Dear Friend,

“Colorado is a great place to be, but it’s scarily expensive.” “High house prices are the biggest concern of almost everyone I know.” 
Sound familiar? These are quotes from our recent survey, and I hear sentiments like this all the time. Housing affordability is a challenge we must tackle head on — and it’s going to take creativity to make real progress.

Fortunately, creativity is alive and well in rural Colorado.

When I first ran to be your Attorney General, I visited southeast Colorado and learned about their dual challenge: a shortage of housing and many blighted, unoccupied homes. That sparked an idea — what if we rehabilitate these homes, create new places for people to live, and boost the local economy in the process? The community was up for it, but they needed resources to make it happen.  

When we took office, we got to work. We learned that as AG I was responsible for overseeing funds to support housing from a settlement with the big banks after the 2008 foreclosure crisis. Almost all of this funding, however, had gone to housing investments in our northern and urban areas, leaving southern and southeastern parts of Colorado behind.

We had $10M left to allocate — and we found a way to help.

We launched the Colorado Partnership for Education and Rural Revitalization (COPERR), a program that partners with Colorado’s community colleges in Lamar, Otero, Trinidad, and Pueblo. COPERR builds skills and housing simultaneously, creating opportunities for students and solutions for communities.

In Lamar, some enterprising graduates of the COPERR program started a construction company that refurbishes houses, turning them into homes for their community. I was proud to tour the first home rehabilitated through this program.

We’ve also seen this innovative spirit in Kit Carson, where Amy Johnson, head of Kit Carson Rural Development, is leading the work to address local housing challenges. You can read more about her inspiring work here.

Amy shared that her community faces similar challenges to Lamar, but the state’s Proposition 123 program — designed to support affordable housing solutions — doesn’t provide her community with the flexibility it needs. In particular, they could house more people if the program covered environmental assessments, abatement, and demolition in addition to new builds. 

As your next Governor, I have this on my radar to fix as well as to take the spirit of innovation from the COPERR program and scale it up to our whole state.

Thank you for keeping this issue front of mind for me and for supporting me so we can work on these challenges — creatively and together. 

Phil