Soaring housing costs, aided and abetted by the legislature’s misplaced priorities, have helped dull Colorado’s competitive edge over other states. It could cost our state business investment and job creation.

That probably was already the educated guess of many Coloradans, but a new report from the Common Sense Institute takes the guesswork out of it with hard data.

As reported this week in The Gazette, Colorado now faces an “inflection point” in its housing sector among other factors that determine quality of life. It should serve as a warning sign to state lawmakers, who have been over-regulating key economic sectors while deregulating crime.

The state is now facing some of the consequences. Findings in Common Sense’s “Free Enterprise Report” include:

Colorado’s housing competitiveness – its affordability compared with other states – is at rock bottom. We’re No. 51 among all states and Washington, D.C., because it now takes 96 hours of work at the median wage to afford the mortgage on a median-priced home. That’s a 118% increase from the 44 hours required in 2011.

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Colorado has fallen to 20th among the states in education competitiveness.

The state also got dinged for its climbing natural gas prices as well as a power grid – central to a fossil-free energy economy – whose reliability is in decline. Critics say that’s owing to the fact that reducing carbon emissions has been the priority that largely has driven the state’s energy policy.

Colorado’s crime ranking fell to No. 37 from No. 22 – a bad thing – in the wake of the epic crime tsunami that slammed our state several years ago.

Of eight broad policy areas covered in the report, only one, the state of Colorado’s infrastructure, yielded a positive outlook after Common Sense crunched the numbers. The rest were iffy or drew an outright thumbs-down. Like public safety, which has suffered due to rampant crime. And school performance, which has been anemic, with student achievement scores that have yet to recover from the pandemic – despite rising funding for public ed.

Lang Sias – a former state representative from Arvada and one of the report’s lead authors – affixed some of the blame for the state’s ebbing competitiveness to his onetime peers in the State Capitol.

“When we legislate, we don’t exist in a vacuum,” Sias said. He said lawmakers and those in the executive branch who imposed regulatory policy ought to weigh the “direct and indirect costs” of proposed rules and legislation and consider their aggregate effect on Colorado’s ability to attract and retain job creators as well as to curb the housing cost spiral.

And sometimes, we’d add, lawmakers in the Capitol ought to consider the costs of sitting on their hands. Notably, they’ve resisted efforts to change policy in ways that could stimulate housing construction in a state starved for it.

For example, current law creates a fertile climate for runaway litigation against home builders over even minor flaws in construction. The result has been to slow the construction of more affordable, entry-level housing – especially condominiums – in the state’s metro areas. As any first-year economics major will tell you, a shortage of any good leads to higher prices.

Meanwhile, the “justice reform” agenda, advanced by majority Democrats at the legislature, has created a fertile climate of its own – fostering more violent and property crime by lowering penalties and making it harder to incarcerate.

All of which is to Sias’ point: Lawmakers aren’t assessing the consequences of their lawmaking. And the rest of Colorado is paying for it.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board