Colorado poll sees concern about cost of living

BY PARKER YAMASAKI THE COLORADO SUN

Cost of living and housing affordability are the top concerns of Coloradans this year, according to a poll released by the Colorado Health Foundation.

In an open-ended question asking participants what they thought the most important issue facing Colorado is right now, 16% answered cost of living and 15% answered housing a ordability. Other issues in the top ve were government and politics, public safety and crime, and homelessness.

About 10% of respondents said that homelessness was their top concern for Colorado, with 79% calling the problem “extremely serious” or “very serious.” e results from the 4th annual survey arrived as Denver’s new mayor, Mike Johnston, declared a state of emergency around homelessness, during his rst full day in o ce.

Polling is conducted over one month through phone, email and text invitations, in English and Spanish. is year’s data includes 2,639 respondents across all ages, races and income brackets, with oversamples of Black/African American, Native American/Indigenous, Asian American and Pueblo County residents.

One of the cornerstones of CHF is to serve folks with historically less power or privilege, according to Austin Montoya, senior o cer for policy advocacy communications, which is why the foundation takes larger samples of speci c populations. Montoya said that by sampling larger numbers of smaller populations, they are able to more accurately re ect the experiences of those populations. e data is later weighted to re ect Colorado’s population. e second- and third-largest decreases in concern were political division, down 6 percentage points, and jobs and the economy, down 5. In the past year, Colorado’s job openings and unemployment reached something near equilibrium, so it tracks that anxiety over jobs has fallen since the 2020 polling, when uncertainty was rampant.

Since the poll’s inception in 2020, the biggest drop in respondents’ top concern was, unsurprisingly, COVID-19, which was top of mind for 26% of Coloradans in 2020, compared with 0% in 2023.

Homelessness had the largest increase as a top concern since last year, up 3 percentage points, while crime had the largest increase as a top concern over the past four years, up 8 percentage points. Both issues were a major focus for Denver’s mayoral election this year.

While most concerns associated with costs — such as rising costs of living, cost of housing and jobs — tended to decline in importance as income levels rose, the percentage of respondents most concerned by homelessness was consistent across income levels. e di erence between the lowest and highest income earners concerned with homelessness was only 3 percentage points.

Having a home is one major concern; staying in it is another. At the time of polling, renters were signicantly more worried about not being able to make rent payments than homeowners were worried about