

That reflects higher homeowners association fees, which are being pushed up by rising insurance and maintenance costs.

Mortgage rates are also playing in a tight octave. They averaged 5.7% for a 30-year loan in the middle of 2022, but were at around 6.92% in June 2024 and 6.4% last month.

That doesn’t imply that affordability doesn’t remain an issue. Insurance, property taxes, and HOA fees are higher than they were in 2022. And prices did get ahead of wages.

Yet, consumer inflation has risen nearly 14% in the past four years, so stable home prices represent a “real” discount for households that have seen their wages rise.

“The market has been resilient, given the amount of economic chaos and uncertainty. This year, we have had inflation increasing and a war with Iran. Midterm elections are coming,” said Amanda Snitker, a local Realtor who heads DMAR’s Market Trends Committee.

The busy spring selling season hit its peak in April rather than May or June. But an early shift into the summer season isn’t rare, she said.

Closings fell 6.6% between May and June to 3,924, and are down 5.6% from June of last year. But over the past four years, they have stayed eerily stable at between 21,000 to 22,000 sales in the first six months of the year.

In June, the median sold price for a single-family home was $675,000, while the median price for a condo or townhome that sold was $391,750.

New listings dipped 4% on the month and 3% year-over-year, a sign that homeowners aren’t feeling pressure to dump inventory on the market. Sellers, however, are under mounting pressure to make sure their homes show well and don’t come with deferred maintenance, Snitker said.

The mid-year inventory of listings was at 12,744 on June 30, down slightly from 14,007 at that point in 2025, but more than double the inventory levels seen in 2022 and 2023.

Barring a major shift in the economy or interest rates, Snitker sees the region’s housing market continuing to coast along its current path.

“The variable most at play is mortgage rates. Unless that changes in a meaningful way, we won’t see much difference for the second half of the year,” Snitker said.

Home prices will remain flat, and metro Denver’s inventory of listings will tighten a bit, she predicts.

But not everyone watching the market thinks it will follow the same trajectory. a real estate data platform and advisory service based in Florida, places Denver and the broader Colorado market high on its list for an impending correction.

CEO Nick Gerli forecasts a 5.9% decline in Colorado home prices and an 8.9% decline in metro Denver home prices a year from now.

“Prices across significant portions of the state are projected to decline over the next 12 months,” Gerli notes in an email. “This is not bad news. This is the reset buyers have been waiting for.”

If his forecast pans out, Denver buyers and sellers might soon switch their tune from “Once in a Lifetime” to “Burning Down the House.”

Both times, he has received zero offers, as in none, nada, zip.

“If someone came to the door and said I will offer you $180,000, I would say, ‘Great, take it!’ ” he said.

After failing to find a buyer on the second go-around with a list price of $259,000 last spring, he rented out his condo again, even though it meant losing $300 a month.

The U.S. housing market is not performing the way buyers, sellers, and the agents who represent them had expected this year.

It has even tripped up housing experts, such as the National Association of Realtors chief economist Lawrence Yun, who thought a rebound would finally arrive in 2026.

After a series of sluggish years, Yun had predicted a 14% gain in home sales nationally based on mortgage rates dropping below 6%.

Now he predicts only a 4% increase in sales and a 4% gain in home prices this year, with mortgage rates averaging around 6.5%.

He hasn’t given up on a double-digit increase in sales, but has pushed it out to next year.

“I think the housing market is bottoming in terms of unit sales — it’s pretty much occurring at the moment. It’s just a question of how much of an increase we can anticipate,” Yun told attendees at the earlier this month.

His recalibration traces back to weaker-than-expected job growth and the headfake 30-year mortgage rates made after the conflict with Iran reignited inflationary pressures.

Federal Reserve rate cuts, which were widely expected in 2026, appear to be off the table for now. Yields on the 10-year Treasury notes, which heavily influence mortgage rates, remain higher than expected.

If affordability is one pillar of a healthy housing market, a strong job market is another. U.S. job counts are at a record level, which should translate into a record number of home sales, Yun said.

That isn’t the case. Although the headline number is strong, Yun said that about half of states, including Colorado, have lost jobs over the past year.

“Housing has been in a recession for some years — essentially since mortgage rates spiked in 2022,” Selma Hepp, chief economist with Cotality, said at the NAREE conference. “And that has led to very low housing market activity, and also very low turnover.”

Home sales, measured against the number of households, are the weakest they have been since the early 2000s, when the country was dealing with the tech and telecom bust, Hepp said.

In a statistic that is not widely understood, per-household sales are weaker than they were during the housing downturn of the late ’00s.

And while home prices aren’t crashing as they did during the housing bust, they aren’t keeping pace with inflation. And Denver’s housing market is one of the weakest anywhere when it comes to price appreciation.

Cotality helps assemble the , a closely watched home price measure.

Denver has consistently ranked at or near the bottom for its annual change in home prices in recent months.

In February, Denver dropped below Tampa to claim the biggest annual decline in home values among the nation’s 20 largest metros.

In March, Seattle, whose index fell 2.5%, overtook Denver, down 2%, for the bottom spot.

Add in inflation, and owners in weaker markets like Denver are losing more ground than they may realize, noted economist Elliot Eisenberg in an email.

In Denver, the median price of a single-family home sold in May is up 1.5% year-over-year, while the median condo and townhome price is down 2.5%, according to the .

Denver’s annual inflation rate, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, reached 5% in May. Adjusting for inflation, the typical condo or townhome owner has lost 7.5% in “real” value.

In metro Denver, year-to-date home sales volumes are down 3% from levels seen the past three years and a quarter from the peak year of 2022.

And after accelerating the past two years, new listings are down 6% so far this year in Denver compared to last, a sign of seller fatigue.

The spring home-selling season, Eisenberg declares, was a “failure.”

Zillow’s chief economist, Mischa Fisher, also speaking at NAREE, said the unexpected rise in inflation this year didn’t push rates higher than where they were last year.

