How Colorado Won Gold in Land-Use Policy Reform
(Colorado State Capitol.)
Sausage-making is a squishy business. The more of it you witness, the more you are struck by the pivotal role that unpredictable, almost random factors can play in whether a given policy idea becomes law. Bills with genuinely broad support may fail to be brought up for a vote because of the tricky dance of negotiating competing priorities as the annual session draws to a close. Interpersonal frustrations, animosities, or (on the flip side) friendships and favors owed can be pivotal. A vote needed to push a bill over the finish line can be lost or gained at the final hour for reasons that have nothing to do with politics, such as a legislator’s unexpected illness or injury.
Last week in Colorado, advocates for people-centered cities and the legalization of much-needed housing pulled it off. A loose package of bills requiring Colorado cities and towns to reform their land-use regulations all passed at the eleventh hour and will become state law. It’s an impressive victory in a year when similar pushes in other states appear to be coming up short.
There’s much for Strong Towns advocates to like in this legislative sweep. The issue of state preemption of local authority is a contentious one among our readership and one we’ve addressed repeatedly (see here, here, here and here). I’m not writing this piece to claim that this is exactly the legislative agenda a Strong Towns advocate might or must support.
But how to get these kinds of measures through a local or state policy-making process is clearly of interest to those who want stronger and more resilient communities.
The Colorado Sun has a nice summary of six of the land-use bills that passed in the 2024 session:
HB 1313: Requires 31 local governments to alter zoning laws to allow housing at a density of at least 40 units per acre within a quarter mile of bus stops and a half mile of rail stations. Most of the affected areas are in the Front Range corridor (Denver metropolitan area).
HB 1152: Broadly legalizes accessory dwelling units (ADUs, also known as backyard cottages or mother-in-laws) across Colorado and prevents cities from using “poison pill” policies to make them infeasible in practice. Per the Sun, it “also creates state grant and loan programs to help finance the construction of ADUs built by low- to moderate-income homeowners and for local governments to incentivize their regulatory work on ADUs.”
HB 1304: Eliminates parking mandates for multifamily residential properties, or mixed-use properties that are majority residential, if they are within a quarter mile of a transit stop with 30-minute frequency or better. (This encompasses up to 80% of major cities like Denver.)
HB 1175: Gives local governments a right of first refusal to buy apartment complexes that were built with public subsidy dollars when their affordability restrictions expire.
HB 1007: Bans local occupancy restrictions, which put a limit on how many unrelated individuals can live together. (These restrictions are common in college towns such as Boulder and Fort Collins as a means of restricting where students may rent houses.)
SB 174: Most local governments of communities with over 1,000 people will be required to submit an assessment of housing needs to the state. Technical guidelines for these assessments will be developed by the end of this year. (California, among other states and regions, already has requirements like this.)
Here are a few lessons from the success of these initiatives:
1. Even a Defeat Can Move the Ball Forward.
In 2023, Colorado Governor Jared Polis made the state’s housing crisis one of his signature issues. A broad bill, which Strong Towns reported on at the time, would have required cities throughout Colorado to legalize incremental housing — in some cases up to six units on a standard residential lot. It ultimately failed by one vote, largely brought down by concerns about the state usurping local control raised by some legislators and the Colorado Municipal League.
While the bill failed, the debate set the tone for the following session. The coalition for housing and urban land-use reform regrouped and took a more piecemeal approach in 2024, introducing over a dozen bills taking various bites at the apple of urban planning, transportation, and zoning policy.
2. It’s All About the Broad Coalition.
Everywhere that statewide land-use reforms have passed, it has taken a broad and eclectic coalition of supporters to make it happen. The nature of seemingly wonky issues such as parking reform is that they are not a central plank of any one partisan or ideological agenda, but rather play a linchpin role for many different policy priorities.
If you want cities to use land productively and be able to maintain a strong financial foundation, you need to end parking mandates.
If you want to meet the housing needs of a changing, growing resident population without pricing people out, you need laws that make incremental housing growth legal and feasible.
If you want to reduce carbon emissions, you have to pass land-use policies that reduce the amount of driving that residents must do to meet their daily needs.
If you want the free market to guide the efficient and prosperous development of cities, you want meddlesome and baseless zoning rules that mandate a very specific pattern of development out of the way.
And so forth.
A press release announcing the victory of HB 1304 — the bill abolishing most parking mandates near frequent transit — includes the following organizations’ endorsements: National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project (SWEEP), Shopworks Architecture, Together Colorado Housing Justice Committee, BlueGreen Alliance (a statewide coalition of labor and environmental groups), Denver Streets Partnership, Conservation Colorado, Signal Tech Coalition, and Boulder Progressives.
The story is becoming clear at this point, after similar coalitions won landmark reforms in Oregon and California: The constituency for expanding housing options and re-legalizing walkable urbanism includes housing advocates, safe streets and transit advocates, environmental justice groups, organized labor, climate groups, developers, local businesses, and more. It is a broad, winning coalition, where these groups can collaborate on strategy and build mutual trust.
Colorado’s push was not as obviously bipartisan as in some other states that have tackled local land use at the state level: The land-use package that passed this year was overwhelmingly backed by Democrats in the state legislature. (In other states like Montana and Florida, Republicans have been pivotal to land-use reform, so this is not a general rule by any means.)
