Rocky Mountain Voice

Tag: Rental Market

Did illegal immigration drive up housing prices? A cautious yes with caveats
Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, National

Did illegal immigration drive up housing prices? A cautious yes with caveats

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Does an influx of immigrants (illegal or otherwise) drive up house prices? The answer to that question, as with many things in life, is complicated. A guarded, and cautious “yes” with plenty of caveats would be how I’d characterize it; if you introduce millions of people into a place, how can their presence not up demand? This is all the more so for a commodity like housing which has much higher connections to regulation and government than, say, cellphones. Simply looking at the spike in immigration post-COVID ought to convince any reasonable person that demand for housing would increase. See screenshot 1 (from the first link below) for a time series graph. In order to look into this question myself, I di...
Priced out, packed in: Colorado renters squeezed by costs, policy gridlock and population growth
Approved, Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Priced out, packed in: Colorado renters squeezed by costs, policy gridlock and population growth

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice Colorado’s affordable housing crunch – especially in the rental sector – has been building for years. Reports from the Common Sense Institute and Bell Policy Center trace the tipping point to around 2015, when demand consistently began outpacing supply. The last decade has seen rising home prices, stagnant wages and insufficient new construction which has made the situation worse due to recent immigration pressures and allegations of resource allocation issues. Origins and escalation of the crisis Bell Policy Center noted a statewide rental rate increase from 30.9% in 2009 to 34.8% by 2022, with urban counties like Denver reaching 50.1%.  In just a year, Colorado slipped further down the affordability scale, now rank...