But they have acted as a restraint that consumers can’t shake off. And the chains serve as a reminder that the promises of relief, long anticipated, have yet to arrive.

“Mortgage payments have doubled, while incomes are up a third in the last six years,” Fisher said. “It really reset what it means to be a homeowner, and it reset how accessible homeownership is.”

Historically, 30-year mortgage rates are below their long-term average, Yun said.

But a stretch of unprecedentedly low mortgage rates of around 3% in 2020 and 2021 transformed the housing market in ways it is still trying to work through.

Yun and Hepp don’t forecast mortgage rates dipping below 5%, a level that would boost affordability for potential buyers and free more current owners to sell, any time soon.

Patience pays off for buyers

For Sundeep Viswanathan and Elizabeth Perkins-Pride, the rebound in interest rates this year has worked in their favor.

The married couple has kept a close eye on their Observatory Park neighborhood near the University of Denver for the past three years in search of a bigger home to accommodate their family.

But until recently, the market was working against them. Prices were elevated, the inventory was tight, and as buyers, they had almost no negotiating power.

Things have changed, even in one of Denver’s hottest neighborhoods.

Observatory Park homes that were going for $4 million three years ago can now be had for closer to $3 million, Viswanathan said.

“We have a lot of leverage and try to negotiate as much as we can,” he said. “We will try to get a good deal, and if we don’t, we will walk.”

The couple expects to close on a home next month that has been on the market for six months and is seeing a significant price drop.

The couple, who moved from California in 2013, paid off their original mortgage. They don’t wear the “golden handcuffs” of a low-rate mortgage that can’t be replaced.

Because they are bringing so much equity to the table, they are less sensitive to what interest rates are doing. But freeing up that equity will require them to sell.

“The challenge for buyers waiting on rates to come down is that everyone else is waiting for the same thing,” said Bret Weinstein, founder of Guide Real Estate, and the couple’s agent.

Lower rates will mean more demand and competition, which will cause buyers to lose some of the leverage they currently have working in their favor.

“For buyers who can comfortably make the numbers work right now, this market can offer a significant advantage,” he said.

The condo market is a quagmire

Although the lack of affordability remains a major headwind for the market, condos and townhomes, which represent an important pathway into ownership for many first-time buyers, are struggling.

Insurance costs have risen sharply, driving up association fees. Older developments are coping with deferred maintenance costs. Property taxes are higher.

Make has felt all those pressures and then some. He considered selling back in 2016 when he and his soon-to-be wife moved into a single-family home in the suburbs of Jefferson County.

But it didn’t feel right, and for years, the condo was a profitable rental. When he needed to raise some cash in 2021, he took out a home equity loan.

He thought he had locked in a low fixed rate, but it was actually a variable rate loan, one that is up to 8%.

“Condos are a tough hold right now, and they are a tough sell,” he said. “I thought this was going to be a long-term retirement plan.”

Condos, especially older and more affordable units, are in direct competition with apartments. Denver is among the cities that have seen a surge in new apartment supply this decade.

Fisher notes that in 2019, only 4.4% of Zillow rental listings came with concessions like a month or two of free rent. Now that is up to 40% nationally, with Denver and Austin approaching 70% of rentals offering concessions.

Zillow’s shows that typical rents in Denver are only 1% higher than the national average, while home prices are 30%  higher.

Over seven years, a Denver renter will come out ahead of a buyer by $108,151, assuming 3% home price appreciation and 3% rent inflation.

More renters who might have bought a condo in the past are staying put.

Yet, the market defies absolutes. Some listings still sell in a few days, while others languish for months, agents note.

“I’ve been traveling around the nation this year, and I am hearing a lot from you that it����ap a really wonky market,” Jessica Lautz, NAR’s deputy chief economist, told a gathering of Realtors on June 16 in Washington, D.C.

“You’ll list a home on the market, and sometimes it’ll sit for months. And sometimes it����ap going to have multiple offers, and they can be next door to each other,” she said.

Weinstein said interest rates are definitely impacting the market, but it����ap still very neighborhood-specific.

“Buyers are still active and getting deals done,” he said.

Absent a big drop in mortgage rates or a recession, Denver’s housing market may remain stuck.

And many people will find themselves in a holding pattern, as Viswanathan did for three years and as Make continues to be.

Aspen, Vail and Telluride aren’t the most expensive starter home markets in Colorado. Instead, it is Cherry Hills Village, not so much of a surprise, and smaller enclaves like Bow Mar and Columbine Valley, according to an

Zillow defines a starter home in a given city as one in the 5th to 35th percentile in terms of price. It takes an average of that group, which works out to around the 20th percentile, and uses that as the typical price for a starter home.

In Cherry Hills Village, a “starter” home averages $2.2 million. In Bow Mar, near Littleton and spilling into Jefferson County, it is $1.64 million. And in Columbine Valley, southeast of Bow Mar and surrounded by Littleton, it is $1.2 million, according to Zillow. In metro Denver, starter homes average $405,573.

Nationally, there are 242 cities where the typical starter home is worth more than $1 million, up from 80 in February 2020, before the pandemic set off a surge in home prices.

California dominates the list with 105 cities having starter homes above $1 million, up from 52 in 2020. New York, which went from 21 to 41, and New Jersey, which went from 1 to 21, saw the biggest percentage gain.

Colorado went from one to three million-dollar-plus starter home markets of the cities that Zillow tracked.

“The pandemic reset the cost of buying a home, spreading million-dollar starter homes from a handful of coastal states to more than two dozen states across the country,” said Kara Ng, senior economist at Zillow, in the report. “But while it may feel like a market of beer tastes at champagne budgets, those million-dollar starter homes are still the exception.”

So what would an “entry-level” buyer trying to break in at the $1 million price point need to earn? Assuming a 10% downpayment, or $100,000, and given a 30-year mortgage rate at 6.5%, a household would need to make $210,000 a year, assuming they didn’t have a lot of other debt and are working with a lenient lender.

But to avoid being stretched too much, defined as devoting more than 30% of their pay to housing, their income should be closer to $250,000.

