By Santiago Nino | Yellow Scene
Twenty-five years ago, Erie was just another small town on the Front Range, the kind of place you only thought about if you lived there. Scattered farmhouses sat under an endless sky, and families were happy to call the place their home. Then, developers saw money signs and started building houses, strip malls. The traffic followed. Enough traffic to make any of these poor farmers lose it.
Now, Erie is one of the fastest-growing towns in Colorado, growing more than 9% in the last year. Over the last 20 years, it became a haven for families priced out of Boulder and Denver. These families are chasing the American dream of a backyard, good schools, and a reasonable commute. For that, you have to live close to where you work. Developers saw opportunity, and they took it. They built mile after mile of single-family homes stretching toward the horizon, the old farm roads now feeding into packed intersections and six-lane highways.
Mayor Justin Brooks likes it this way. He’s made it clear that Erie isn’t meant to be a city. He calls it a bedroom community — a place for people to live, not work. In reality, a town can’t survive on single-family homes alone. Walk into any restaurant, coffee shop, or grocery store in Erie, and you’ll hear the same story. Rent is too high, businesses can’t find workers, and there’s nowhere affordable for them to live. Teachers and first responders commute from towns an hour away or further. Meanwhile, the roads are packed, the gas stations are full, and the people who can actually afford to live here spend most of their time somewhere else.
Erie is a symptom of a growing problem that can be seen in other neighboring cities as well. As sprawl takes over Colorado, there are solutions that can be implemented, but who is willing to take action?
Colorado has always had an abundant amount of space, and for a long time, that was enough to curtail the problem. If you need more houses, you can build a new neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. If you need a bigger grocery store, just knock down some trees and call the construction company. The state’s postwar boom followed the same blueprint as the rest of the country. Local governments prioritized cars and land ownership, writing zoning laws that kept housing and businesses separate.
In all honesty, it worked for a time. Land was cheap while there was land. After all, it was abundant. Cars were everywhere, and public transit was an afterthought. Neighborhoods started popping up all over the place, and they stretched out instead of up.
Between 2000 and 2020, nearly 1.5 million people moved to Colorado. Demand for housing shot up, but the local government never adapted. Cities and towns clung to their zoning laws and prioritized single-family development, even as home prices skyrocketed and commutes got longer. Finally, some people proposed higher-density housing as a solution, and the backlash was immediate.
Neighborhood groups fought tooth and nail against new apartments, worried about traffic, property values, and “preserving community character.” In places like Erie, leaders doubled down on low-density sprawl, rejecting the very developments that could have made housing more affordable in the name of keeping towns the same.