Fort Collins Land Use Code Update

Fort Collins, CO | 2021

Fort Collins has been one of the fastest growing cities in Colorado for years, consistently topping the lists of most livable and family-friendly communities in the country. Yet, strong housing demand has put a strain on their housing market, making it difficult for new supply to keep up, and housing affordability has suffered in recent years.

The City of Fort Collins engaged with Metta Urban Design, Cascadia Partners, Peter Park, and Equity Policy Solutions to implement a significant update to the City’s land use code in order to expand housing options and promote affordability.

Cascadia led economic modeling to inform strategies to encourage affordable housing development. The firm analyzed the connection between recently updated Comprehensive Plan designations and existing zone districts, highlighting inconsistencies between the city’s vision for housing development and its regulations. Cascadia modeled housing prototypes for each of the city’s 15 residential and mixed use zone districts, then worked with staff and stakeholders to perform several rounds of sensitivity testing to identify the most effective code changes to spur housing development. The proposed code changes achieved the following results:

• Increased overall zoned capacity for housing on buildable lands by 53% from about 25,000 units to nearly 40,000 units.
• Increased capacity for deed-restricted affordable housing possible to build with bonus incentives by 194% from about 1,600 units to over 4,600 units. Expanded bonus incentives from 2 to 15 zones.
• Restructured bonus incentive criteria to ensure incentives address the most critical shortages in affordable units.

Cascadia supplemented this work with equity analyses that helped the City to prioritize and target code changes to advance equity goals. These equity analyses include a Neighborhood Gentrification Typology and Access to Opportunity Indices on four dimensions: economic, mobility/accessibility, education, and environment/health.

Following several months of public engagement and updates to code language based on community feedback, City Council passed the housing-related code changes in October of 2023.