So how is it even possible that it would be easier for an entry-level homebuyer to get a foot in the door in Vail than in Bow Mar? It mostly comes down to the mix of homes and the high level of public support extended in many ski resort communities.

Aspen and Vail, despite their reputation as ritzy housing markets, have enough one-bedroom condos priced below $1 million to keep them off the list, said Alex Lacter, a communications manager with the Seattle-based company.

Condos represent 54.8% of the homes in Aspen, with one-bedroom condos 16.3% of the inventory, according to Zillow. And while the typical home runs at around $3.3 million, the typical starter home is $860,982.

Vail’s condo share is just shy of 63%, with one-bedroom units 12.6% of the market. The typical home runs $1.7 million, but the typical starter home is at $860,133, nearly as much as Aspen.

That contrasts with Cherry Hills Village, Bow Mar and Columbine Valley, where strict covenants block the development of attached housing. The rules are skewed in favor of large lot single-family homes, and exclusionary zoning makes those communities more homogeneous in their housing stock.

Mountain resort areas, by contrast, are leaders in inclusionary zoning, or trying to provide homes that are affordable across a range of incomes, even though that has become an increasingly difficult task, and often involves the luck of the draw, literally via a lottery.

About 70% of the homes in Aspen that are occupied year-round have some form of subsidization or deed restrictions, according to the Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority.

That has allowed the ritzy resort to keep its starter housing stock priced below $1 million, while also allowing it to have bragging rights to the first home sale in the state to top $100 million. That $108 million sale in 2024 took place in the Red Mountain area.

Vail’s housing market has a higher share of vacation homes and a lower level of subsidization, with about 12% of homes deed-restricted, meaning there are limits on how much they can appreciate and resell for.

While Vail’s homes overall are about half as expensive as those in Aspen, its starter homes are comparable in price because of the smaller share of public subsidization.

Home and condo sales declined 4.3% to 4,004 across an 11-county area in May compared to the previous month, and the sales pace fell nearly 7% compared to May 2025. Sellers also showed signs of fatigue, with new listings down 9.5% from April and 17.5% from last year.

“A quiet exhaustion has taken hold on both sides of the transaction table. Homeownership attainability fatigue is leading buyers to pull back and sellers are locked in place,” said Amanda Snitcker, chairwoman of the DMAR Market Trends Committee and a local Realtor in comments accompanying the report.

Inspection contingencies, seller concessions, and rate buydown negotiations are all becoming more common after disappearing during the frenzied market seen in the recent past, she added.

Although prices surged at an unprecedented pace from late 2020 to 2022, they have bounced around in a narrow range since then. Going back to May 2017, median price gains have averaged 6% a year, which is ahead of wage gains, but close to historical rates of appreciation, Snitker said.

The median price of a single-family home sold in May was $675,000, which is up 1.5% over both the past month and the past year. The median price of condos and townhomes sold was $395,000, up 2.6% from April and down 2.5% for a year ago.

The pain point in terms of affordability remains mortgage rates. At today’s median home price, the monthly payment on a home with a 10% downpayment would run $3,498 a month at the current 30-year mortgage rate of 6.5%, compared to $2,580 at the 3.8% mortgage rate in play in May 2020, Snitker said.

“Focusing on a rate solution is far more productive than waiting for a 40% price correction that the data simply does not support. Every 1 percent decline in mortgage rates reduces the monthly payment on today’s median-priced home by approximately $315, a rate buydown or future refinance away from meaningfully changing the affordability equation without requiring any movement in price,” Snitker said.

But looking at the historical average of the 55 years that the 30-year mortgage has been popular, the current rate of around 6.5%, up from 5.99% before the U.S. and Israel began their bombing campaign against Iran at the end of February, is a bargain.

“This is a lower rate than the historical average. It is still a good rate,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist with the National Association of Realtors, speaking to the National Association of Real Estate Editors in Miami.

Yun had forecast a 14% rise in U.S. existing home sales this year driven by a decline in the 30-year mortgage rate to below 6%. And for a moment, rates did cross that threshold. But after hostilities began with Iran, they have risen back into the mid 6% range.

Yun now predicts that U.S. home sales will increase 4% this year. In metro Denver, home sales through the first five months of the year are down nearly 3% compared to the same period of 2025.

“Maybe we get 14% next year,” he said.

Above the Apiary Hotel, a at 4855 S. Quebec St., the 20-story tower features 193 apartments and 13 penthouses.

Each apartment includes quartz countertops, waterfall-edge islands and panelized refrigerators built into custom cabinetry. Residences also feature Thermador appliances, engineered hardwood floors and walk-in closets with built-in storage systems. Many units include balconies with mountain and city views.

With 30% already leased, residences range from one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments and from 905 to 4,072 square feet. The community’s largest floor plan is a three-bedroom-plus-den penthouse.

Pricing varies widely across units. A 905-square-foot one-bedroom one-bath residence on the tower’s seventh floor is listed at a of $3,036, according to the floor plans of the apartments.

At the other end of the spectrum, a top-floor penthouse of more than 2,500 square feet with two bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms is priced at more than $17,800 per month.

Several amenities also are offered to residents, including a rooftop pool, sauna, co-working spaces and a resident lounge, along with hotel-level services such as valet parking and food and beverage delivery from Keepers Cocktail Lounge and June Gap Market and Cafe.

Residents of the penthouses also have access to the Colony Club, a dedicated lounge offering services such as complimentary valet, package and grocery delivery, monthly housekeeping, monthly car detailing and assistance with dining and entertainment reservations, with additional programming planned.

Developers say the project is the city’s first residential community designed to combine upscale apartment living with hospitality-inspired services, amenities and concierge-style attention typically associated with hotels.

That hotel-inspired approach extends to the sensory experience as well, with common areas scented with an “Apiary scent,” a custom fragrance created exclusively for the property and also available to residents as a candle.

