Commentary: Denver's Pro-Housing Candidates Should Practice What They Preach

With so many candidates running for office in Denver this year, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what will happen on April 4. Amid all the uncertainty, however, one fact is clear: For perhaps the first time in Denver’s history, the vast majority of candidates running for office in Denver are running on pro-housing platforms.

Ideas that were considered politically toxic even to mention just a few years ago are now commonplace among the platforms of candidates running for office in Denver. Policies like ending exclusionary zoning, upzoning to allow for ADUs and missing middle housing, ending parking minimums, and more.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the candidates running on pro-housing platforms this year are struggling to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to supporting the Park Hill Golf Course development proposal. On Thursday night, when fifteen of Denver’s mayoral candidates were asked if they support the Park Hill Golf Course development, only two contenders for mayor expressed their support for the development.

For months, pro-housing abundance advocates like myself have been showing up at Denver City Council in support of a fantastic opportunity to bring almost 3,000 new homes to Denver. We have donated to and volunteered for mayoral candidates that we believed would be champions for housing abundance. For us, Thursday night’s forum was incredibly disappointing.

While disheartening, it’s hard to say that it was surprising that no one wanted to support the PHGC plan. In the eyes of the majority of candidates running for office in Denver right now, supporting a controversial development whose future will have already been decided by the time the new mayor and city council members take office just isn’t worth the risk of losing an election.

Politically, staying silent is the easy thing to do — but Denver is in crisis. Denver is facing a shortage of nearly 50,000 housing units. Over the past year, the median rent in Denver has increased by almost 16 percent, and by the most recent count, almost 7,000 people in the metro area are unhoused. Politically cautious decisions aren’t going to bring an end to this crisis.

The simple truth is that when candidates refuse to publicly support the current plan for Park Hill Golf Course, they put the wants of wealthy homeowners over the needs of the tens of thousands of young people, teachers, nurses and working-class people who have for years struggled to live in Denver during the current housing crisis.

I said it at the city council meeting last Monday, and I’m going to say it again: Denver’s future is a policy choice. If Denver’s next leaders fail to enact pro-housing policies and fail to support affordable, dense, multifamily housing developments like the one proposed at Park Hill Golf Course, Denver will be left without a future.

Denverites deserve better than leaders who are only willing to make politically cautious decisions. Every single mayoral and city council candidate running for office on pro-housing platforms right now should be publicly supporting the current plan for Park Hill Golf Course. Denver needs leaders who are willing to stand by the values and ideas upon which they campaign.

Tobin Stone is an advocate for housing abundance in Colorado, a lead for YIMBY Denver, and a member of the Denver New Liberals.