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Essential workers risk being priced out

Staffers at Swedish Medical Center in Englewood say the housing problem also affects them. They blame the shortage of essential hospital workers they’re contending with, in part, on the cost of housing.

“Absolutely the rising cost of housing here in Colorado is a topic,” said Dena Schmaedecke, the hospital’s vice president of human resources. “Colleagues are often bringing up those stresses.”

That housing-cost factor has caused hospital leaders to offer a $10,000 housing stipend to incentivize new employees, Schmaedecke said.

In Brighton, northeast of Denver, Michael Clow, chief human resources officer for 27J Schools, said the cost of housing has impacted the district’s ability to maintain and support staff.

“We hear from candidates and from our new hires that the cost of housing and their ability to find housing is a real problem,”

Clow said. “ We recently had two math teachers (husband and wife) join us. They were excited to live their dream and move to Colorado. After just one year and realizing they could not afford to raise a family here, they moved back to their home state.”

Clow said the crisis has restricted the district’s pool of applicants graduating with teaching degrees, creating intense competition for staff and teachers.

“The cost of housing is becoming a serious obstacle for us to maintain service levels and serve our mission,” he said.

Farther north, in Fort Lupton, the Weld R-8 School District has faced similar pressures. Superintendent Alan Kaylor said the annual salary for a first-year teacher in the district is about $41,000.

Kaylor bought his home in 1995 for $72,000. He said a home across the street from his was recently listed at $685,000. The price of that house across the street rose more than four times faster than the pace of inflation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator.

“How can any family afford that?” he asked. “Something has to give. After a while, you have to wonder how long people will tolerate living on teachers’ wages.”

Even for some residents making a larger income, housing remains elusive.

West of Denver, in Evergreen, husband and wife Bill and Charm Connelly bring in a combined six-figure salary.

Bill Connelly is an insurance agent and blackjack dealer for a Black Hawk casino. Charm is the front-house general manager for Cactus Jack’s, a bar and restaurant in Evergreen. The two rent a three-bedroom home and are struggling to save for a house. Even downsizing to something smaller, they said, would likely increase their spending by roughly $400 a month. The two currently pay $2,200 per month on rent.

“I feel like a failure. I finally get a good full-time job making great money, and eight years ago, 10 years ago, we could easily have gotten something,” Bill Connelly said.

“Between the two of us, I see what we make,” Charm said. “We are making decent money, but I want to be able to save money and not blow it all on rent.”

For Adam Galbraith, a Cactus Jack’s bartender, the only way to keep his rent affordable is to live with others.

“The only reason I’m able to save money is because it’s a 1,100-square-foot place and we crammed four people in it,” Galbraith said, adding monthly rent is about $1,500. “If you’ve got roommates, that’s the only way you’re going to save money.”

A housing ‘limbo’

Near the end of 2019, Laney, the Littleton bartender, was beginning to feel more confident about reaching his goal for a down payment. He’d paid off his car and credit-card debt and said he “worked hard to keep it that way.”

His savings account was beginning to bulk up. Then came COVID-19.

Years of careful saving and unyielding restraint on spending evaporated in months. Laney was

Dear Davis Schilken, forced to drain his savings account during the beginning of the pandemic amid lockdowns. He received nothing from the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program, though he would gain $3,200 from stimulus checks in the months to come. Still, he was hanging on.

It was “the community around Jake’s, our regulars, who kept us alive,” Laney said.

“I was there every single day, for damn near a year,” he said, with the bar able to do curbside orders even as its indoors remained shuttered.

Before the pandemic, Laney estimates he brought in about $4,000 each month before taxes. By the end of the month, after paying for rent, utilities, groceries and gas, he would be left with just $200 to $300, which usually went into his savings.

Living that way was “terrifying,” said Laney, who always felt he could be on the edge of losing his housing should he have a bad month. The pandemic only exacerbated the uncertainty.

As his savings depleted, Laney’s dream of owning a home never seemed further away.

But his resolve didn’t waver and he used what federal relief he had to rebuild his savings because, as he put it, “I had a goal: I wanted a house. When I came out of the tunnel I knew what I wanted.”