“We thought about this the way a hotelier would. Hospitality drives every decision here, from the way residents are greeted to the way their needs are anticipated to the way spaces are designed to make daily life feel effortless. That comes from a hospitality mindset, not a residential one,” said Sonja Dimond, principal at Denver-based .

Managed by global rental housing operator Greystar, the property was a collaboration between Marriott, Stonebridge and Copford. served as the architect and general contractor for the project.

“What we’ve built here is a service infrastructure designed around residents’ daily lives,” said Jacquelyn Hammond, regional property manager at Greystar.

“Residents shouldn’t have to think about what they need. Our job is to anticipate it. Whether that����ap how a space is staffed, how a request gets handled or how someone feels walking through the door at the end of the day, every touchpoint is intentional. At Apiary Residences, that level of care isn’t an amenity; it����ap the standard.”

But the market for the past several years has, like an oil tanker in the Persian Gulf, found itself stuck in a holding pattern. It isn’t sinking, but it isn’t advancing either.

The number of homes available for sale in metro Denver surged 17.2% last month, from 9,846 in March to 11,539 in April, according to the .

But it is down 3.6% over the year. A similar pattern played out last year, when the inventory jumped 22.5% from March to April to reach 11,964.

The median price of a residential property sold in April was $605,000, up from $590,000 in March. That is close to the $604,000 median price reached in April 2025 and the $602,000 median price measured in April 2024.

For single-family homes, the median price was $670,000, up 4.4% from March, but only $10,000 higher from the price a year earlier. For condos and townhomes, the median price was $385,462, down 0.5% from $387,500 a year earlier.

The number of sales rose 2.35% to 3,926 from March, and is down 5.9% from a year ago. But the year-to-date total of 12,631 is down 3.7% from the same period in 2025, and on par with 2024 and 2023 levels, according to DMAR counts.

The number of days it took a listing to sell was a median of 14 in April, down from 16 in March, and up from 13 days in April 2025. But otherwise, fairly steady.

“There was a time when Denver’s real estate market moved with the seasons,” said Amanda Snitker, chairwoman of the DMAR Market Trends Committee and a local Realtor, in comments accompanying the report.

“Prices climbed each spring, peaked between April and June, then eased into fall. That predictability has faded,” she said.

From 2017 until the pandemic boom, heightened competition in the spring would drive up prices and tighten inventory, Snitker said. That pattern broke when a buying frenzy took the median price from $473,450 in February 2021 to $616,500 in April 2022.

Rising mortgage rates broke the pattern, and the seasonality has yet to fully return, she said.

Snitker advises Realtors to highlight the pattern as one of “stability” rather than “stagnation” with their clients.

But a more negative take points to an impasse that could resolve to the downside. The for Denver dropped 2.2% year-over-year in February, the weakest performance among the 20 major metros that the index tracks.

Denver’s decline was just below Tampa’s 2.1% decline and in contrast to the 0.9% gain for the 20-city index. Chicago’s index was up 5%.

Thom Malone, principal economist at Cotality, said in the report that all the signs of a classic price mismatch between buyers and sellers are emerging.

Many sellers, sitting on ultra-low rate mortgages from earlier this decade, have been able to wait out buyers. But Malone argues that the pressure on sellers to find an exit will only build over time.

“This spring is a critical test. Sellers who sat out last year are relisting, and we may finally see the desperation required to trigger meaningful price cuts.”

Metro Denver’s average apartment rent in the first quarter was $1,758 a month, which was $4 higher than the fourth quarter average but $61 lower than a year earlier, according to an update from the Apartment Association of Metro Denver.

“No news is good news for renters and people in the housing market right now. We didn’t see many changes quarter over quarter,” said Scott Rathbun with Apartment Insights, which puts the report together for the AAMD.

Average monthly rents range from $1,945 in Douglas County to $1,614 in Adams County. The average rent in Denver County, which has the highest amount of new construction and the highest vacancy rates, is $1,789.

Rents are averaging $1,411 a month in 1970s-era apartment buildings and around $2,289 for newer units that came online this decade.

Average rents are back to levels seen in the fourth quarter of 2022, which has improved affordability, Rathbun said. That is without adjusting for inflation or the freebies landlords are increasingly offering to win over new tenants.

Concessions, at a two-decade high, reached 10% of advertised rents, which works out to between four and five weeks for every unit advertised.

Accounting for the more robust concessions, “effective” rents are down 8.6% over the past year, while advertised rents are down a more modest 3.3%, according to Apartment Insights.

Landlords typically don’t extend concessions when leases come up for renewal, but they are also much less likely to try to squeeze out rent hikes above the original rate in this kind of market, Rathbun said.

The region’s apartment vacancy rate fell from 7.6% in the fourth quarter to 7.5% in the first, and it remains above the 7% vacancy rate measured a year earlier.

That rate is for stabilized buildings that have moved beyond their initial renting phase. The vacancy rate is closer to 10.9% when new buildings in the lease-up phase are added into the mix. That is down from a rate above 12% late last year.

“I’m hopeful that the downward pattern of vacancy continues. The number of apartments under construction has continually declined from the 2023 peak, which might lead to fewer deliveries in the coming quarters, giving providers a chance to catch up,” said Erica Sanchez, a vice president of operations with Places Management LLC, and a member of the AAMD board.

Developers delivered 2,796 units in the first quarter, and the market absorbed 3,210 units. But an overhang remains. Over the past year, renters have absorbed 8,893 of the 12,070 units added.

Rathbun said around 24,000 apartments are under construction across metro Denver, which works out to about 12,000 new units a year for the next two years. While below the recent pace, it should keep the market balanced.

The bigger concern comes beyond that. Compared to the peak reached in 2023, the number of proposed units has “fallen off a cliff,” Rathbun said.

An estimated 46,700 apartments across 190 projects are proposed but not yet under construction in metro Denver.

About 20,000 of the proposed units, or around 4 in 10, are tied to projects that rushed to get ahead of Denver’s Expanding Housing Affordability (EHA) policy, which took effect July 1, 2022.

