When Colorado mountain towns couldn't find affordable housing for workers, they started building homes themselves

Aspen leaders first started thinking about smart growth policies and making development pay its way back in the 1970s, implementing rules in the 1980s, Anderson said. As the down valley communities of Basalt and Carbondale became more expensive, they adopted inclusionary ordinances in the early 2000s.

Even Glenwood Springs, which implemented an inclusionary ordinance in 2001 only to suspend it in 2011, brought it back in 2021.

Inclusionary housing policies haven’t prevented home prices from skyrocketing — the median sales price for a single-family home was $11.9 million last year in Aspen, according to the local Realtor board.

But over time, when combined with other policies, they have allowed more workers to live there. Aspen has been able to preserve seven in 10 units of year-round occupied housing units as affordable, according to the Workforce Housing Report from the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments.

Aside from Boulder County, inclusionary ordinances have remained mostly confined to the mountains, especially after the Colorado Supreme Court in 2000 ruled that Telluride’s inclusionary ordinance was a form of rent control, which is prohibited in the state.

Legislation in 2021, however, clarified that inclusionary requirements don’t constitute rent control, and opened the door to more programs, chief among them Denver’s Expanding Housing Affordability Ordinance.

“It seems like the Front Range communities are starting to face the same kind of affordability pressures that the resort communities have faced for years,” said Lance McDonald, a program manager with Telluride and one of the architects of the town’s original inclusionary housing ordinance in the 1990s.

More isolated than Aspen and Vail, Telluride couldn’t count on workers commuting in from long distances to fill open jobs and started taking a hard look at its housing shortfall in the 1980s. If it was to survive, it had to house its workers.

When the typical household in a community can’t make enough to buy or rent a home in that community, then there is a serious problem, he said. Building more units at the market rate by itself won’t boost affordability.

“Not one approach will work. It will take multiple approaches,” he said.

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