The Colorado Springs Gazette final

Affordable housing advocates to march on Colorado Springs’ 150th anniversary

BY DEBBIE KELLEY debbie.kelley@gazette.com

While city leaders throw a big bash Saturday to mark the 150th anniversary of Colorado Springs’ founding, a coalition that says the community is not doing enough to address the dearth of affordable housing will march to protest skyrocketing rents and a lack of places for low-income residents to live.

“Part of what we’d like to see is more creative solutions to our housing crisis,” said Jonathan Christiansen of the Chinook Center, a collective that houses progressive groups that are part of the demonstration, including the Democratic Socialists of America and the Colorado Springs Tenant Union.

Other participants include the Colorado Springs Pro-housing Partnership and Just COS, which bills itself on Facebook as presenting “revolutionary news and views from the grassroots of Colorado Springs” on Youtube.

The call to action is the

first major public event for the Colorado Springs Housing for All coalition, organizers said, and intentionally coincides with the sesquicentennial celebration, as well as the end of the moratorium on evictions.

The protest will start at 11 a.m. at Dorchester Park, a longtime hangout for homeless people. Participants will hand out food, personal hygiene items, tents and containers for used needles to homeless people as they march to an unidentified location downtown, Christiansen said.

City officials are aware that the group might “attempt to disrupt the festival and parade on Saturday, detracting from what is meant to be a celebratory and family-friendly event for all in our city,” spokeswoman Jamie Fabos said via email.

The COS 150 “Parade Through Time” begins at 11 a.m. and will move south on Tejon Street, with more than 60 floats and entries representing key moments in Colorado Springs’ history. A large downtown festival follows.

“We know we are joined by the vast majority of our community in looking forward to the opportunity to come together to celebrate our city’s rich history and bright future,” Fabos said.

The Colorado Springs Housing for All group will rally and hold a news conference, Christiansen said, declining to elaborate.

Housing has become one of the top issues facing the city. The average first-quarter rent in Colorado Springs was $1,334 a month, based on a recent University of Denver report on local apartment costs.

Local resale homes averaged $450,000 in June, having set record highs for the past five months. Newhome prices also have risen in tandem with construction materials and labor costs, making it tough to deliver just-built homes in the region for under $400,000, builders have said.

But the city is on track to surpass its 2021 goal of adding 1,000 affordable housing units per year, said Steve Posey, Housing and Urban Development programs manager of Colorado Springs’ Community Development Division for Colorado Springs.

More than 1,000 affordable apartments are either under construction or soon will get off the ground in the southeast part of the city alone, he said, with up to 1,000 more to come.

The individual projects are connected to nonprofits, Posey said, including Greccio Housing, Colorado Springs Housing Authority, Volunteers in America and Solid Rock Baptist Church.

“It’s important people understand the city is fully aware that we have housing challenges,” he said, “and we are doing every possible thing we can and using the resources we have available to address these challenges.”

Of $127 million the city has received from large grantors including HUD and tax-exempt bonds, $111 million of that is earmarked for housing, Posey said.

But Christiansen said that many of the key players who are featured at local forums and discussions on affordable housing work in the industry and are not the people being affected by the problem.

“This is bringing in a whole new set of voices that aren’t just looking for solutions that are making money off the crisis,” he said of the march.

Melissa Hall, a single mother of six children who live with her, said it’s been hard to find an apartment when many landlords require three times the income of the monthly rent payment.

She and her children were homeless for about six months in 2019 before being accepted to Family Promise’s program for homeless families. She eventually graduated and now shares a home but is saving up to buy a house.

“It was hard then, and it’s even harder now to find a place to live,” she said. “But there are things we can do, and they’re reasonable requests.”

Organizers want city leaders, who are collecting community input on revising the city’s zoning ordinance, to “be more flexible in the way they zone that would allow more lands to be opened up for housing,” Christiansen said.

Empty storefronts in older strip malls such as Rustic Hills could be turned into affordable housing, he believes.

Increasing higher-density and mixed-use housing, requiring developers to set aside a certain percentage of new developments as affordable housing, setting aside land to be used for affordable housing in perpetuity, establishing a housing trust fund using general city fund money and widening tenants’ rights to keep renters in their homes are among what the coalition wants to see happen.

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2021-07-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

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