The policy required new apartment projects of 10 or more units to keep between 8% to 12% of units affordable to households making 60% of the area median income or pay something called a linkage fee. Those units must remain income-restricted for 99 years.

Developers filed about three years’ worth of site plans in the month before the new rules took effect, which allowed them to be grandfathered in and not subject to the stricter requirements.

The projects originally had 18 months to break ground, but that deadline has been pushed back a couple of times, with the latest extension about to expire later this year.

On May 4, a proposal to offer a 36-month extension will be voted on by the Denver City Council.

Rathbun said a much better route would be for Denver to repeal its EHA requirements, given that market rents are now affordable to households making 60% to 70% of the area median income.

That is showing up through a rising vacancy rate for affordable developments, which are struggling to compete with market-rate units.

“It would make it easier for developers to build new units and fill that (future) backlog,” he said.

An earlier version of the story said rents were back to 2021 levels, but the AAMD updated the figure to 2022 levels. 

After all that work, the Lakewood City Council finished the job in December, passing final changes to the city’s land-use blueprint designed to pave the way for the construction of more diverse and dense housing, like triplexes and quadplexes, anywhere in Colorado’s fifth-largest city.

“It was very condensed, very intense in terms of the time we put into it,” Lakewood Mayor Wendi Strom said.

Fast-forward to the April 7 special election brought to a ballot by residents unhappy with the changes. When the initial results popped up on the city’s website at 8 p.m. — showing — Strom was dumbfounded.

“In that first 10 seconds when you get those results, it was a pretty good kick in the gut,” she said.

How Lakewood might proceed from here is anything but clear. The special election result was just the latest twist in a yearslong battle over how to make housing more affordable for Coloradans, especially those in low-income and working-class families who have largely been priced out of the market.

The election also highlighted a battle that has played out in other Colorado communities in recent years. In , Steamboat Springs and Littleton, among other places, attempts by elected leaders to spur housing price relief through zoning changes or affordable housing initiatives have run headlong into residents’ desire to keep their communities as they are.

Lakewood’s mayor is still committed to changing the city’s zoning code, but she acknowledged that she and her colleagues may need to take a different approach.

“The code is so complex — it’s hard to expect a voter to understand it to that degree,” Strom said.

Karen Gordey headed up the Lakewood Citizens Alliance, one of several issue committees that formed last year to collect signatures for a citizen ballot initiative to repeal the city’s zoning updates. The 15-year Lakewood resident said the city tried to do too much all at once, while failing to appreciate how important the look and feel of a neighborhood is to those who live there.

“The hope is that this election sent a strong message to the council — to listen to the citizens and not make radical zoning changes,” Gordey said. “This went way too far.”

State Rep. Rebekah Stewart, a former Lakewood councilwoman, worked on earlier iterations of the code changes that voters spurned. She said the city’s leaders crafted ambitious ordinances that provided the tools and incentives to alleviate Lakewood’s housing shortage.

The state had an estimated shortfall of 106,000 homes and apartments in 2023, the most recent year available, and needed to build at least 34,100 housing units per year, not counting vacation homes, over the next 10 years to keep up with slower population growth, according to .

Despite a recent slowdown in metro Denver home prices that have surged upward for a decade or more, the median sale price of a single-family home came in at $630,000 in February — up 2.4% from January’s $615,000.

Price relief won’t come, Stewart said, if everything simply stays as it is.

“This has been years and years of work and community stakeholding that was undone in a single night,” she said of the Lakewood council’s redrafting process during the last half of 2025. “We have a problem, and the election didn’t solve that.”

Complying with state housing law

Voters’ decision earlier this month may also have raised another problem: Lakewood’s compliance with state laws passed in 2024 and last year that aim to increase and diversify housing stock across the state.

The bills, passed by legislative Democrats, broadly require cities — especially those on the Front Range — to implement various zoning changes and undertake detailed planning to ease and incentivize housing development. The measures push accessory dwelling units, the packing of more residential units around transit stops and a reduction in the square footage that must be devoted to parking.

“I do believe Lakewood is now out of compliance with state laws, which is really unfortunate,” Stewart said.

But Strom isn’t convinced that her city is crosswise with state law. The mayor is confident the city can tweak its code less comprehensively to ensure it is complying with the state’s housing mandates.

“There may be instances where we can do little one-offs (to come into compliance),” Strom said.

A shows 18 cities out of compliance with one or more of the housing laws passed over the last two years. Lakewood is not one of them, but the list is current as of April 1, which preceded Lakewood’s special election.

Cities and counties that don’t comply with the laws run the risk of losing out on tens of millions of dollars in state grant funding, Gov. Jared Polis’ office has said.

Several metro Denver cities sued the state last year over the laws, claiming that the mandates encroach on their home-rule authority to manage land-use policies as they see fit. Several of those plaintiff communities, including Aurora, Westminster, Lafayette and Centennial, appear on the state’s list as being out of compliance with the state statutes.

The Lafayette City Council is in the homestretch of , an effort that began last year. A survey conducted by the city showed mixed support for the proposed changes, with about 48% of respondents backing “missing middle” housing in a limited way, particularly if it’s paired with strong design standards to maintain neighborhood character, according to .

Missing middle refers to housing of slightly higher density, including duplexes, triplexes and attached townhomes, that might fit near single-family homes without being as imposing as large apartment buildings.

The Denver Post requested an interview with the governor, or an adviser on housing policy, to ascertain what effect the special election results could have on Lakewood’s standing. Polis’ office provided a statement instead.

“The governor is committed to working with Lakewood and other local governments to reduce or eliminate government imposed barriers and red tape that block or increase the cost of housing and we are assessing the impacts of this election,” said Eric Maruyama, a spokesman for the governor.

Max Nardo, a housing and smart growth senior associate with the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, said it wasn’t clear what price communities might pay if they don’t comply with state housing laws. Colorado, he said, didn’t really start addressing housing and zoning issues at the state level until about three years ago. And many of the measures passed by the legislature, he said, are still being rolled out.

The problem is bigger than mere compliance with state laws, Nardo said. Lakewood had gone beyond what the state required, he said.

