Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Stand in the parking lot of a Safeway in Lamar, Colorado, and you can feel the distance from Denver — not just in miles, but in political attention. Southeast Colorado has been losing population for decades, watching young people leave for cities where the jobs are, while the homes they grew up in fall apart, vacant and blighted, because there's no money to fix them and no one coming to buy them.
That image — empty houses rotting in a town that desperately needs housing — is either a tragedy or an opportunity, depending on how you look at it. In the 2026 Colorado governor's race, how each candidate looks at that image tells you a lot about who they are.
Housing affordability has rocketed to the top of the agenda for this race, and for good reason. According to survey data cited by candidate Phil Weiser, Coloradans are calling high home prices "the biggest concern of almost everyone I know." In many parts of the state, the number of hours a family must work to afford a mortgage has doubled over the past decade — even as average wages climbed nearly 50%. You're running faster just to fall further behind.
Three serious candidates are making their pitches: Democrat Phil Weiser (current Attorney General), Democrat Michael Bennet (current U.S. Senator), and Republican Victor Marx. They all say housing is broken. They don't all agree on how to fix it — and one of them barely addresses it on his website at all.
Weiser's housing story begins in southeast Colorado, back when he was first running for Attorney General. He visited the region and heard a version of the same paradox you find across rural Colorado: a shortage of housing and a surplus of blighted, abandoned homes. Nobody had connected those two dots into a solution.
As AG, he found a lever. After the 2008 foreclosure crisis, the big banks settled with states across the country, and Colorado ended up with funds earmarked for housing. The problem: almost all of it had flowed to northern and urban Colorado. Southern and southeastern communities were left out.
Weiser had
In Lamar, graduates of the COPERR program went further — they started their own construction company and began turning abandoned houses into actual homes. Weiser toured the first one himself.
He's also been talking to Amy Johnson, head of Kit Carson Rural Development, who is doing similar work in eastern Colorado. Johnson's frustration is specific and telling: the state's Proposition 123 program, designed to fund affordable housing solutions, doesn't give rural communities like hers the flexibility they need. Specifically, it won't cover environmental assessments, abatement, or demolition — only new construction. That's a problem when your town's best housing opportunity is a structurally compromised 1950s ranch house sitting on a lot with asbestos tile.
Weiser says that as governor, he'd fix that gap in Prop. 123's rules and scale the COPERR model statewide. His pitch is rooted in something real he actually built — though critics might fairly note that the plan still sounds more like a framework than a fully-funded blueprint.
Senator Bennet's housing platform is the most comprehensive of the three — a full-spectrum policy document that reads like it was written by someone who has spent years in Washington watching housing bills live and die.
Bennet frames the crisis in stark terms: Colorado needs homes at every stage of life, for every part of the state, and the current system is failing on almost every front — limited supply, bureaucratic delays, rising construction costs, and a permitting process that can take years. His goal is pointed: no Coloradan should spend more than 30% of their income on housing.
His plan hits several distinct targets. He wants to drive a statewide surge in home construction — including a commitment to increase state-supported housing supply by as much as 30% by 2035. He wants to bring starter homes back: townhomes, condos, duplexes, ADUs — the kinds of homes that used to be the first rung on the ownership ladder and have largely disappeared from the Colorado market. He wants to expand downpayment assistance, mortgage assistance, and rent-to-own pathways for first-time buyers.
Critically, like Weiser, Bennet explicitly calls out the need to preserve and rehabilitate existing affordable homes — pointing to Prop. 123 and tax credit programs as tools that should be flexible enough to support rehab projects, not just new construction.
The plan calls for bringing together local governments, private developers, nonprofits, philanthropy, and the legislature. It's ambitious in scope. Whether a governor could actually move all those pieces simultaneously is a fair question.
Republican Victor Marx takes a different angle. His public-facing campaign materials don't include a dedicated housing policy page — notably absent given that his opponents have made it their top issue. What he does talk about is eliminating red tape and reducing bureaucracy to get builders building.
It's a coherent philosophical position: government-driven housing programs cost money, create dependency, and slow things down, so get out of the way and let the market work. His argument would likely land with voters who are skeptical of state spending and believe permitting reform alone could unlock significant supply.
But without specific proposals — no target numbers, no identified programs to cut, no explanation of what deregulation would look like in practice — it's harder to evaluate. Streamlining permitting is something both Democratic candidates also support. The question is what you do after that.
Here's where this author has a thought worth raising, presented not as partisan opinion but as a policy question worth debating: what if Colorado created a special primary-home mortgage loan?
The pitch: a fixed-rate loan at something like 3.5%, available to first-time homebuyers and to anyone selling their primary residence to purchase another primary residence in Colorado. You can only hold one at a time, and you must be a Colorado resident.
The logic is interesting. Right now, one of the biggest invisible jams in the Colorado housing market is existing homeowners who are locked into 3% pandemic-era mortgages and can't afford to trade up — or even trade sideways — at 7%. So they stay put. Their home never hits the market. Inventory stays frozen.
A state-backed loan program that travels with you when you move could unlock that frozen inventory without requiring new construction. It's not a replacement for building more homes, but it's a tool that addresses a specific friction point that neither candidate's plan directly targets.
Both Weiser and Bennet have housing at the top of their platforms. Marx doesn't list it as a formal stance. Whether that gap matters to Republican primary voters — or to general election voters in a state where housing anxiety crosses every demographic — remains to be seen.
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Colorado has been one of the fastest-growing states in the country for two decades, and the housing market has never fully caught up. The 2026 governor's race may turn, in no small part, on who convinces voters they have the most credible answer to a question that's kept a lot of Coloradans up at night: will my kids be able to afford to live here?
The candidates are making their cases. The specifics — and the gaps — are worth paying attention to.