Affordable Housing vs Housing People Can Afford

Affordable housing is a glaring and urgent concern for metropolitan areas and their surrounding towns across America. In Denver, average home prices have almost doubled in the last decade. Boulder has seen a similarly steep trend in that time period while the average rent across Colorado is $2040 a month. Aside from inflation, these skyrocketing numbers have been attributed to the involvement of what are being widely being referred to as “corporate investors.” The logic behind the attribution is that these large investors are taking ownership of pre-existing residential units, namely single family homes (SFH) which lowers the available supply for purchase and drives up demand. The other branch of this argument is that those residential units are then turned around and rented out for prices so high that renters can’t save up to buy a home. 

In response to these affordable housing concerns, an executive order from the Trump Administration on January 20th called for greater restrictions on large investors’ purchases of SFH. “Neighborhoods and communities once controlled by middle-class American families are now run by faraway corporate interests,” Trump stated. “People live in homes, not corporations.”  An official stop on Wall Street involvement, from the president whose family legacy is built upon corporatization, makes sense from the lens of the “returning to traditional American values” messaging which has dominated the MAGA platform. 

“Buying and owning a home has long been considered the pinnacle of the American dream and a way for families to invest and build lifetime wealth,” Trump’s order reads. “But…that American dream has been increasingly out of reach for too many of our citizens, especially first-time homebuyers.”  

Colorado realtor Vivi Gloriod said that the January 20th executive order works in conjunction with an August 2025 order which, in part, allows individuals to withdraw from their 401k’s for the purpose of purchasing homes – with zero penalties and zero taxes. “A lot of people get matching [401k’s] with their employers but it was elusive money they couldn’t touch until they turned 65.” Gloriod added hopefully, “This could make a big difference in housing affordability for first time buyers.” 

Although the imbalance of Colorado’s housing supply and demand is apparent to realtors, renters, and aspirational homeowners alike, banning corporate investors from buying more property only fractionally addresses the affordable housing crisis. The housing issue spans multiple sectors, all engaging in a tug of war over supply, costs and risk. 

With the implementation of HB23-1253 in 2023, the Colorado legislature created a task force to study corporate home ownership. They published their findings in a June 2025 report. The report shows that in 2023 the share of corporate owned housing across all “owner occupiable” units in Colorado was 3%, which was less than the national average. One of the top three corporate investors, accounting for highest ownership of residential realty in the country, is Blackstone Inc. 

Gloriod said, “Blackstone has bought up a ton of houses in Colorado in the past, and this executive order really prevents that from happening again.” She was referring to a lot of 978 apartment units under Blackstone’s ownership, later sold to Equity Residential in 2024, as well as a 2007 purchase of  359 residential properties through “Tishman Speyer Real Estate Venture VII,” a partnership between two Blackstone subsidiaries. The mass of property acquired by corporate heavy hitters like Blackstone is nothing to snuff at but it cannot account for the entirety of the affordable housing crisis Coloradans find themselves in. 

Smaller LLC investors, known as “mom-and-pops,” have also played a role in lowering housing supply. According to Cotality’s 2024 data acquisition close to 1 in 5 SFH purchases made since the pandemic were done so by these so-called mom-and-pop landlords. Both Gloriod and Joe Seehusen of Compass Real Estate said that Colorado was a hot spot for small and large investors alike in the 2010s, but that has changed in recent years. Seehusen said “Ideally when you are a mom-and-pop investor, you want to buy low and rent high enough to net a profit. There were opportunities for people wanting a 10-20 house portfolio in Colorado, before prices started shooting up. So now they’re leaving town for cheaper places like St. Louis.” 

Despite federal claims that blocking large investors will increase homeowner accessibility, the trickle out of such investors from Colorado’s housing market witnessed by Gloriod and Seehusen has not significantly impacted Coloradans’ home ownership opportunities.  

Increasing the housing supply has been looked to as a possible solution for affordable housing in Colorado. In 2019, Colorado hit a historic peak – the shortfall between housing demand and supply was a gap of 140,000, meaning 140,000 residents who wanted or needed homes did not have them.  Since the HB23-1253 initiative, led by Governor Jared Polis, the State Demography Office (SDO), and Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA), the shortfall lessened to 106,000 units but, the report acknowledges that the drop was largely due to slower population growth and increased housing production. “Between 2020 and 2023, Colorado built an average of 43,000 housing units each year, significantly higher than the pace of the previous decade.”

Seehusen, who has been a realtor to the West of I-25 for eleven years, said that continuing to increase the housing supply has become incredibly difficult. Building supplies, while increasingly plasticized, have been deteriorating in quality since the pandemic, and prices have spiked with the implementation of Trump’s tariffs. Seehusen said, “A lot of builders don’t want to build because the quality of the building can go downhill. If they put in windows that give out in five years, they can get sued…They just don’t build complexes how they used to.” 

Stricter zoning has also played into liability and costs, as in the case of the Boulder and Superior areas after the Marshall Fire. With over a thousand homes destroyed, Boulder implemented new fire-preventative requirements for new developments, but residents’ insurance coverage for losing their home could not afford a re-build under those requirements.  

Along with increased mortgage interest rates in the Denver area – from approximately 3% in 2020 to 6.5% in 2025 – insurance rates for both builders and homeowners have also gone up. “Colorado is in the top three for hail in the country. With high HOA rates, owners can’t afford to repair hail or other kinds of damage, and the damage gets worse because of that,” Seehusen said. While liability increases for builders using less sustainable materials, the use of cheaper materials does make housing more affordable. “People may not like it, but they have to do it that way.” Seehusen said as he referred to the war between affordability and liability. 

“For example, there is an initiative for ‘assumable loans,’ where somebody can sell their house with the same interest rate they bought it at. So if they’re paying a 2.8% interest from a house they bought in the pandemic, the next owner would assume that amount… but a deal like that in a market with a 6 or 7% average, would drive up the value anyway,” Seehusen weighed. 

It is possible that the White House block of Wall Street investors may work in conjunction with its’ executive order to make 401k’s more fluid for potential homeowners to result in more accessibility for first time homeowners, as Gloriod predicted. But in the grand scheme of Colorado’s housing, the restriction of corporate buyers will hardly move the needle. If the complex problem of affordable housing is to be even marginally solved, it will require a more holistic approach than an executive order can provide.

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