In Colorado, a full-time worker must earn US$36.44 an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment without spending more than 30% of their income on rent, according to a recent report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The state’s minimum wage is $15.16. Someone earning that would have to work 96 hours a week, more than two full-time jobs, to cover rent.

The report ranks Colorado as the 12th-least-affordable state in the country for renters.

In July 2026, Congress offered state and local leaders a new set of tools to expand housing supply when it passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the most significant federal housing legislation in decades. It authorizes relatively little new spending. Instead it offers competitive grants and technical assistance to state and local governments that ease the local rules that slow housing construction and raise its cost, and it loosens federal restrictions on how existing housing dollars can be spent.

I direct the Center for Housing Research and Innovative Solutions at the University of Denver, where we study how Colorado and states across the Mountain West can expand housing supply and lower housing costs. Before that, I led the Office of Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which evaluates proposed housing legislation, during the years when many of the ideas behind this new law were being developed and debated.

Housing costs are now central to Colorado politics. In a statewide poll in spring 2026, voters were more likely to call the cost of housing “a very big problem” than any other cost they were asked about. Whoever wins the governor’s race in November will inherit that problem along with a new federal law that could help address it. They will also take office just as federal agencies begin writing the rules that determine how much the law actually delivers and what states get out of it.

What the new law offers Colorado

Much of the federal act rewards changes that Colorado has already spent several years making. One provision authorizes competitive grants for local governments that revise parking mandates and minimum lot sizes or streamline permitting and........

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