With an eye toward keeping rent low, Denver nonprofit buys its first apartment building — with plans for more

As state officials and legislators debate how Colorado can build its way out of the housing crisis, one Denver nonprofit is taking a different approach: preserving what’s already here.

In a bid to curb rent increases and gentrification in east Denver, the East Colfax Community Collective’s housing trust purchased its first property in September. The 23-unit building is right on the border of Denver and Aurora, and it’s the first in what the group’s leaders hope is a series of acquisitions of affordable but rundown apartment buildings.

If they were sold to typical buyers, the properties that the group is targeting would likely be subject to rent increases or further deterioration, harming the high proportion of immigrants and low-income tenants who call them home.

In the short term, the group aims to own 100 units across multiple buildings in the next year. Over the next decade, it plans to use a combination of grants, loans, rental income and other funding sources to acquire 1,000 units, largely located along the East Colfax corridor from which the group takes its name.

The buildings would be overseen by a board of tenants and community members. Rents would be kept affordable to people making below the area’s median income.

“We want to keep these buildings permanently affordable — we don’t want them to be gentrified, basically,” said Carson Bryant, the director of the project that’s formally called the Mixed Income Neighborhood Trust, or MINT.

Denver is the fifth pilot site of the MINT model developed by Trust Neighborhoods, a national nonprofit. The East Colfax Community Collective, in search of another way to prevent locals from being displaced by rising housing costs, settled on the model after surveying its members in 2022.

The group intends to target naturally occurring affordable housing — meaning buildings that are cheap but don’t have legal requirements mandating lower rents. Rent would be kept affordable for residents making between 50% and 80% of the area’s median household income, Bryant said; that range is roughly $56,000 to $89,000 for a family of three.

The group is one of a small number of organizations pursuing the preservation of existing affordable housing. That strategy underpinned a recent two-year fight at the legislature over a new law allowing cities to buy subsidized housing properties before their affordability requirements expire. And some other groups in metro Denver have purchased properties serving lower-income residents to keep them affordable.

A less-common approach

But in a state that’s settled on development and zoning reforms as its prevailing pathway to more housing, preservation still stands as a less-embraced approach to keeping rents low.

The strategy can be more immediately impactful than building new complexes and neighborhoods over a period of years, and it’s a “key focus” of Denver’s Department of Housing Stability, spokesman Derek Woodbury said.

The city is now in early talks with the East Colfax Community Collective to financially support the group’s housing trust, Woodbury said. Last year, the Denver City Council approved a $2.1 million, 30-year loan to another group to help it preserve affordable housing.

Still, 1,000 units in a decade is ambitious for a small nonprofit.

Additional funding has come from grants from groups including Gary Community Ventures and the Colorado Health Foundation, Bryant said. The East Colfax group is also pursuing more grants, loans and fundraising, and as its portfolio of housing properties grows, rental income will help pay for the broader project — as well as for needed repairs to the buildings it hopes to buy.

“We know there’s a tremendous amount of interest from a lot of large foundations and philanthropists in Colorado in making sure the East Colfax corridor is an area that develops without displacement,” said Brendan Greene, the East Colfax group’s co-founder and executive director. “This is something that a lot of the big players in the Colorado landscape are focused on and have said that there’s a priority for.”

That support helped pay for the $3 million purchase of the group’s first property, on Xenia Street one block south of Colfax Avenue.

The 23-unit building, which Bryant suspects is an old hotel, is home to several refugees from Myanmar who speak Karen (pronounced “cur-rin”). It’s L-shaped, with an internal courtyard that has turf roughly in the shape of a swimming pool. Motel-style units open onto walkways and open stairwells. Laundry fluttered from hangers hooked to the building’s walkways on a recent day.

Eh Paw Say, 35, has lived there for 14 years with her husband and a growing family that now includes four children. She came to the U.S. from the Noh Poe refugee camp in Thailand, and she speaks Karen, like a third of the households at the property.

One of the new oversight board’s first tasks was searching for translation options to help tenants communicate with property managers. The group’s new lease document was recently fully translated into Karen, which Bryant announced to the project’s oversight board in November with an accompanying fist-pump.

Say pays $1,400 a month for a two-bedroom apartment. It’s affordable compared to other apartments in the area, she said from a picnic table outside of her first-floor unit. Her husband works for JBS Foods in Greeley. Say is taking time off after giving birth to the couple’s fourth child.

“The last ownership, the difficulty would be, if something broke in the building or even in our units, we’d have to call them and we wouldn’t really ever get a response,” Say said through a translator. “There was always a problem inside the unit — that was the most difficult with them.”

“Healthy, dignified housing conditions”

The group is now looking for its next acquisition.

Bryant walked through several potential options during an oversight board meeting in mid-November that was attended by seven members and two translators (one for Spanish, another for Burmese).

The group is looking for buildings with longstanding problems, like poor conditions or neglectful property management, to fix up and improve. (Those properties are also the easiest to buy, and Bryant declined to discuss the group’s specific next steps to avoid hurting its position in future negotiations.)

“We want people to be living in healthy, dignified housing conditions,” said Htoo Paw, a member of the oversight board, which is formally called the Trust Stewardship Committee. “And also, we want people to know that they can stay in a place as long as they want, or they can stay in a place and not have rent increases.”

Her family also came to the U.S. from a Thai refugee camp, and she grew up around the corner from the Xenia Street building.

Last year, Bryant said, the housing trust briefly considered pursuing CBZ Management’s Nome Street property, which was ordered closed by the city of Aurora in August after years of unresolved code violations. The East Colfax group, which has organized CBZ’s tenants in Aurora, eventually moved on, Bryant said, because of the price and significantly deteriorated conditions at the property.

Several months later, CBZ would become a footnote in the U.S. presidential race after its owners claimed its Aurora properties had been overtaken by a Venezuelan gang.

Ultimately, Bryant and Greene said, the group hopes to become a big-enough player in rental housing to have a broader impact on the market.

That may mean helping to keep marketwide rents down through its own properties’ lower lease rates. Or it could mean that the trust grows large enough that the group has the reach to influence housing policy in the state, building upon the organizing work it has done with tenants along East Colfax.

For now, though, the group’s leaders still plan to keep its headquarters in a church basement.

“You can’t beat the rent,” Bryant said.

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