Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
290 homes. Barnum. West Colfax. A part of Denver that is gentrifying faster than almost anywhere on the west side. Those homes were promised. Income-restricted. For low- and moderate-income families who are watching their rent climb every single year.
They are not getting built. Not as pledged, anyway.
Here is what is actually happening. On Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026, the city's Department of Housing Stability (that is HOST) walked into the City Council's Community Housing and Planning Committee with a piece of legislation. And what it does, in plain English, is rewrite the promise.
Back in 2018, the city signed an intergovernmental agreement with the Denver Housing Authority. The deal was simple on paper. DHA would deliver 1,300 units of affordable housing. That was the number. That was the commitment.
The new number they want on the books is 959. As in, the units DHA has already finished. So the "goal" quietly becomes the thing that is already done.
You have to understand where this money came from, because that is the part people miss.
The whole thing is called DHA Delivers for Denver. D3 for short. It launched off a 2019 municipal bond of about
And the pitch back then was aggressive. The original D3 vision was going to compress about 10 years of development into roughly five years. Take that bond, leverage it into hundreds of millions in new development. Fast. That was the sell.
So a program built on speed is now asking to extend some deadlines by almost a decade. Read that again. Ten years of work in five became, well, the opposite.
The amendment drops the Westridge development from D3 entirely. Gone from the program.
Westridge Homes redevelopment was the roughly 290 units in that Barnum and West Colfax stretch I mentioned. Low- to moderate-income families. In a neighborhood where, if you have watched the market out there like Hayley and I have, you know exactly what is happening to prices. Old brick ranches getting scraped. Pop-tops. The families who have been there for decades getting priced right out.
Westridge was the counterweight to that. And now it is coming off the list.
To be fair, let me give you their side, because it is not nothing.
Erin Clark is DHA's chief real estate officer. She told the committee that market conditions changed dramatically after the IGA was signed. And she has a point. A lot of the assumptions in that 2018 deal were set before the COVID pandemic. Before this volatile interest-rate environment we have all been living through.
Here is the mechanism, in her words basically. DHA's D3 Direct program absorbed a market shock to finish the Sun Valley pipeline. Absorbing that shock left funding gaps for other projects. Westridge being one of them. And with all the D3 Direct funds now exhausted, Clark said Westridge simply cannot be completed within D3 without more money.
So it is not that they walked away for no reason. They spent the money keeping Sun Valley alive.
And Sun Valley is real. I want to be clear about that.
DHA took the old 333-unit Sun Valley Homes public housing and replaced it with seven new multifamily buildings. That development now serves 965 households earning between 20% and 100% of area median income. Phase 3, a 212-unit building called Flo, for adults 55 and older and people with disabilities, opened in September 2025.
That happened. That is a genuine win. The problem is the money that made it happen was the same money that was supposed to also build Westridge.
The amendment also extends deadlines for DHA's two remaining supportive housing sites. One at 3965 Fox St. The other at 4595 Quebec St.
That Quebec address is worth a second. It is the former Best Western Central Park hotel. 194 units. DHA's board approved buying it back in 2023 for
DHA is not some fly-by-night operation. It is a quasi-municipal corporation founded in 1938, headquartered at 1035 Osage St., run by CEO Joaquín Cintrón Vega. Portfolio of more than 13,000 units serving over 31,100 people. These folks build housing. That is what they do.
But here is the thing. Denver voters and Denver property owners put money into a program on a specific promise. 1,300 homes. Fast. And the fix on the table is to lower the promise to match what got done, extend the clock by nearly a decade, and drop the 290 homes in the neighborhood that arguably needed them most.
The committee is looking at it. Whether they wave it through or make DHA find the money for Westridge somewhere else, that is the fight to watch.
And keep an eye on Barnum while you do. Because those 290 units are not just a line item. They were the last affordable thing standing in a neighborhood that is changing whether anyone builds them or not.