Brian Eason’s piece in The Colorado Sun is about the latest housing brainwave from Democrats under the Gold Dome: if homes are too expensive, just make the lots smaller and order local governments to go along with it. The article explains that House Bill 1308 would require many local governments to let property owners split one residential lot into two, and House Bill 1114 would bar most cities from requiring lots larger than 2,000 square feet for a house. That is the “affordability” plan. Shrink the lot. Override local control. Call it progress.
Eason frames the effort as the next phase of the state’s housing push under Governor Polis, after earlier efforts focused on apartments, townhomes, duplexes, and other higher-density housing. Now the target is the single-family home itself. The theory is simple enough: smaller lots mean less land cost and therefore cheaper homes. But the article also makes plain what the ruling class keeps saying out loud now without a hint of embarrassment: when local voters and local governments do not produce the outcome Democrats want, the state should step in and make the call for them.
And that is the real story here. Not housing. Not affordability. Not “innovation.” Arrogance. The kind that assumes a legislator in Denver understands your neighborhood, your infrastructure, your water capacity, your sewer lines, your traffic flow, your lot pattern, your public safety needs, and your local electorate better than the people who actually live there and the officials they elected. That is not housing policy. That is political vanity with a zoning map.
The Bullet Point Brief
- Democrats have now moved from pushing apartments and townhomes to shrinking the single-family home itself. Because apparently the party that cannot make eggs cheaper has decided it can redesign your subdivision.
- House Bill 1308 would require many local governments to allow residential lots to be split in two, so two single-family homes could be built where one used to sit. Nothing says “local control” like the state legislature ordering local governments around with a smile.
- House Bill 1114 would ban most cities from requiring lots larger than 2,000 square feet to build a house. Two thousand square feet. That is not a lot. That is a postage stamp with a mortgage.
- The article quotes Democrats arguing that if local control were the solution, “we should have found it by now.” There it is. The quiet part, spoken right into the microphone. If voters and local governments refuse to comply with the preferred ideology, then democracy becomes a problem to be solved.
- Even the article admits the bills are no silver bullet. At best, advocates say they may produce a slow trickle of new housing over time. So the state is blowing up local zoning authority, neighborhood planning, and infrastructure assumptions for something that even supporters admit is not going to solve the problem. Outstanding.
My Bottom Line
The arrogance here is just breathtaking. Democrats under the Gold Dome still believe they can legislate affordability into existence. They cannot. They have been proving that for years. Government does not make housing cheaper by issuing mandates, overriding local governments, and pretending market forces will politely salute and follow orders. What government does make is red tape, distortion, delay, compliance costs, and bad incentives. Then it acts shocked when prices keep rising.
And this is where the whole thing gets even dumber. Subdivisions were designed around actual infrastructure assumptions. Water. Sewer. Electric. Roads. Drainage. Parking. Public safety. School impact. All of it. Lot size and number of homes were not pulled out of a hat by some suburban caveman trying to oppress the future. They were part of an integrated plan. When the state barges in and says, “Actually, that neighborhood should now hold more units on smaller lots,” it is not magically creating affordability. It is loading more pressure onto systems that were built for something else.
That is how neighborhoods begin to fail. Not all at once. Slowly. A little more strain here. A little more congestion there. A little more demand on water and sewer. A little less space, a little less privacy, a little less predictability, and eventually a lot less confidence that anybody in charge actually respects the people who bought into the neighborhood in the first place. But Democrats do not care, because in their minds the “Great Suburban Normie” is living too large and wanting the wrong things. Good news, citizen: the glorious state has arrived to inform you what you really need.
And let us be honest about the politics of this article. When voters in Lakewood or elsewhere reject density schemes, Democrats and their allies do not stop and wonder whether the public might have a point. No, the problem is “fear,” “misinformation,” or not enough state control. That is always the move. The narrative must survive, even when the facts and the voters do not cooperate. But the truth is simpler than all this. If you want housing to become more affordable, stop piling on regulatory burdens, stop mandating markets, stop treating local governments like branch offices of the legislature, and stop pretending you can centrally plan what people ought to want in a home. Colorado families do not need another sermon from Denver. They need government to get out of the way.
Source: The Colorado Sun
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