University of Denver Creates New Program to Tackle Affordable-Housing Crisis

The University of Denver is drawing on a network of faculty experts and industry leaders in real estate, construction management, law, social work and public policy to create a program that changes how folks approach affordable housing.

"We need to stop having idiots out there building junk," says Susan Daggett, executive director of Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute and co-director of the new Affordable Housing Certificate program.

"It's time to have people do a good job at it."

According to an October 2023 report by Up for Growth, Colorado is severely lacking in housing inventory, and needs upwards of 100,000 new home units to meet the state's housing demand, while a 2024 report from the Common Sense Institute estimates that metro Denver alone could be at the same level of under-production.

The new program — touted as a first of its kind in both Colorado and the country — is aimed at up-skilling professionals who are currently working in the affordable-housing sector or re-skilling those looking to transition into it. This includes real estate experts, developers, city planners, policy makers, attorneys, civic leaders, housing advocates, property managers, architects, lenders and more.

"We want smart and capable people who understand this ever-changing environment and ecosystem in which we're operating," Daggett tells Westword. "We're trying to figure out how we can help make affordable housing better."

Beginning this fall, classes will be offered for the DU program through the Burns School of Real Estate & Construction Management at the Daniels College of Business and the Land Use Institute at the Sturm College of Law. The classes will cover topics and issues broken down into eight modules: Orientation Workshop; Housing Policy (Federal, State, & Local Approaches); Legal & Regulatory Context (Land Use, Planning, Zoning, & Entitlement); Social Dimensions of Affordable Housing; Affordable Housing & Project Finance; Construction Management, Design, & Innovations in Affordable Housing; Development & Management of Affordable Housing; and Capstone Project (The Practicum).

The program's core mission is to get professional minds from different sectors under one roof, and then build more sustainable and equitable communities, according to DU. Daggett says the modules are designed to be granular and will touch on laws, regulations and barriers in Colorado.

For Vivek Sah, professor and co-director of the Affordable Housing Certificate program and director of the Burns School, "There's no one-size-fits-all solution."

"Usually, the people who work in this space in terms of information, education, development, data and other things, they work in silos," Sah explains. "There's not one program that puts all these people and things together. If you're a public official working on getting policy changed and all of that, you're so focused on that aspect that you don't understand the other aspects. If you're working on affordable-housing projects as a developer, you're focused on developing the project and looking at financing, but you don't understand the other aspects, whether it's policy, whether it's zoning, whether it's the social stuff. All of these things are interlinked, but there's nothing that actually connects them. That's what this program is for."

The Affordable Housing Certificate classes are slated to cost $7,500 a person, and "generous scholarships" will be offered, according to Daggett and Sah. The program is intended for working professionals, so DU students are prohibited.

"To a lot of the big developers, $7,500 is not a lot of money and they won't need a scholarship," Daggett says. "But if there's a small public entity or planner or person with a small family-owned business or shop, we're happy to give scholarships out through our seed funders of this program, including the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority."

While homelessness and subsidized housing have been front and center in the affordable-housing debate, it's housing and living affordability for all — and the road map to get there — that Daggett and Sah are most interested in.

"Affordability is not just the cost of the housing," Daggett says. "It's also the cost of maintaining the infrastructure, the cost of transportation, the cost of getting from where you live to where you work, the cost of getting your kids to school, the cost of construction, the cost of materials, the cost of labor. All of this leads to a price point that our wage system is not capable of."

With costs rising annually and the amount of land available to buy going down, Colorado's ever-increasing population continues to have less and less to work with each year, according to Daggett. And a low supply isn't the only issues that buyers and renters face in bigger cities, like Denver.

"There have been instances where a developer shows up at a project and their entire crew has gone down the street to another one that's paying more. So then the only choice the developer has is to increase the wages and squeeze their profits, and it ends up passing down to the consumer. Whether it's through rent or through the price of the house or the unit, the costs will go up," she adds.

Daggett and Sah believe the new Affordable Housing Certificate program at DU can help industry experts find the wiggle room on a project and how to adjust properly, rather than just thinking for themselves. This is especially important today as Colorado's regulatory practices and legal structure continue to change, they note.

According to Daggett, it's "incumbent" upon housing developers and affordable-housing advocates to "have and understand the tools that are available to them."

"We're building critical infrastructure that we're going to be living with for the next fifty to 100 years. We need to do it thoughtfully and serve people in the right ways," she says.