There might not be easy answers to Loveland’s affordable housing crisis, but that doesn’t mean there are no answers.
On Thursday, about 40 people gathered at the Mirasol Event Center to learn more about the challenges in the local housing market with three of the people working hardest to overcome them: Jeff Feneis, executive director of the Loveland Housing Authority; Jammie Sabin, co-owner of Aspen Homes of Colorado; and Alison Hade, the city’s community partnership administrator.
The two-hour event was co-hosted by the League of Women Voters and the city’s Affordable Housing Task Force. It began with the basics — what constitutes affordable housing and why there is a lack of it in Northern Colorado.
According to Julie Stackhouse, a LWV member and a retired executive vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “affordable housing” often means different things to different people, but there are some official parameters for it set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Per HUD, a household’s housing is considered affordable when it costs less than 30% of gross income. For a household earning $5,000 a month, that translates to no more than $1,500 in rent or mortgage payments, plus utilities.
But housing priced at that point is very hard to find in the Fort Collins-Loveland area these days due to population growth over the last several years that has outstripped the supply of available units. As a result, Stackhouse told the audience, the median sales price of a single-family home has quadrupled since 1995 to $580,000.
Continuing, Stackhouse said that escalating input costs for construction are also driving high housing prices, mostly thanks to the high cost of water.
“Water is a big deal here, and not just because water is scarce and expensive,” she said. “It’s because, depending on which water company you’re working with, you’re going to have a different set of criteria to abide by.”
After the table was set with the data, the three panelists took turns answering questions about what the city is doing right to alleviate the housing crisis and what remains to be done.
To the first question, both Feneis and Sabin praised the city’s efforts to be an active partner in finding solutions through the task force, which was formed in 2021 and tasked with expanding housing options for working families.
Both also said that close collaboration between developers, builders and the city had been the key to several affordable projects in Loveland, such as Legacy Crossing, a 60-acre neighborhood near Taft Avenue and 57th Street being developed by the Housing Authority in partnership with three homebuilders. When completed, it will include roughly 330 homes serving families from 40 percent to 120 percent of the area median income.
“I do feel very fortunate that we’re in Loveland in the support that the affordable housing community has received is tremendous,” said Feneis. “And I’m optimistic a lot of the work that’s been happening the last three, four years through the task force, which couldn’t happen without the city’s involvement, is starting to come to fruition.”
Hade outlined several recent policy changes designed to reduce costs, including fee waivers for affordable units and a “scalable” fee model that adjusts water and utility fees based on home size. Beginning in January, Loveland will become the first city in Colorado to adopt that model. Smaller homes will also pay proportionally lower capital-expansion fees, which fund parks, police and other infrastructure.
“These policies took a lot of time and hard work to develop,” Hade said. “It’s been a lot of really good work and a great collaboration with city departments.”
Still, the city faces obstacles, notably an out-of-date comprehensive plan that complicates approval of mixed-density or nontraditional housing developments, according to Hade.
“The comprehensive plan should be updated every 10 years,” Hade said. “It’s overdue, and we don’t have the money to do it. That’s an obstacle to producing the kind of housing people want.”
Another, panelists agreed, is community resistance.
“Everyone wants affordable housing in Loveland,” Sabin said, “but a lot of people don’t want it next to them. We have a large NIMBY contingent that is vocal and organized.”
He urged residents who support new housing to counterbalance that opposition by speaking up at public hearings.
“Your voice matters,” he said. “You don’t have to be an expert — just show up and say this is the kind of project we need.”
Audience questions touched on the role of metro districts, manufactured housing and accessory dwelling units (ADUs), as well as Proposition 123, a state program requiring participating cities to increase affordable housing stock by 3 percent per year to qualify for construction funding.
While none of the speakers claimed there was a silver bullet, all three emphasized that Loveland is moving in the right direction, even if the journey will be a long one.
“From my perspective, the Affordable Housing Task Force and the city staff have been working for the last several years, and the impact of that is just about to get to the market next year and the year after and then you’ll start seeing some real changes,” Sabin said.