Colorado Sun dropped a heavy one this week with a deep dive into why Colorado teachers can’t afford to live in the communities they serve. The piece was penned by Erica Breunlin and backed by research from the Keystone Policy Center. Spoiler: it’s not just about low salaries – it’s about how high the freaking prices have gotten, thanks, in part, to regulatory red tape that would make Kafka cringe.
The Bullet Point Brief
- Colorado teachers are being priced out of their own classrooms, literally, and not just because of bad pay.
- The real villain here? Sky-high costs of land, materials, interest rates – and a tangle of government regs tighter than an HOA rulebook.
- Developers are caught in bureaucratic hell when trying to build affordable housing. Zoning laws are more rigid than Aunt Marge’s fruitcake.
- School districts are now playing landlord just to keep staff from fleeing the state or commuting three hours like pioneers on I-25.
- Everyone agrees on the problem, but the solution isn’t sweetheart teacher raises, it’s slashing government control and letting builders BUILD.
My Bottom Line
Listen, I love our teachers. They’re out there wrangling tiny chaos goblins all day while parents manufacture outrage over book titles (Now, don’t get me started on the teacher’s union – the CEA is demonic, but that’s another article). They deserve respect… and yeah, probably better pay. But let’s get one thing straight: Colorado’s housing crisis ain’t just about wages, it’s about price tags inflated by decades of bureaucratic nonsense and red-tape strangulation that would choke an anaconda.
Want to fix it? Don’t look to some half-baked government “task force” or another taxpayer-funded initiative that’ll spend six figures figuring out there’s no money left. Start by cutting the mountain of regulations making it impossible to build anything that doesn’t look like Aspen Barbie’s ski chalet. Get zoning reform done yesterday. Make land developable again. Interrogate why inputs cost so damn much – hint: it ain’t greed, it’s scaffolding made of city permits, water tap fees, litigation threats, and NIMBY suburbanites weaponizing city councils like HOA mercenaries.
We don’t need more regulation; we need REGULATION REMOVAL SURGERY. You want cheaper homes for people like teachers? Then quit shouting at developers in public meetings like they’re villains in a Hallmark Christmas movie and start working with them like grown adults who actually give a damn about housing people.
Whatever you do, stop pretending big government has ever fixed anything other than its own PR crisis. Colorado is high desert, not fantasyland, and if we want real solutions for housing affordability, we need less bureaucracy and way more bulldozers.
