The Denver area is a top-tier real estate market. It gives great returns for national developers and investors, but how do locals fare here? Is housing becoming more broadly affordable? Are neighborhoods becoming stronger? Is local wealth being built? The goal of this group is to address these issues by providing local citizens with the means and the runway to become the developers shaping their own communities.
- Local Changes to help local development:
how these enable or limit housing and/or commercial development, and what hurdles can be cleared.- Zoning codes:
- What are current codes, and what do they allow for? Let’s try to decode the code.
- What changes would we like to see, and are there elegant solutions that exist to make them happen?
- How would proposed changes help to meet the goals laid out in the recent Colorado legislation of 40 units per acre near transit?
- Building codes: are there onerous or unnecessary building codes that limit development? (ex: sprinkler requirements for a 4-plex, transitioning to single stair codes)
- Permitting and approval: what is the current process and timelines for building at different levels. What are attainable means of speeding this up? (pre-approved plans, required deadlines for permitting agencies to make decisions, etc.)
- Zoning codes:
- The Developer’s Toolkit
- What to build
- Plans: hiring an architect isn’t always necessary—there are a number of high-quality, inexpensive plans available that can get an amateur developer started.
- Materials: what are the pros and cons for the local environment of building with different materials?
- Demand: what are there gaps in housing being built? Are more family-friendly 3-bedroom apartments needed downtown? Should more studio-style cottages or town homes be built?
- How to Finance it
- Construction loans: what are the local lending institutions that offer loans for construction?
- Options for those who currently own property: what are the processes and potential drawbacks of these?
- Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) loans
- Cash-out refinancing
- How to build it:
- Who you need: a description of the different groups you may need for different construction types (dividing a single-family home into a duplex; building a granny flat; building a town home)
- Local tradespeople: essentially a Rolodex of reliable contractors to give people a starting point on who can handle these kinds of jobs
- What to build