This week, the House Appropriations Committee will consider HB22-1287, a bill that, if passed, will become the first statewide rent control in Colorado’s history. Like all rent-control legislation, this bill misses the mark, failing to address the supply shortage behind rising housing costs. In this case, legislators’ efforts are especially misguided, as they target the largest provider of unsubsidized, affordable housing in Colorado: mobile-home park owners.

For years, we’ve understood the root of our state’s affordability issues: low supply. Between 2010 and 2020, Colorado’s population grew at twice the national rate. As developers struggled to keep pace with population growth, Colorado’s supply-demand gap grew, and the cost of housing rose accordingly. With dozens of Coloradans competing for every available housing unit, price increases were inevitable. This crunch has been especially burdensome for Colorado’s low-and-fixed-income residents, for whom the shortage of housing units now exceeds 113,000.

If the cause of rising housing costs is low supply, then the solution is new development. If we don’t increase our rate of construction, housing demand will continue to go unmet, and housing costs will rise across the board. In the coming months and years, we need to incentivize builders and housing providers to invest in new development. This could take the form of tax credits, development grants or permit-fee reductions – all examples of effective, pro-building policies. But with HB22-1287, and all rent-control legislation, lawmakers aren’t just failing to address our statewide supply crunch; they are making it worse.

Rent control artificially reduces housing units’ value, forcing housing providers to offer their properties at below-market rates. This dramatically reduces developers’ incentive to construct new units, as the artificially deflated rental market offers a lower return on investment. In cities that implement rent control, new construction decreases dramatically, producing substantial declines in the availability of rental housing. In Colorado, where the supply shortage is already so severe, the last thing we need is a new barrier to building.

The damaging effects of rent control don’t end there. In addition to amplifying supply shortages, rent control has a detrimental impact on existing housing, reducing housing providers’ incentive and ability to improve their units. Here, HB22-1287 would harm the very population it intends to help: low-and-fixed-income Coloradans in rent-controlled units. This would be especially harmful to residents of mobile-home parks, where housing providers take on huge and unique upkeep responsibilities: amenity design, road repairs, signage installation, landscaping and more. Profit motive is an essential part of park ownership, and if HB22-1287 passes, it all but disappears.

HB22-1287 isn’t just regressive; it also has the wrong target. Amazingly, Colorado’s mobile-home industry has remained immune to the state’s rising housing costs. Over the last half decade, market-wide rent increases in mobile-home parks sit at an average of just 1% to 5%, with average rent payments between $400 and $600. Both figures are well below the national and statewide average for alternative forms of housing.

HB22-1287 is a misguided and regressive attempt to address a problem that, in the mobile-home industry, doesn’t even exist. I applaud lawmakers’ effort to bring down Colorado’s housing costs, but new barriers to building are not the answer. Going forward, we should remove all artificial constraints on Colorado’s rental housing market, and we should support new, supply-side solutions to the statewide housing crunch. The answer to rising housing costs is the construction of new housing – and if we want developers to act, we must create new incentives to build, not tear existing ones down.

Drew Hamrick is the senior vice president of government affairs and general counsel for the Colorado Apartment Association.