Gustavo Navarrete Hernández spends his working days installing insulation in Denver’s luxury homes before catching a bus back to his modest apartment off South Federal Boulevard, where he and his family have faced eviction after falling behind on rent.

His three youngest children sleep huddled for warmth in the living room surrounded by space heaters after an ongoing battle with their landlord to fix a broken heater.

“I have worked on the nicest apartments, and it makes me sad that I cannot afford one,” Navarrete Hernández said. “I work hard, and I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Navarrete Hernández, his pregnant wife and their children sought refuge in Denver a decade ago, fleeing a homeless shelter in the Bay Area where they had lived when unable to keep up with increasing rent. They were headed to Florida, where they have family, but stopped in Denver so Navarrete Hernández could earn enough money for the rest of the journey. They never left.

Now, the family of six is once again staring down the possibility of life on the streets as they frantically search for housing after being evicted from a Denver apartment for the second time in 10 years. “I feel bad because I know other people are in this situation,”  the 37-year-old said.

Nvarette Hernández is representative of the rising number of Denverites facing eviction as rent and home prices have exploded. Even some residents making a decent living told The Denver Post they’re living paycheck to paycheck trying to keep up with housing costs. Still others who have the means to make it work in Denver say they’re packing it up and moving elsewhere because the amount they’re paying to live here doesn’t feel worth it anymore.

The anecdotes are reflective of researched data, said Phyllis Resnick, executive director and lead economist with Colorado State University’s Colorado Futures Center, which researches economic, fiscal and public policy issues in the state.

In January, Denver County eviction filings hit a four-year high at 1,101 for the month, doubling the total number of evictions in January 2022, according to the Community Economic Defense Project’s data. (The federal pandemic moratorium on evictions ended in September 2021.)

In the past 12 years, Denver rents have more than doubled — from a median of $853 a month in July 2011 to $1,783 a month late last year. The cost of a typical Denver home rose 165% during that same time frame, with the median cost of a single-family home sold in January at $590,000, and $430,000 for a condo or townhome, according to the Colorado Association of Realtors.

Meanwhile, wages have not kept up.

“The cost of housing has grown at a pace that has far outstripped earnings growth, and so there’s for sure evidence just from economic data that things are getting more difficult in terms of affordability,” Resnick said.

Between August 2015 and August 2022, the average hourly wage in Colorado increased 27%, rising to $34.71 from $27, according to housing affordability research from Colorado’s Common Sense Institute. However, the number of hours of work needed to cover Colorado’s median mortgage payment increased 89% in that same time frame, rising to 75 hours from 40 hours, the institute’s research showed.

Fewer people are moving to Colorado than they have in decades, according to the Colorado State Demography Office. Still, more people are coming to Colorado than leaving, but the state’s net migration — the difference between those two numbers — dropped significantly in 2021, to 15,477. It was Colorado’s weakest net migration number since about 2005, the state found.

The Colorado Futures Center has been tracking migration and has found “increasing churn” in and out of Denver, particularly in areas of the city especially vulnerable to economic pressures, said Jennifer Newcomer, the organization’s research director.

“This region has enjoyed the benefits that come from fairly robust net in-migration, and those numbers seem to be slowing,” Resnick said. “We may not be that exploding-growth city we were for the last 30 years. That may move on and we become more of a steady state of growth.

“People are going to start making decisions with their feet.”

The Post interviewed people who already have been or are on the verge of being priced out of Denver. Some moved to the Mile High City with dreams of a fun, active lifestyle in a recreational powerhouse only to be hampered by ever-rising housing costs that forced them to leave Colorado. Others born and raised in Denver said they could no longer afford to live in the community that raised them and were pushed to the outskirts.

Melissa Mejía serves as the director of state and local policy at the Community Economic Defense Project, which helps support Coloradans facing evictions. She said that, of the people she grew up with on Denver’s Northside, none have been able to afford to buy a house in the neighborhood.

“Most people who grew up here do not live here anymore,” Mejía said

Born and raised but can’t afford to buy

While some of Nate Mitchell’s classmates at Denver’s George Washington High School aspired to leave Colorado for greener pastures, Mitchell, now 25, always dreamed of putting down roots in the city he loved. He wanted to grow old next to his family in a house of his own.