“Lakewood was doing more — its reforms included smaller homes on smaller lots throughout the city,” Nardo said. “It followed a two-year process and had favorable polling in the community. What more can you ask for?”

His organization put out a news release two days after Lakewood’s special election, calling it a “low-turnout” election that didn’t accurately reflect the will of the city of 156,000 people. The release noted that just over 22,000 voters overturned the zoning changes, “roughly 20% of all registered voters in the city.”

“Research consistently shows that the residents most likely to participate in local zoning debates and special elections tend to be older, wealthier homeowners who bought into their communities years ago at much lower prices, and have more time and capacity to engage in public processes than renters, essential workers, or young families,” the organization said in its release.

Housing policy is necessarily a statewide issue because the housing market is not confined to any one community, Nardo said.

“This outcome underscores that this is a collective action,” he said. “A city cannot solve it by acting alone.”

‘Checks and balances’

Kevin Bommer, the executive director of the Colorado Municipal League, called the notion of local governments in Colorado needing to defer to state lawmakers on the subject of housing policy “hogwash.”

Cities and towns are best equipped to know what is needed inside their borders, he said, not part-time legislators who convene for less than five months a year in Denver. The housing laws that the General Assembly passed over the last couple of years created pressure and artificially accelerated a process that takes time and public input, Bommer said.

“If folks at the state Capitol hadn’t pushed this forward with mandates, the municipalities could take the time to work with their citizens and come up with a long-term vision,” he said.

It didn’t surprise him that residents would revolt when they didn’t feel their elected representatives were taking the right approach to overhauling zoning codes in a way that could potentially impact their neighborhoods.

“This clearly shows that residents are the ultimate form of local control. And ultimately, they said the vision that was laid out (by the City Council) was one that they aren’t on board with,” Bommer said. “The last time I checked, that was called participatory democracy — it isn’t always pretty.”

Godrey, who led the charge to repeal Lakewood’s zoning rewrite, said the city could find other ways to address the housing shortage without opening up the city’s many single-family neighborhoods to “blanket upzoning.” Converting vacant office space to residential uses is one approach, she said.

“This election was about having checks and balances — and you got to hear the voice of the people,” she said.

Peter LiFari, the executive director of Maiker Housing Partners, says it’s the powerful emotional element that comes with homeownership that makes the issue difficult to solve locally. Maiker is the housing authority in Adams County.

“Homeowners are highly motivated to protect their most precious asset,” he said. “There are some things that we can’t easily make a decision about at the local level because they’re so visceral.”

Despite the council’s loss at the ballot box this month, LiFari said Lakewood’s attempt to address its housing challenges was far from over. Crafting and refining housing policy takes years, if not decades, he said.

But without that thoughtful work, he said, Colorado is never going to fix its affordable housing crisis.

“I would tell Lakewood to go at it again — it takes a couple of bites at the apple for people to get comfortable with this,” LiFari said.

Strom, the mayor, said the issue may go quiet for a little while as she and her colleagues lick their wounds from what was a bruising electoral battle. But the need to adjust the city’s zoning code to account for Lakewood’s evolving housing situation is not going to disappear.

“This is not over — we have things in the code that need to be updated,” she said.

Storefronts along Walden’s Main Street have emptied, including the 10th Frame, a bowling alley that closed its doors when it failed to find a buyer after more than a year of trying, said Samantha Martin, the county’s administrator and a long-time resident.

“We have talked about it multiple times, and there is no perfect answer,” Martin said of strategies to stem the declines. “Right now we don’t have an action plan.”

Since 2020, Jackson County has lost a larger share of its population, 12.2%, than any county in the state, leaving it with 1,211 people as of June 30, 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Young people continue to depart for better jobs in larger cities. A loyal remnant is aging in place, even when moving to a lower altitude might benefit their health, Martin said. But they can defy time for only so long.

When homes come on the market, some heirs convert the properties to family vacation homes in Colorado’s “moose viewing capital.” If they do get listed, investors looking for short-term rentals snap them up, leaving limited options for anyone looking to relocate.

Long accustomed to drawing people without even trying, Colorado last year experienced its slowest population gains since the late 1980s. Winners and losers are coming into sharper focus as the battle intensifies to retain and attract people.

Defying predictions that the state’s population gains would be back on track by now following the pandemic, a majority of Colorado counties have lost their demographic momentum.

Much of Colorado’s growth is now concentrated in a belt of counties stretching from Weld down to Elbert and El Paso counties, temporarily bypassing Arapahoe, which had the state’s biggest population loss in raw numbers.

Of Colorado’s 64 counties, more than half, 33, lost population last year, including four of the state’s largest: Arapahoe, Denver, Boulder and Pueblo counties.

Resort areas, with some of the highest home prices in the country, are starting to shrink, joining the aging agricultural counties on the Eastern Plains that have suffered a steady drip of population losses for years.

More than a third of Colorado counties have fewer residents than they did in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That group includes Jefferson County, the state’s fourth most populous county.

After Jackson, Sedgwick, Otero, Hinsdale and Pitkin counties have the largest five-year percentage declines in population.

Colorado added 225,688 people in the first half of this decade, including 24,059 last year. A majority of the state’s gains this decade have come from immigration, which contributed 130,218 people. But that source, already down under the Trump administration, may dry up this year.

“Certainly in 2026, we can expect very weak or negative net international immigration to Colorado,” said State Demographer Kate Watkins.

The White House in every major metro area in a news release after the county and metro area Census numbers came out. Metro Denver earned a mention for having one of the biggest declines after Laredo, Texas, where immigration flows dropped 95%.

“In Denver and its suburbs, the net immigration rate fell by almost three-quarters. In the Chicago area, it was slashed by nearly two-thirds,” the release said.

Immigration had been masking big declines in people moving from other states. Domestic net migration was why Colorado averaged population gains of 100,000 people a year in the 1990s, and more than 72,000 a year in the ’00s and ’10s.

