Colorado has designated $400 million in federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act to address the housing needs of Coloradans impacted by the COVID-19 public health emergency. A state task force was convened to identify ways to best utilize this once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform affordable housing in our state. The self-described “Transformational” Task Force was the result.

However, to find truly transformational policy that will disrupt our housing status quo in the task force’s report, you actually won’t find it in the recommendations. Rather, you need to keep turning pages to the end of the report, in what we Terry J. Stevenson Fellows like to call the innovation graveyard, the section titled, “Additional Policy Ideas Discussed.”

The innovation graveyard is where we begin to see the seeds of transformational housing policy, in the discussed but non-consensus ideas. The report recommendations, while laudable, fail to live up to the “transformational” ethos of the task force, by falling short of recommending any groundbreaking policy innovations here in Colorado. If we are to identify and diagnose why the state of housing affordability in Colorado is in such dire straits, the task force tells us directly by what they have omitted.

So we ask the question: why did these “additional policy ideas” not make the cut? The task force clearly entertained these ideas, what could it be that derailed their inclusion?

Transformation means disrupting the status quo, which requires articulating a clear problem statement, and in this regard the report gets it half right. Colorado does have an affordable housing supply shortage. The results have impacted all Coloradans. And we have a significant allocation of federal funding to help us address it.

The report further details how we can deploy this funding in ways that will increase and sustain our technical capacity. We specifically praise the Innovative Housing Incentive Program which aims to kickstart Colorado as a first mover and leader in innovative building methodologies. The third – and in our state’s case, the most important – element of changing the status quo is political feasibility. By outright omitting any discussion of the role that cities and counties play in our affordable housing supply shortage, we believe the report fails to meet the moment at hand.

What has Freddie Mac, the White House and countless other experts identified as a key factor that has facilitated our housing supply shortage? Land use, planning and zoning laws at the local level. What could Colorado state legislators do in response, you ask? We’ll give you a hint:

What is within the control of the Colorado state legislature, yet is most challenging politically to the party in control of all three branches of our state government? The designation of housing as a matter of statewide concern and the subsequent policy interventions to address it.

Yet, of note, any new statewide interventions failed to reach consensus in the report – policies we believe would make a transformational impact on housing supply in Colorado. A statewide building code? No. Statewide “use by right” zoning processes for single and multifamily housing developments? No. Outlawing local anti-growth ordinances which mitigate every recommendation in the report? No. How could this transformational task force miss an opportunity to actually be transformational? We think the answer is as clear as a Colorado bluebird sunny day.

Home rule, Colorado’s political third rail, strikes again. While home rule serves Coloradans well in many aspects of self-governance, it has and continues to fail to facilitate an environment that allows for the creation of housing that is required to meet the basic needs of our state. The report has no qualms sharing the data that demonstrates this brutal truth – but it fails to share a major cause.

Yet, hope springs eternal. Other states are also tackling the same thorny issue. Arizona, which suffers less from a housing shortage than Colorado, recently issued a bipartisan bill to address housing affordability. Calling for a statewide response to a statewide crisis, legislators proposed HB 2674 declaring “housing supply and affordability is a matter of statewide concern.”

Then, just this past week, something interesting happened in our legislature. A GOP sponsored bill, SB22-63, that designates housing as a matter of statewide concern and outlaws cities and counties from issuing anti-growth laws, was supposed to fail in the Democratic-led State Veterans and Military Affairs Committee. Yet, committee chair Sen. Julie Gonzales, who also served as vice chair of the task force, saved the bill from demise and it lives another day for a second hearing.

We commend the chair and the sponsors for engaging in the amendment process, which narrows the bill to focus solely on outlawing local anti-growth laws. We look forward to the conversations to come. If you’ve heard those words before, it’s because we echoed that very sentiment in our own report last year. Furthermore we applaud Sen. Gonzales for engaging in the hard work of truly transformational leadership – we now implore our locally-elected officials and their membership organizations to follow suit.

Now is the time for transformational leadership. The ball is in your court, state legislators.

Peter LiFari and Evelyn Lim are Terry J. Stevinson Fellows for Common Sense Institute. In 2021, they co-authored From Conflict to Compassion: A Colorado Housing Development Blueprint For Transformational Change.