University of Denver to launch first-of-its-kind housing research hub
The University of Denver is launching a new Center for Housing Research and Innovative Solutions to tackle one of the state's most pressing issues.
"We're in a housing crisis in Colorado," said Susan Daggett, Director of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute. "Housing is too expensive across the board. We don't have enough housing of the types that we need to serve the population that we have, much less the population of the future."
It's an ever-growing issue in Colorado, which is why DU is establishing the hub.
"This center will focus on the entire spectrum of housing," said Vivek Shah, Director of the Burns School of Real Estate and Construction Management.
The center is the first of its kind in the state, with the goal of bringing together lawmakers, policymakers, industry leaders, and student researchers to find solutions to a variety of housing issues.
"We're borrowing policy ideas from similar centers to ours in California, in New York and Boston, in places that are unlike Colorado in many respects," said Daggett. "So the idea is to have a center that's focused on this place, the ethos and culture of this place, the history of this place, the legal and policy environment of this place, and that allows us to come up with solutions that are based in Colorado and that are appropriate to Colorado, rather than borrowing them from California."
Although the center won't officially open until this summer, DU staff supporting its launch say it has already proven its value. They conducted research on eliminating mandatory parking requirements for buildings in the city of Denver. Their findings helped influence recent policy change.
"If you can take out that marginal cost, developers are able to produce more housing units," said Daggett. "We wanted to pose the question to ourselves and try to answer that question so that the city council could consider the information as they considered their policy choice."
They're also working to provide insights into Colorado's housing markets, information that people often rely on websites like Zillow for.
"That's exactly reason why we wanted to create this center, one of the pillars to provide access to these reports that are and data that is unbiased and not -- again, either subscription based, where people have to pay money, or it's providing some kind of their incentive to give that data, or get the give that report, which has some bias from whatever they're trying to sell," said Shah. "Whether it's Zillow, whether it's some other real estate organization or home building organization, the center will provide unbiased view, unbiased report and unbiased analysis."
The center's first project will involve evaluating the impact of building codes.
"Evaluating the impact of our building codes, international building codes, whether residential or commercial, affect the cost and therefore the construction of middle density housing," said Daggett. And by middle density housing, I mean triplexes, fourplexes, duplexes, things like that."
