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Week of January 19, 2023
JEFFERSON COUNTY, COLORADO
A publication of
JeffcoTranscript.com
VOLUME 39 | ISSUE 26
Our in-depth look at the housing crisis
Wheat Ridge adopts affordable housing strategy BY ANDREW FRAIELI AFRAIELI@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
Trickling up: How housing is becoming less affordable for more Coloradans BY TAYLER SHAW AND LUKE ZARZECKI COLORADO COMMUNITY MEDIA
A home means everything to Shelley Gilson, a 50-year-old single mother of three girls who works as a guest service agent at an airline. “It’s one word: priceless,” she
said. The rising cost of housing in the Denver area has made it difficult for her to afford a home. She spent years bounding around working for low pay, including to several affordable housing communities across the state.
INSIDE: VOICES: PAGE 13 | CALENDAR: PAGE 14 | SPORTS: PAGE 24
Eventually, more than a decade ago, she found a home at Orchard Crossing Apartments in Westminster. It is an affordable housing community that includes Section 8 housing, the federal government program that provides vouchers to low-income families, the disabled and elderly. SEE TRICKLING UP, P10
Wheat Ridge City Council has adopted an affordable housing strategy that’s been in the works since 2021, aiming to help ease the affordability crisis that has affected the city. Adopted in the Jan. 9 meeting, the 73-page plan developed in partnership with czb — a consultancy agency that focuses on housing — gives context to the crisis by presenting data and an action plan for the city. A lead priority in the plan is creating a separate housing fund, the Wheat Ridge Housing Fund, to finance possible programs like helping renters pay their first and last month’s rent to enter an apartment — a fund that council gave consensus to city staff to create in the same meeting. Along with searching for other one-time funding sources like grants, the WRHF will mainly be funded by a portion of the short-term rental lodging tax, which Deputy City Manager Allison Scheck estimated in the meeting to be about $375,000 annually. “We’ve discussed over the past year a few times in study sessions that neither the private or public sector can build ourselves out of the affordability crisis, and we can’t legislate our way of it,” Planning Manager for the City of Wheat Ridge Lauren Mikulak elaborated, making a point about the need for the affordable housing plan. “So the only way — and it states it pretty clearly in the strategy — the only way to close the gap between what housing costs and what households can pay is to identify SEE STRATEGY, P3
D’EVELYN BASKETBALL CELEBRATES WINS P24