By 2021, he started looking again. A townhome might come up on the market — far from perfect, but within Laney’s means

SEE PRICES, P5

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— and he would ready himself to put down an offer. It never was enough.

“Someone comes in and puts 20k cash on the offer, or 30k or 40k,” Laney said. “I went through about a year and a half of that and I knew in my head I was not going to be able to get a house.”

A real-estate agent who came into his bar told Laney to apply for a $300,000 bank loan. He had good credit, the agent told him, and would be a shoo-in for the money.

“Three hundred thousand dollars does not get you a townhome,” Laney thought to himself.

He was frustrated. More than frustrated. He felt depressed.

“I’d done everything right, everything I was supposed to do and it still didn’t matter,” he said. “I’m just stuck, like the hundreds of thousands of other people, in limbo.”

Laney’s luck began to turn near the end of 2021 when he heard there were about to be dozens of single-family homes for sale in Littleton for less than $300,000. He thought it was too good to be true.

‘We can’t all win the lottery’

That year, South Metro Housing Options, which manages affordable properties throughout Littleton, sold 59 of its single- family homes to Habitat for Humanity of Metro Denver, which pledged to renovate the units and sell them at a below-market price.

Laney’s hourly wage had slightly increased since the pandemic from $8 to $10, though 90% of his income still came from tips, he said. Still, Laney believed he met the financial requirements for a Habitat home, which would only sell to people who earn no more than 80% of the area’s median income.

But when Laney applied to be on a waitlist at the beginning of 2022, he was quickly denied. He was told his income, roughly $56,000 when he applied, exceeded the cap by less than $1,000.

Laney said he was actually making less than that, about $54,000, but because Habitat counted his “unrealized interest gains,” such as money held in stocks, Laney was over the threshold.

Habitat was also only looking at the income of recent months, Laney said, rather than his income over the past year. This made it look like he made more than he did because his monthto-month income would fluctuate dramatically based on tips.

He applied again and was denied again, this time for making just $300 more than the cutoff. But, a slow month at work turned out to be a good thing. His income dipped just enough that by the third time he applied he made it on the waitlist.

That did not come with the guarantee of a home. Laney was in a line of people just like him and demand far outweighed supply. Number 10 was his position. Who knew how many more were behind him, he thought.

Then it happened. Laney was made an offer, a 1,275-squarefoot detached home near Ketring Park in central Littleton valued at $285,000, roughly a third of what similar properties sold for.

“I can’t even express how happy I was,” Laney said. “I’ve been living and serving this community for 10 years and I want to live here.”

Still, the program has some drawbacks compared to traditional homeownership. Laney cannot build as much equity as many of his neighbors because he does not own the property the home sits on. Instead, it is owned by something called a land trust — a collection of entities.

“The beauty of the land trust is it removes the cost of the land from the equation from the cost of the home,” said Kate Hilberg, director of real estate development for Habitat for Humanity. “It allows the homeowners to pay on that mortgage for that home and improvements to that home but not the land.”

Land trusts are crucial tools organizations like Habitat use to lock in the affordability of homes even as property values rise elsewhere. The owners of these units will see some equity from their homes, Hilberg said, about 2% each year. But it won’t be enough to match the likes of homeowners who have used their growing property values to build decades of generational wealth.

“A lot of families use this as a starter home option and they do gain enough equity and stability to turn that into a down payment on a home in the open market,” Hilberg said of homes under land trusts.

But fathoming a concept like equity is a luxury for those who still can’t buy a house on the market, Laney said.

While he’s thankful for what Habitat did for him, he fears the few dozen homes it manages in Littleton can only go so far to meet the demand of hundreds, if not thousands, of residents who have struggled as he has.

“There isn’t enough incomebased housing for people … the people who live and work in this community can’t afford a house,” Laney said. “We can’t all win the lottery.”

Colorado Community Reporters Andrew Fraieli, Steve Smith, Tayler Shaw and Ellis Arnold contributed reporting to this story. To