BY CATHERINE DUARTE

Meeting Our Region’s Housing Needs Requires Housing Justice 

Introducing a 3-part series 

Last November, the City of Colorado Springs and El Paso County released the 2025 Regional Housing Needs Assessment (HNA) and the numbers are sobering. Our region lacks over 27,000 housing units to meet the current need across the income spectrum and is slated to fall short by 60,000 units in 2035 if we continue building at the same pace. The over 300 pages of data presented in the 2025 Regional Housing Needs Assessment do not just indicate a shortage of supply, but a crisis of housing justice, as well.  

Housing justice is about ensuring the ability, safety, and dignity of all people to afford, find, and keep housing.  Housing justice is structural. It is found in our laws, ordinances, plans, budgets, policies, and practices. Housing justice is zoning that welcomes housing types for all people. It is preventing unjust evictions and addressing unlivable conditions. Housing justice is being able to find and afford an accessible home if you have a disability. It is ensuring that neighborhood reinvestment benefits residents of all incomes.   

Housing justice also embodies the core principles of Catholic Social Teaching—human dignity, solidarity, and subsidiarity—which translates our faith to action, calling not just for charity but for justice.  Housing, which the Catholic Church recognizes as a human right, is denied from too many in an era of unprecedented wealth and abundance.  

Creating more housing is the bare minimum to begin addressing the real needs in our region. Housing justice demands that we be clear-eyed about how we build it, where we build it, how we fund it, how we engage with those most affected, and for whom we are building. These details are where housing justice lives. When we plan with the most vulnerable and for the common good, we build a safer city for all. 

In anticipation of the City and County kicking off the action plan to close the housing gap, I will be sharing a three-part series on the housing justice crisis we face and how we might create greater access, as well as dignity and opportunity.  

As we look for solutions, we must acknowledge that our current affordable housing tools are not enough to close the gap and that the solution is not simply more supply, as critical as that is.  

How do we know this? In 2015, the City of Colorado Springs and El Paso County released a regional housing needs report that identified a shortage of over 19,800 housing units affordable to low- to middle-income populations. In response, the City maximized their federal- and state-funded tools to support the development of 780 affordable units and the rehabilitation of 656 units from 2016 through 2024 – a valiant effort, though more than 19,000 units short of the need identified in 2015. 

This shows us that our region’s current affordable housing tools will not dig us out of this housing deficit.  We also see from cities like Denver and Austin, where rapid and substantial development drove rents down but did not change the percentage of cost burdened households, that supply alone does not deliver affordability, especially for those who need it most. Affordability is achieved through intentional and robust policies, programs, wages, and funding that center justice and human dignity in their design.  

In this series, I’ll share my takeaways from the 2025 HNA showing various dimensions of the housing justice crisis and ways to ensure the dignity and safety of all our neighbors. 

Part 1. PEOPLE: Prioritizing the most vulnerable  

Part 2. PLACES: Reinvesting without displacing 

Part 3. COMPASSION: Becoming a more welcoming community 

The HNA stresses the importance of partnerships in meeting our region’s housing goals. As the City prepares an action plan to address the needs of the 2025 HNA, you can count on Catholic Charities of Central Colorado as a partner. In 2025, we took two significant steps to seek and cultivate housing justice: We opened Hunt Family Housing in the Hillside neighborhood: 24 transitional apartments in a beautiful, safe, and historic neighborhood to help families exit homelessness and find stability. We also adopted a strategic plan to build and preserve 500 units of affordable housing across the diocese. We are excited to do this work and bring other neighbors and partners on board.  

This HNA is a call to action for us all. It is not enough to have the data. We must act. Speaking about structural poverty and inequality, Pope Leo XIV warns of the personal and social costs of inaction: “A genuine form of alienation is present when we limit ourselves to theoretical excuses instead of seeking to resolve the concrete problems of those who suffer.” 

We also must be bold in our actions and recognize that we all have a part to play in solving for affordability. In this time of inconsistent federal support, we must reimagine and rebuild our local toolbox and resources for residents seeking safe and affordable housing and the organizations committed to building it. 

Catherine Duarte is the Sr Vice President of Housing Development at Catholic Charities of Central Colorado.