More growth caps like Lakewood’s may come to northern Front Range

Lakewood voters’ approval of a 1 percent annual cap on new homes and apartments may have opened the door to housing growth limits across the region.

“Eleven Front Range counties are looking at growth limits” via one initiative, said Teo Nicolais, who addressed the Apartment Association of Metro Denver at its Summer Econ conference Thursday.

Even as the overall pace of apartment rent increases in the second quarter dropped below the rate of inflation, Nicolais said the few remaining reservoirs of apartment affordability in metro Denver — places such as Wheat Ridge — continue to see big rent increases.

“It’s incompatible for us to limit growth and make rents more affordable,” Nicolais told the crowd.

The U.S. population is growing at a 0.6 percent pace, its slowest rate since the 1930s, but Colorado remains a popular place to move. The state will need to find a way to accommodate an additional 2.4 million people by 2050, estimates state demographer Elizabeth Garner.

“If you are a fan of jobs, you will need housing units,” Garner said. “We always assumed we would be able to attract the best and the brightest.”

If high housing costs along the northern Front Range aren’t addressed, that assumption could be tested in the years ahead, she warned.

A sentiment that growth is out of control played a role in the Lakewood vote. What few people realize is that the population gains this decade are much tamer than those absorbed in the 1970s and 1990s, she said.

Population growth in Colorado surged above 5 percent a year in the 1970s and ran at a 3 percent clip for much of the 1990s. Since 2010, it has averaged 1.6 percent a year, and is now closer to 1.4 percent — half the pace of what the region handled in the dot-com boom days.

And what about all those out-of-staters? Net migration went above 100,000 one year in 1970 and for several years in the 1990s as the tech and telecom boom drew in workers. It hasn’t been that high since 2001.

What is different this decade is that a much larger share of newcomers have settled in metro Denver, and to a lesser degree in Larimer, Weld and El Paso counties. A third of Colorado counties are currently losing population.

Builders just recently created enough homes and apartments to match household formations, Garner said. The lack

of supply caused home prices and rents to surge, contributing to an anti-growth backlash.

“As Coloradans, we can do better,” she said.

Actually, the state will have to do better. Garner forecasts that migration will surge again next decade as the baby boomers who came to Colorado as young adults in the 1970s retire in greater numbers. Transplants are needed to fill the gap in the workforce.

Of the 2.4 million new residents expected by 2050, 1 million will locate in metro Denver, 600,000 in Larimer and Weld counties and 400,000 on the southern Front Range, Garner said.

The rest of Colorado will see only 400,000 more people. Large swaths of rural Colorado will lose people.