Once he landed a job as a certified arborist and started socking money away, Mitchell thought he and his dog trainer wife were ready to make that dream a reality.

Denver apartment rent kept increasing, Mitchell said, with a $200 per month spike one year and $300 the next.

“It felt like we were not in control of the way we could budget our living situation,” Mitchell said. “Instead of throwing money into rent, we decided to try to build equity.”

The couple house-hunted for about two years during the pandemic, searching for a Denver place in the $350,000 range.

“It became pretty clear pretty fast in the process that a home at that price wasn’t an option for us,” Mitchell said. “I never wanted a huge house. I just wanted to live in the area I grew up in, and I found out I need to get paid a lot more to do that.”

Mitchell, who earns about $70,000 annually, was teased by his boss and coworkers for believing he could afford to live in Denver.

None of them can, he said.

“I just thought it was interesting, no one in my workplace makes enough to live in Denver, but every day we work in Denver,” Mitchell said.

Resnick, with the Colorado Futures Center, said it’s important to pay attention to whether a city’s workers can afford to live where they labor.

“There’s a limit to having a well-functioning economy if folks through the entire profile of what you need for a healthy labor market can’t afford to live in a region,” she said. “If we don’t have enough folks to work in the service jobs we rely on every day, at some point, things start to become a challenge.”

The arborist and his wife settled on a $350,000 townhouse in Aurora.

While not far from Denver proper, the message Mitchell received from his homebuying experience was that he wasn’t the target audience for the city where he was born and raised. It was a hard pill for Mitchell to swallow.

“I hold out hope we can move back one day,” Mitchell said.

Ditching the mountains for the beach

When Andi Whiskey moved to Denver three years ago, she thought it seemed fairly affordable.

The now-34-year-old signed a lease on a two-bedroom, two-bath City Park apartment in 2020 for $1,350 a month, which she split with her boyfriend.

Whiskey hoped she’d found somewhere more inexpensive than her California motherland. As her hopes rose, so, too, did her rent.

Now the same City Park apartment is about to cost Whiskey $2,000 a month in the upcoming lease cycle — an almost 50% increase in a couple of years.

“And it wasn’t even that nice,” Whiskey said. “I said, ‘No thank you.’”

Unable to stomach the rent hike, Whiskey priced out other states where she and her boyfriend could move on their $170,000 combined household income.

For fun, Whiskey looked up apartments in Long Beach, California, where she went to school — and was shocked to see she wasn’t paying too far off from that in Denver.

“It just doesn’t feel worth it in Denver,” Whiskey said. “It’s cool here, and I like it, but in California, I’m OK with paying a premium because it’s perfect weather and the beach is there.”

Come April, Whiskey and her beau are packing up and heading west to Long Beach, where they found a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment two blocks from the beach at $2,330 a month. Long Beach median rent is listed at $2,120, according to Zillow.

In Denver, Whiskey, a small business owner, also paid $3,330 a month to rent a 2,100-square-foot warehouse for her digital marketing agency. In Long Beach, Whiskey will pay $3,500 a month for a larger warehouse.

Whiskey has lived in a few different locales now, from California to Portland, Oregon, to Nashville, Tennessee, and said Denver has been the most difficult place to be a business owner. Trying to get a tax question answered by local government, she said, was a nightmare here.

“It feels like the city doesn’t care here, which feels silly to say, but I just can’t justify the price for what I was getting,” Whiskey said.

Paying more for less

Shane Fetch left Denver to return to North Dakota three weeks ago.

The 30-year-old North Dakotan left home for the 5280 seven years ago in pursuit of job opportunities and city life.

Fetch found work in Denver as an electrician, eventually transitioning into an office role. When he first arrived, Fetch lived in a townhouse with a roommate, each paying $500 a month.

He jammed at concerts, soaked up Rockies games, cheered the Nuggets on, ate at trendy restaurants and went out on the town, enjoying his youth and happy with his decision to move somewhere more bustling.

