State zoning preemption tested as Colorado lot bills fail

After years of pushing housing affordability reforms, Colorado legislators hit a wall — crashing up against the limits of how much zoning control they could strip from local governments.

This year, they sought to require most cities to allow single-family homes on lots as small as 2,000 square feet, about a third the size of typical lots in many locales. The bill passed the state’s House but stalled in the Senate in late April. A similar bill – requiring cities to allow owners to split lots – also passed the House before meeting the same fate.

Colorado has emerged as a national model for state-level zoning reform that pre-empts local governments.

That has come with a price. Home rule cities sued Democratic Gov. Jared Polis over an executive order threatening to cut them off from $280 million in grants, loans and tax credits if they did not comply with major housing reforms he signed into law two years ago.

Colorado’s struggle illustrates a defining feature of the nation’s housing debate: Party affiliation provides no immunity from political blowback.

A Republican-controlled Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 15 last year, capping the minimum lot size cities can require at 3,000 square feet, and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed it into law in June 2025. Yet even in Texas, the bill drew fierce opposition from local governments. It’s the same local-control fights playing out in Colorado.

Seeking smaller lots for smaller, more affordable homes

Sen. Matt Ball, the bill’s Senate sponsor, opened an April 23 committee hearing on House Bill 1114 by acknowledging the need for lot-size reduction. He then quickly delivered the bill’s death sentence.

“I do want to say at the outset that we will hear witness testimony on this bill, and then I will be postponing it indefinitely,” Ball said.

A week later, Ball delivered the same message for the lot-split bill at the same Senate committee meeting, but without witness testimony. The arguments for smaller homes and density had already been made.

Knowing the HB 1114 was dead, proponents and opponents proceeded with testimony.

“If we used 2,000 as kind of a pre-bubble benchmark for home ownership rate and maintained it, we’d have 62,000 more owner-occupied units today,” Scott Cox, a Colorado-based home building consultant and a contributor to The Builder’s Daily, told the committee.

Cox noted that much of the legislative effort on housing — at both the local and state levels — targets rental rather than owner-occupied housing. “If we do not find ways to allow more single-family housing, we are guaranteed that those prices will continue to rise faster than the majority of the population’s ability to pay for it,” Cox said. “Detached homes will become, simply become a luxury good.”

Tim Lightly, CEO of the Colorado Association of Home Builders, noted that HB 1114 does not mandate smaller homes or smaller lots. “This represents one of the first proposals in a very long time to be truly free market oriented,” Lightly said. “It says we’re going to legalize a greater variety of housing and let the market determine where it works.”

Arguments for and against

Nationally, smaller homes draw support as a path to ownership for first-time buyers and empty nesters downsizing. AARP has backed smaller housing in states across the country for seniors choosing to age in place.

Echoing that theme, Kip Kolkmeier, a retired land-use attorney and former chair of the Lakewood Planning Commission, told the committee that he and his wife had to leave the city because smaller homes to downsize into simply did not exist. Kolkmeier said smaller lots reduce land costs — one of the biggest factors in home prices.

“People are clamoring for this,” he said. “This is what your constituents want.”

Not all municipalities agreed. City leaders in Lakewood, a Denver suburb, voted in new zoning maps for higher density and smaller homes last October, but voters repealed them in early April. Voters in several other municipalities across the state also rejected higher density in referendums in November.

Fear that density would destroy established neighborhoods carried the day. Cities repeated objections familiar to every statehouse, arguing that preemption ignores local needs and strips away planning authority.

“Cities are cool with top-down mandates as long as they’re the top, but the most local decision maker is the landowner,” Tim Pegg, with YIMBY North Metro, said in testimony. “I’m asking the state to protect landowners from overzealous local regulation that artificially drives up the cost of homes and lowers people’s quality of life.”