Since 2020, it has only contributed 17,729 people total.Until housing costs become more competitive, it is hard to see how it rebounds.

That leaves natural change, or births minus deaths, as the main driver of population growth going forward. In Colorado, that currently contributes a little over 20,000 people a year.

But as more baby boomers die, expect that to shrink too. Nationally, natural decline, or more deaths than births, is expected to set in by 2030. Colorado isn’t expected to hit that grim milestone until 2047.

“We are a young state relative to the nation as a whole,” Watkins said.

Population declines elsewhere will result in fewer adults available to move to Colorado in the years ahead.

Growth is now concentrated mostly in Weld, Douglas, Adams, El Paso, and Larimer counties, which gained a combined 26,678 people last year, more than the statewide population gain.

A lower birth rate, higher living costs that deter domestic migration, and slower immigration are all contributing to more modest population gains. And that slowing has set off a battle to capture whatever population growth is available.

Where the population is shrinking

Arapahoe County led the state with a net gain of 4,621 immigrants last year, but it also saw the most residents move out to other parts of Colorado or other states, 9,859. That contributed to a net loss of 1,940 residents in the 2025 count.

Since 2020, Arapahoe has lost nearly 32,000 residents domestically, which was offset by a gain of nearly 35,000 immigrants.

When immigrants leave Colorado for other states, they count as outbound domestic migrants, Watkins said. That could explain, in part, why counties like Arapahoe and Denver are seeing such large domestic outflows.

So why didn’t more immigrants, as well as other residents, stay put?

“Like every county in Colorado, we’re experiencing a crisis of affordability in the housing market,” said Jill McGranahan, a spokeswoman for Arapahoe County.

To what degree high housing costs pushed immigrants to move to more affordable places is hard to parse out. Some immigrants never intended to land in Colorado in the first place.

In 2023, Denver spent more than $35 million to handle an unexpected surge of immigrants, mostly from Venezuela, including purchasing 14,800 tickets to send them to other cities.

Denver had the state’s second-largest population loss last year at 978, reflecting net domestic outflows of 8,023, less a natural increase of 4,197, and continued immigration of 2,871.

Denver and Arapahoe counties rank high for births, and they should remain gateways for young adults relocating from other states.

Denver has a big surplus of new apartments that is pushing down rents. And home construction is set to take off in Arapahoe County, especially south of the airport.

A harder demographic hurdle to overcome will be a shrinking gap between births and deaths, which Jefferson, Boulder, Pueblo and Mesa counties are staring down.

When there aren’t enough homes available for young families at prices they can afford, they either delay moving forward with children or move elsewhere. Not only is inbound migration limited, but so are future births.

“We wanted to help people age in place and stay in their homes, but what that means is these homes don’t turn over?” asks Phyllis Resnick, executive director of the Colorado Futures Center.

If homes don’t turn over or not enough are built, families wanting to have children are forced to move elsewhere. They might end up in Weld County. Or Idaho or South Carolina.

“Our birth rate and our death rate are getting closer and closer together,” acknowledged Chris O’Keefe, the planning and zoning director for Jefferson County. “People enjoy it here and they age here. People don’t leave their houses.”

Over the past five years, the county has recorded 28,791 births and 26,745 deaths, according to the Census Bureau.

Home to nearly 10% of the state’s population, Jefferson County has contributed only 2.3% of the state’s natural increase since 2020. Denver, by contrast, accounts for 12.3% of the state’s population, but has contributed 22.3% of the natural increase.

Fewer children means fewer enrollments. Jefferson County Public Schools, the state’s second-largest school district, has seen a wave of closures, especially on its eastern side, which has older neighborhoods.

Developments such as Candelas and Leyden Rock further west, by contrast, have brought in young families. But it isn’t enough to offset losses in Lakewood and Wheat Ridge.

Vivian Elementary, where Mollie Crampton had her two young sons enrolled, was among the schools shuttered in 2022.

Declining enrollments are linked to the county’s stagnating population, which in turn, Crampton argues, is linked to the county’s high home prices.

“I think a really big part of it is affordable housing,” she said. “Prices just don’t go down.”

Lakewood enacted rezoning ordinances to permit higher density in an effort to increase supply and lower home prices and rents.

But long-time residents of the state’s fifth largest city, skeptical that the zoning changes would work and worried about crowding and congestion, rallied to call a special election to repeal the measures.

Crampton said she voted early in Tuesday’s election — against repealing the recently enacted rezoning ordinance.

“If it passes, I think a lot of people will leave because they can (only) afford to buy a home in another state, or another county,” Crampton said. “There’s never going to be more inventory.”

According to early results posted by elections officials Tuesday night, voters in Lakewood overwhelmingly approved four measures that restore the zoning code the city had before elected leaders changed it last year to prod more home building.

Pueblo and Mesa counties have had the largest natural decreases this decade — with Pueblo down 2,787 and Mesa down 1,738.

Mesa County has offset that with relatively strong domestic migration this decade, allowing its population to grow by 7,135 people vs. 1,110 for Pueblo.

Fremont County has also managed to pull a rabbit out of a hat, increasing its population by 1,102 this decade, despite a natural decrease of 1,629 people.

Both are retirement havens that have attracted residents from the Front Range with lower living costs, and in the case of Grand Junction, a more temperate climate. Colorado’s aging population is working in their favor.

By contrast, resort areas, where housing costs are so high that even doctors and corporate managers struggle to find affordable accommodations, are seeing residents leave.

Pitkin County, home to Aspen, has seen its population shrink by 4.3% this decade, while San Miguel, home to Telluride, is down by 3.7%, and Eagle County, home to Vail and Beaver Creek, has lost 2.5% of its population.

On the whole, the forecast calls for continued growth, although at a slower pace than in prior decades, Watkins said. Colorado reached 5 million people in 2010 and hit 6 million last year. It should cross 7 million by 2045.

New homes, new faces

Weld County Commissioner Scott James, 63, grew up in LaSalle and has had a front row seat in the county’s transformation from farm and oil fields into Colorado’s fastest growing county.

With 46,992 people added over the past five years, including 7,146 last year, Weld County surpassed Boulder County in population before the pandemic, and last year it surpassed Larimer County.

In 1998, James moved to Johnstown, which had 3,200 people at the time, and he paid $136,400 for a home in what he said represented an “iconic Americana slice of life.”

The town now counts around 21,000 people, who live largely on former farms and ranches, said James, who witnessed the transformation when he was mayor.

“These guys would sit in the back of the room and almost hang their heads — but what choice did they have? The farmer has a chance to cash in on all his hard work,” he said.

One thing that Weld County shares in common with the state’s other growing counties is an openness to home construction. And those new homes open the door to babies.

Weld County has welcomed more than 25,000 babies in the past five years, while Adams County has added 33,349 and Douglas County has added more than 20,000.

“People who want a bigger home and more land, it’s available to them,” said Jeff Keener, president and CEO of the South Metro Denver Chamber, which is based in Lone Tree.

Douglas County hosts the state’s largest master planned community, Sterling Ranch, which has ranked in the top 50 nationally for the past six years and has sold more than 3,000 homes since construction started in 2017.

Parker and Castle Rock have also been actively adding homes at lower price points.

“The home-rule cities have done a really good job of planning for that,” Keener said. “They have worked really hard to put in a wide variation of housing prices.”

With greater housing availability, the fastest-growing counties are also winning when it comes to net domestic migration. Weld County added 31,411 people that way since 2020, while Douglas County added 27,490 and Larimer County added 12,518.

Domestic gains in Weld and Douglas surpass the 17,729 added statewide, which reflects their ability to lure residents from other parts of the state.

James said he sees nothing but opportunity for Weld County, provided people can think differently and stay open to new ideas.

“We are excited about geothermal, we are excited about renewables — and by God, bring on nuclear,” he said. “The fact that Weld County is a county of almost 400,000 people tells me we’re doing it right.”

Update made noon Wednesday: The general location of Jackson County has been updated.

The special election vote strikes a blow against those who have been pushing for more density in the state’s fifth-largest city in the hopes of increasing housing supply and lowering home prices.

The four measures passed by nearly 2-to-1 ratios, with more than 15,000 votes in favor of repealing each ordinance and approximately 8,700 votes to keep them, according to

Tuesday’s special election was set in January after a group of citizens gathered enough signatures to get the measures on the ballot as part of an attempt to reverse the city’s zoning changes. Cathy Kentner, who headed the anti-rezoning committee Lakewood For All, said she was “very happy” with Tuesday’s result.

“It’s truly a win for the people over big-money special interests,” she said, noting that her side was far outspent by those pushing for the zoning changes. “I think the voters are saying they expect more from their (city) councilors. They voted for these councilors, and they expect them to represent them. And this zoning change is not representing your constituents.”

Kentner said this was the second citizen initiative put on the ballot in Lakewood in the past decade, a sign the city needs to do a better job talking to its 156,000 residents before enacting big changes to land-use policy.

“To move forward with zoning, they need to talk to the people whose property rights they’re changing,” she said.

Sophia Mayott-Guerrero, a former Lakewood City Council member who serves as campaign manager for Make Lakewood Livable, conceded that the rezoning effort had failed Tuesday.

But she said the special election was a “low-information, low-turnout” election that was marked by “fear-mongering” on the other side.

“I understand if what you believe is that you will lose your home, that you would vote this way,” Mayott-Guerrero said. “But we have a system of housing and zoning that needs to be updated. It’s based on things from 50 years ago, and with this defeat tonight, we will continue to have a housing affordability crisis.”

The City Council passed four ordinances in 2025 that together encourage the construction of more varied housing types, and by extension, greater density — with the ultimate aim of lowering home prices in a notoriously expensive metro housing market.

Despite a recent slowdown in metro-Denver home prices that have galloped inexorably upward for a decade or more, the median sales price of a single-family home came in at $630,000 in February — up 2.4% from January’s $615,000.

The median sales price, however, remains 2.2% below where it was a year earlier.

The changes the City Council made last year allow diverse housing types — duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes and townhomes — anywhere in the city. They also limit new home sizes to 5,000 square feet and encourage the conversion of vacant or underused commercial buildings to housing.

The new rules went into effect Jan. 1.

Opponents of the rezoning effort said the changes would endanger the character of established neighborhoods while not actually helping reduce home prices. In a news release issued this year, the opposition called Lakewood’s rezoning efforts “a blueprint for crammed, profit-driven development, bulldozed trees and ignored infrastructure.”

Those backing the city’s rezoning effort countered that without policies designed to diversify Lakewood’s housing inventory, working-class families representing teachers, firefighters and health care workers will never be able to afford a home in the city.

Mayott-Guerrero told The Denver Post last month that “the idea that we can keep structuring our housing in the same way and get a different result doesn’t make sense to me.”

The battle over affordable housing runs deep in Colorado, with the state mandating higher density in recent years and, in turn, being sued by cities that claim the legislation treads on their home-rule authority. Last fall, Littleton voters passed a measure that better protects single-family-home neighborhoods from multifamily housing projects.

The campaign to retain Lakewood’s rezoning regulations has outraised the opposition by a ratio of nearly 6-to-1 — $269,000 to $46,000, according to on March 31.

The issue committee Make Lakewood Livable — which supports keeping Lakewood’s rezoning ordinances — has pulled down big-dollar contributions from developers, including $10,000 from Cardel Homes and $50,000 from Boulder-based Conscience Bay.

Its top donor is the Action Now Initiative. The Houston-based nonprofit advocacy organization, which is a part of the national philanthropy Arnold Ventures, gave Make Lakewood Livable $75,000.

Arnold Ventures was launched by John Arnold, a former Enron executive and hedge fund manager who previously spent in support of Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s election and a 2024 Denver affordable housing sales tax proposal that was rejected narrowly by voters.

The top contribution on the side in favor of repealing Lakewood’s rezoning, which was supported by three issue committees, is $2,500.