Climbing rents, and the moving costs when he could no longer afford apartments, led to the slow decline of his entertaining lifestyle.

Soon, Fetch found himself in an apartment with a roommate paying more than $1,500 per month and, not long after that, nearly $1,800. As the rents climbed, Fetch said the apartments he could afford — he lived in six different rentals — grew smaller and featured fewer amenities and more problems.

“The quality of apartments declined so much as I kept paying more and more,” Fetch said. “The last apartment I was in had mold, the toilet was constantly broken, the hot water heater didn’t work, the washer and dryer was 20 years old and the size of the apartment was 40% less than what I had when I first got here. There was a pool, but I bet you’d get a staph infection just from walking by it.”

Fetch said he was making about $70,000 and living paycheck to paycheck to keep up with rent. He couldn’t afford to have fun anymore.

“If I couldn’t do the things I moved to Denver for, why was I still in Denver?” Fetch said.

Now, Fetch is paying $500 a month sharing a spacious two-bedroom, two-bathroom home and a three-car garage with a roommate in Bismarck, North Dakota, while he looks for his own place.

In Denver, Fetch said he was paying $300 a month for his car insurance, which is now $200 a month cheaper. What Fetch lost in fun he’s making up in funds.

“North Dakota is not exactly a central hub of recreation and activities,” he said. “I enjoyed my time in Denver and took advantage of it, but it just didn’t make sense for me anymore.”

Getting the boot

The first time Gustavo Navarrete Hernández and his family were evicted in Denver, they had fallen behind on rent payments during the early stages of the pandemic.

Navarrete Hernández was working construction at Greeley’s Weld County Jail, where a coronavirus outbreak was running rampant. Due to his constant exposure to COVID-19 at his workplace, Navarrete Hernández was placed under frequent quarantine protocols, he said, which left him missing out on work and pay.

The family used up their savings trying to make ends meet, he said, but were eventually evicted from their one-bedroom apartment when they couldn’t make rent.

Then, Navarrete Hernández, his wife, their three young children and his adult stepson moved into a two-bedroom apartment off South Federal. Rent was advertised as $1,350 a month, but came out closer to $1,600 with added fees like utilities and sewage.

Things were going well, Navarrete Hernández said. Sure, the building was loud, the heat was continuously broken and his children complained about the weed smoke that drifted into the windows from outside, but they chalked that up to apartment living and were grateful to have a roof over their heads.

That is, until the end of last year, when the company Navarrete Hernández works for began reducing everyone’s hours and money got tight.

The father of four went from working 50 hours a week and bringing home around $800 weekly to only working a couple days a week making $100, Navarrete Hernández said.

When they fell behind on rent and faced eviction, Navarrete Hernández went to court and met with a representative of the Community Economic Defense Project, which provides Colorado renters with rapid rent payment aid, eviction legal defense and rehousing services.

The organization provided the money needed to catch up on rent, but Navarrete Hernández’s landlord still said the family had to go.

The family has until the end of May to find a new place to live. Navarrete Hernández’s hours are back to normal, he said, so he’s saving as much money as possible.

“I’m stressed out because after going through this situation, I’m sure my credit is going to be hurt and if I need to get references and all that stuff, I’m sure my references from these apartments aren’t going to be good even though I feel like I haven’t done anything bad,” Navarrete Hernández said.

The insulation installer doesn’t know how he is going to show a landlord that he earns three times the cost of rent. A 2022 study found that half of all Colorado renters are cost-burdened, meaning they spend 30% or more of their income on housing costs.

Navarrete Hernández worries his family is going to end up on the street again.

“When people face these evictions and have nowhere else to go, the alternative is often they end up experiencing homelessness,” said Mejía, director of the Community Economic Defense Project.

Sometimes families will live in their car, but the Navarrete Hernández household hasn’t been able to save up enough to buy one.

The family is willing to move anywhere that will be better for their children, Navarrete Hernández said. At this point, they’re just grateful to have each other, he said.

“We’ve already lost a ton of the diversity and communities of color in Denver,” Mejía said. “They’ve been forced out and it’s pretty clear they have gone to nearby suburbs in a lot of cases, which is an indicator that it was not by choice.”

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