The Denver Post, August 7, 2020: Bosselman: Denver doesn’t want to know how much housing it needs — and it needs a lot
You may want to start looking for a new place to live.
If you’re not rich and you would like to continue living in your neighborhood, you have reason to worry about a recent report that ranked Denver as the second most intensely gentrifying city in the U.S.
Between 2010 and 2017, more than 100,000 people moved to Denver. But the city issued just 35,000 permits for new housing units in the same timeframe.
Many new residents arrived with college degrees and good salaries, allowing them to spend their way into existing homes and apartments, often in historically Black and Latino communities. The situation increased prices in some of the city’s most affordable neighborhoods and drove thousands of families to leave their longtime homes. Now, this pattern of gentrification and displacement will likely intensify as the COVID-19 pandemic triggers a financial crisis.
