preservation
Preservation of Colorado’s affordable housing inventory is vital for ensuring Colorado makes progress toward its housing goals. Properties serving low- to moderate-income households are most commonly required to remain affordable for 30 to 40 years. As of December 2024, affordability restrictions on nearly 21,000 affordable rental housing units are set to expire in the next 15 years across Colorado.
What is Affordable Housing Preservation?
- Preventing Loss to Market Rate: Ensuring properties with expiring affordability restrictions remain affordable rather than converting to market-rate housing, which could remove units from Colorado’s affordable housing stock and potentially displace current residents.
- Maintaining Quality: Renovating or repairing aging properties to keep them habitable and sustainable for the long term.
- Supporting Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH): Protecting and stabilizing rental properties that are naturally affordable but lack formal affordability restrictions.
- Partnerships and Funding: Collaborating with owners, developers, local jurisdictions, and housing authorities; and leveraging public and private resources to sustain affordability.
Preservation is critical to addressing Colorado’s housing needs.
Benefits of Preservation
- Energy and resource efficient
- Critical community assets that have received public support are maintained
- Stable rental housing is vital to diverse, equitable, healthy communities.
Preservation at CHFA
CHFA's preservation initiative established a Housing Preservation Network by convening key stakeholders—including U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Colorado Division of Housing (CDOH), Public Housing Agencies (PHAs), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), nonprofits, and developers—to collaboratively address affordable housing challenges. The initiative focuses on developing and maintaining a master database to track affordable housing inventory, identifying at-risk properties, and implementing a coordinated strategy to ensure the long-term affordability of housing units.
Key focus areas include:
- Preserving aging affordable housing
- Protecting affordable inventory
- Mapping Colorado's multifamily inventory
- Outreach to managers and owners of income-restricted properties
Colorado Affordable Housing Database
This map is a resource for external partners and customers to help understand the existing affordable housing stock across Colorado. It reflects properties from CHFA’s portfolio as well as data from external partners including Colorado Division of Housing (DOH), City and County of Denver, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Properties included on this map receive or have received an incentive to ensure their affordability. Examples of incentives could include rent supplements, below-market financing, and/or Housing Tax Credits. The search bar on the map allows for searching by address or by property name.
Because the data in this map comes from several sources, including external partners, the data is updated at staggered intervals. Data from CHFA’s portfolio is updated annually.
Preserving Affordable Housing in Colorado: Join the Effort
Affordable housing preservation is critical to ensuring stability and opportunity for Colorado's communities. Addressing the ongoing challenge of preserving multifamily rental housing requires innovative resources, quick and flexible capital, and strategic collaboration.
At CHFA we offer a range of loan products designed to support the preservation of affordable housing statewide. Select from the options below to learn more.