Affordable Housing a Tough Sell in Stapleton

In 2003, a local developer named Jackie Peterson broke ground on Stapleton's first affordable development, the place where Zweck and Piceno now reside: Roslyn Court. Peterson had built affordable rentals before, but not for-sale homes. Even so, she received a $6.5 million loan from the city. But she underestimated the project's costs and defaulted on a portion of the loan when she was about halfway through. Forest City was left to pick up the pieces, selling the eighty units itself over the next four years.

Since the going was slow, Forest City lowered the price of the units from $176,000 to $164,000 or less for a three-bedroom home. The city also administered federal down payment assistance to some Roslyn Court buyers, giving a single person as much as $22,000 to urge him or her to move in.

"A lot of the people who bought before the money came out are probably pretty upset if they know that other people got that money," says Evan Jansen, a preferred lender in Stapleton's affordable program. "The affordable homes were sitting there. They weren't being sold. They were overpriced for people who were income-qualified to buy them."

Mindy Sunday moved into Roslyn Court just over a year ago, after receiving the full $22,000 down payment grant. Her daughter and son-in-law were one of the first couples to buy a regular Stapleton home, and she decided to relocate from her apartment in the Alamo Placita neighborhood to be closer to her grandchild. Her daughter found her the one-bedroom place for $124,000. "This allows me to be an available grandparent without going broke," says Sunday, who started her own business as a kitchen designer after six years of working for Home Depot. "Do I enjoy living here? I'm getting used to it. This is living in suburbia of sorts, but it's not like the other suburbs I've been to."

But Sunday, who never owned a home before, says affordable living is accompanied by a stigma. Once, at a Christmas party on her daughter's street, a man stopped speaking to her when he learned where she lives. "This is a good financial move and investment," she says. "Did I like it when that guy walked away from me? I'm not used to being discriminated against."

Worse, though, are the problems within Roslyn Court itself. In recent months, residents have complained of thin walls, crumbling balconies, and a concrete base that slopes into the center of the development rather than away from it. They've prompted their homeowners' association to look into a possible lawsuit against the builder. Sunday notices the noises coming through the walls most of all. "If you're in the bathroom, you can hear the toilet paper coming off the roll from the other side of the wall," she says.

Down the street, Syracuse Village also faced initial setbacks. BMW Realty Group — owned by former Denver Broncos Claudie Minor Jr. and Odell Barry, along with an executive named Thomas Williams — was commissioned to build it. But the partners quit a third of the way through when they couldn't find enough potential customers to move forward.

"When we began that process, we understood that there was a list of 1,100 folks that were interested in being at Stapleton," says Minor. "But when we got into the mix of it all, not all of those folks were qualified buyers." In most cases, they made too much money to qualify, he adds.

Forest City's Gleason wouldn't comment on the situation.

BMW Realty sold its property back to Forest City. "You know, Forest City is the 900-pound gorilla. We were little fellows," says Minor, adding that Stapleton's main developer could better afford to build and hold on to empty homes. But construction on Syracuse Village stalled for nine months as Forest City got ready to take over the project. At the same time, some low-income buyers who were prepared to move in were told to wait it out. But many ended up dropping out of the program anyway.

To help get its affordable program back on track, Forest City will change course for an upcoming project called 29th Drive Row Homes by donating land to the developer, New Town Builders.

"Our last estimate was that it was at least a $20 to $30 million subsidy that no one anticipated," says Knott about the cost of donating the land. "Because of our contract with the city, we need to do what we need to do."