Every Community Needs a Full Deck of Housing
Affordable housing isn’t just a big-city burden. It’s a community infrastructure problem — and the places that get it wrong are already paying for it.
There’s a comfortable myth running through prosperous suburbs and small towns across Colorado: that the housing affordability crisis is someone else’s problem. A Denver problem. An urban problem. The kind of thing that happens in places with tent cities and transit agencies, not in communities with good schools, strong home values, and thriving downtowns.
That myth is wrong. And it’s costing communities — including mine — more than most people realize.
The Pattern Repeats Across the Front Range
I’ve spent my career working in land use policy, tax incentives, and real estate development and transactions across the Colorado Front Range — multifamily, land, commercial, and residential. I’ve worked in communities ranging from Colorado Springs to Castle Rock to the rural Eastern Plains. The through-line in almost every market, at every price point, is the same: when a community fails to plan for housing across the full income spectrum, it quietly starts losing the people who make it run.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. But steadily — in ways that show up in your kids’ classrooms, your restaurant wait times, your childcare waitlist, and your neighbor’s decision to finally move somewhere more affordable.
This is the housing spectrum problem. And it belongs to every community, not just the ones making the news.
Castle Rock: A Case Study in Prosperity and Displacement
I live and work in Castle Rock, Colorado — one of the fastest-growing communities on the Front Range and, by most measures, a success story. The median household income here exceeds $145,000. New home construction is averaging around the $800,000 mark. A one-bedroom apartment runs nearly $2,000 a month. Parks, trails, top-rated schools, a thriving downtown. We land on “Best Places to Live” lists regularly.
And yet: a preschool teacher, a firefighter, a restaurant manager, a home health aide — none of them can realistically afford to live here.
A local daycare owner put it plainly when I asked her about staffing: “They commute in from Aurora. It’s the only place they can afford.”
Aurora — a city of nearly 400,000 people and a major employment hub in its own right — is where qualified, committed early childhood educators have to go to find housing they can afford on a teacher’s wage. The average one-bedroom in Aurora runs roughly $500 a month less than in Castle Rock. That gap translates to a 45-minute commute each way, compounding fatigue, eroding retention, and ultimately pushing people out of the profession entirely. One of my son’s teachers left the field a few years ago — not for a better teaching job, but for retail work closer to home. The pay was roughly the same, and the commute was a fraction of the drive. Let that sink in.
This isn’t an edge case. It’s a structural failure built into the housing economics of communities like ours.
What Housing Spectrum Thinking Actually Means
Housing spectrum thinking is a straightforward idea: every community, regardless of its size, wealth, or market positioning, needs to intentionally plan for housing that serves people across the full range of incomes and life stages.
That means more than building luxury product at the top and assembling a handful of subsidized units at the bottom. It means planning — through zoning, incentives, land use policy, and partnership with developers — for the full range in between:
Deeply affordable and supportive housing for residents experiencing instability, aging out of the workforce, or living with disabilities.
Entry-level workforce rentals — studios and one-bedrooms priced within reach of service sector workers, first responders, teachers, and early-career professionals.
Attainable homeownership — townhomes, condos, and smaller single-family homes that give moderate-income households a realistic path to building equity.
Move-up and mid-market product — the category most communities build reasonably well, though often to the exclusion of everything below it.
Attainable senior housing — for long-term residents who’ve raised families in a community and shouldn’t have to leave it to find something manageable to age in.
Luxury and high-end product — which contributes meaningfully to the property and sales tax base and serves high-income households, but cannot carry the full weight of a community’s housing needs on its own.
Most Front Range communities are heavily overbuilt at the top and significantly undersupplied in the middle. That middle tier — workforce rentals, starter condos, attainable townhomes — is exactly where the people who keep a community functioning need to live. And it’s where supply has most consistently collapsed over the past decade.
This Is an Infrastructure Argument, Not a Charity Argument
The most durable case for housing spectrum thinking isn’t moral — it’s economic.
Communities that price out their service workers create operational fragility in every business that depends on them. Communities that price out young families hollow out school enrollment and eventually erode their tax base. Communities that price out seniors on fixed incomes lose decades of institutional knowledge, civic participation, and volunteer capacity.
We build roads and water systems because we understand that infrastructure supports growth. Housing is the same kind of investment. A community that only plans for its highest-income residents isn’t just failing the people it displaces — it’s making a slow, structural bet against its own future resilience.
The places that get this right will be stronger, more economically competitive, and more livable in 20 years. The ones that don’t will wonder why the people who keep the lights on keep moving somewhere else.
I explore these ideas in depth — with data, local examples, and the policy and market forces driving them — in my Substack, Building Blocks.
Read the full essay → The Case for Housing Spectrum Thinking
Read the Q1 2026 Colorado Front Range Housing Market Pulse Report
Sarah Humbargar is a licensed real estate broker and REALTOR with Shift Real Estate, based in Castle Rock, CO. Her practice spans the building blocks of great neighborhoods: home buying and selling, multifamily investment sales, land for housing development, and neighborhood serving retail across the Colorado Front Range.