Thirty-one Colorado jurisdictions face a December 31 housing-density deadline
Thirty-one Colorado jurisdictions face a December 31 housing-density deadline
2026-09-10 · Colorado · Legislation · Pending — not yet law
By December 31, 2026, roughly thirty-one Colorado cities and counties must file a Housing Opportunity Goal report with the state or risk being designated “nonqualified” — and the density formula behind it is forty units per acre. HB24-1313, “Housing in Transit-Oriented Communities,” is the 2024 statute driving it, and the deadline is now under four months away.1
The list is nearly all Denver metro: Denver, Aurora, Lakewood, Arvada, Broomfield, Centennial, Commerce City, Englewood, Golden, Glendale and Greenwood Village, plus Fort Collins and Colorado Springs outside the metro.
How the goal is calculated
Each transit-oriented community multiplies its transit-area land area by a density of forty units per acre to produce a housing opportunity goal, then must ensure that total zoning capacity across all transit centers in the jurisdiction is greater than or equal to that goal. Approvals for qualifying projects must be streamlined. Alongside the report, each community must identify affordability and displacement-mitigation strategies.
What it does — and does not — do to a declaration
Nothing in anything reviewed for this article addresses covenants. The bill operates on local governments' zoning capacity, not on recorded declarations.
That is the point worth making to owners, because it is where the alarm usually comes from: a transit-oriented rezoning can put a forty-unit-per-acre entitlement on the parcel next door to a covenanted subdivision without altering a single word of that subdivision's declaration. The community's own standards are unchanged. What changes is what may be built on land the community does not control.
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Related Colorado HOA Topics
- HB24-1313, "Housing in Transit-Oriented Communities" — bill page, Colorado General Assembly ↩
- "Transit-Oriented Communities Bill Targets Housing Access Through State Intervention," Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck — the 40-units-per-acre formula and the "nonqualified" designation ↩
- Lawsuit FAQ, City of Arvada — the six-city challenge to HB24-1313 and HB24-1304 ↩
- Transit-Oriented Communities Initiative, Arapahoe County ↩
- "No More HOA Restrictions on Public Streets," Altitude Community Law — on C.R.S. 38-33.3-106.5(1)(d.5) ↩
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