I spoke with Matt Frommer, Senior Transportation Associate at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project (SWEEP), who emphasized the value of “trying to build as big a list as possible in terms of the sign-on sheet.” According to Frommer, environmental advocates in Colorado have been engaged with urban land-use policy for a couple of decades, largely because of the ways it enshrines and enforces automobile dependency. But it was not until the housing-price crisis reached truly epic levels in Colorado that the land-use reform coalition gained the firepower to win.
“The convergence of the climate crisis and the housing crisis was the impetus for all the land-use bills” in the 2024 session, says Frommer.
3. Anticipate and Neutralize Sources of Opposition.
At this point, the arguments against land-use reform bills are fairly well-known and predictable. This does not mean they will not be persuasive. A number of Colorado legislators were skeptical, for instance, of the effect abolishing parking mandates would have on low-income residents. The specter was raised in debate of the effect on a gardener with a work truck, or a house cleaner making multiple house calls in a day.
There are good answers to these concerns. Developers tend to still build parking even when it is not mandated — though they do come to build less. A 2020 study of parking counts at 86 residential properties in the Front Range region found that parking was systematically overbuilt: Only 60% of spaces, on average, were used at market-rate apartment buildings, and only 50% at dedicated affordable housing.
To rebut these arguments, the coalition for parking reform in Colorado made sure to have affordable housing advocates, as well as developers, on board as early proponents. This way, they could present to legislators the case for reducing parking requirements at these properties — that it will enable both more and less expensive housing.
Not all legislators were swayed, and one eventually forced a compromise in the final bill, allowing cities to continue requiring up to one parking stall per unit at affordable properties if they can produce a study demonstrating that having no mandates would have harmful consequences. Although this is backward and counterproductive, it was a compromise that allowed the legislation to pass.
4. Ambitious Policy Reform Requires Dedicated Champions in Elected Office.
Before she was a Colorado state representative, Stephanie Vigil from Colorado Springs was a DoorDash delivery driver. Vigil had a front-row seat to the effects of Colorado’s car-centric transportation policies, especially on working-class people. She “caught the bug on parking,” says Frommer, by reading books on the subject, including Donald Shoup’s legendary "The High Cost of Free Parking" and Henry Grabar’s "Paved Paradise". Vigil sat down with advocates last fall to discuss how to structure legislation aimed at reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in Colorado, including abolishing parking mandates.
Senator Nick Hinrichsen from Pueblo sponsored the parking bill in the state senate. Hinrichsen was formerly a public transit operations manager in Pueblo, so he was also deeply engaged in urban transportation issues. Hinrichsen, according to Frommer, compared watching the way local policies enshrine car-centric planning to “being a doctor and repeatedly watching your patients make horrible health decisions.” He has highlighted, in particular, the way parking mandates require housing to be built farther away from transit stops that residents might use.
The sponsorship and advocacy of these legislators with a background in transportation were crucial to the success of the parking reform bill. Before the bill’s introduction, “Half the legislature didn’t know we had parking mandates.” Many legislators want to do something for an issue they know is important to their constituents, like housing affordability, but the complicated (yet important) connections between a highly salient issue and a somewhat wonky one like parking policy can be less than obvious. When a bill is under threat, it is extremely important to have legislators who actually understand what it does and who will go to bat for it, said Frommer.
5. Statewide Reform Can Catalyze Local Reform, Not Compete With or Replace It.
Statewide preemption does not rewrite local zoning. The next, and most important, step is implementation. Cities will need to write zoning updates that comply with state law. And this provides a crucial window of opportunity, not only to ensure that cities get the details right but to encourage them to go above and beyond what the state has required — for their own sake.
Take HB1304, the parking reform bill. The messy process of getting it through the legislature involved adding a lot of caveats: only residential buildings, only multifamily, only near transit, only if the property is not subsidized affordable housing, etcetera. Contrast this to Minnesota’s bill, which has not passed the legislature, which fits in half a page.
Cities in Colorado now have a choice: They can either implement procedures for complying with a complicated set of requirements for where parking may and may not be required — and communicate these rules clearly to would-be developers — or they can simply abolish parking mandates citywide, everywhere, for all uses. The case for the latter path is strong: It will save city staff time and money that would have been spent enforcing rules that are arbitrary, pseudoscientific and stunt the growth of prosperous neighborhoods.
No city in Colorado has fully abolished parking mandates…yet. But Longmont, which abolished commercial parking mandates in its downtown in 2014 and has reduced requirements for some apartments more recently, is reportedly on this path. Hopefully, they will finish the job and other cities (including Denver) will follow suit.
State preemption has a role to play in getting cities “unstuck” from the legacy of bad zoning policies that were thoughtlessly copied from one city to the next in the mid-20th century. But it is not the only path or the best one. One of the most useful purposes of state legislation is to put cities on notice: “You can do this yourself, or we will do it for you.” The results will probably be cleaner, easier to administer and more locally productive if cities are the ones taking action.
Ready to get involved? Become a member today!
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is a founding member of the Strong Towns movement. He is the co-author of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, with Charles Marohn. Daniel now works as the Policy Director at the Parking Reform Network, an organization which seeks to accelerate the reform of harmful parking policies by educating the public about these policies and serving as a connecting hub for advocates and policy makers. Daniel’s work reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota.