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Page 20 — Multifamily Properties Quarterly — August 2017
D ozens of cranes in the Denver
skyline are an encouraging
sign for many residents that
the city’s economy is boom-
ing. New buildings populated
with bright, modern apartments and
ambitious businesses undoubtedly are
important to Denver’s urban develop-
ment. But another type of building
innovation is happening in the city
and, in many ways, it’s more important
to the communities here. Retrofitting
Denver housing to preserve its afford-
ability and availability is crucial to
many neighborhoods’ vitality. Retrofits
are more cost-effective than new con-
struction, they build on previous public
investment in a way that supports local
economies, and they counteract the
rapid loss of affordable options due to
deterioration, abandonment or conver-
sion to more expensive housing.
As more people move to cities
nationwide, the rising urban popula-
tion will increase investment, property
taxes and competition for housing.
In this article, Denver is used to illus-
trate developments in similar cities
where new investment and the grow-
ing demand for housing are inflat-
ing property values.Where this shift
happens, the number of available
housing options that historically have
been affordable to low- and moderate-
income households can decline dra-
matically. Addressing this trend is espe-
cially pressing given that in the U.S., for
every 100 households that earn 30 to 50
percent of their area median income,
there are only 65 available and afford-
able units.
• Denver’s housing market. As new
construction raises property values
and rent throughout neighborhoods,
the Denver metro
area has seen a sig-
nificant increase in
demand for afford-
able housing. Homes
with base prices
above $400,000 now
represent 68 percent
of the market, an all-
time high for Den-
ver, according to a
Metrostudy research
released in February.
Meanwhile, less
affordable housing is
being developed and fewer subsidized
housing vouchers are being offered
than ever before. As a result of this
situation, the Colorado Independent
reports that, “the affordable housing
crisis has moved from the ranks of the
impoverished and low-income earners
into the ranks of the middle class.”
To ensure that all households, regard-
less of income level, benefit from the
development of urban neighborhoods,
practitioners and advocates should
work to preserve existing affordable
housing, protect renters from rising
costs or pressure to move, and ensure
new development includes affordable
will place emphasis on the
first solution, as it is less obvious to
many (particularly ribbon-cutting politi-
cians) why preserving affordable hous-
ing is more impactful than building it.
• Preserving vs. building affordable
housing. Across the U.S., approximately
100,000 affordable housing units are
built each year. But for every unit built,
two are lost due to deterioration, aban-
donment or conversion to more expen-
sive housing. Preserving housing, rather
than building it, has proven to be the
most financially sustainable method of
reversing this trend of taking one step
forward and two steps back.
In cities like Denver, with high land
costs and restrictive land use regula-
tions, it can be difficult to build rental
housing affordable for low- and mod-
erate-income households. In fact, the
cost of building new affordable housing
can be as much as double the cost of
preserving a city’s existing stock.
Preservation also protects the billions
of taxpayer dollars already invested in
affordable housing by building on that
investment for future public benefit.
This makes retrofitting our existing
housing stock the most cost-effective
investment that the public sector can
make to ensure that its citizens have
decent and affordable places to live.
These efforts create opportunities to
work with communities to meet their
housing needs.They build upon the
character and history of a neighbor-
hood in a way that values rather than
erases the past.
• Subsidized housing vouchers. Sub-
sidizing rent for low- and moderate-
income households through housing
vouchers offers another solution to
affordable housing shortages. However,
in Denver, the near-impossible acquisi-
tion of these vouchers makes afford-
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Affordable Housing
Ravi Malhotra
President and
founder, ICAST,
Denver
Ben Criswell, ICAST
A historic apartment building in Denver’s Highlands neighborhood recently was retrofitted
to preserve its affordability for low- and moderate-income residents.