Colorado
More generations living under one roof as Coloradans battle high housing costs, caregiving needs

Steve Chapman’s full house sometimes feels like it’s bursting at the seams.
The 45-year-old and his wife welcomed Chapman’s mother and stepdad into their Aurora home a few years ago after his mom’s landlord sold the Loveland trailer the couple lived in, leaving them unable to afford Colorado rent on their Social Security income.
“The idea was it’d be temporary to help them get going, but it’s impossible to make it here, it seems,” Chapman said of the living arrangement.
Then the Chapmans’ 23-year-old daughter fell on financial hard times while working and pursuing her education at Arapahoe Community College. She moved into her parents’ home to save on rent. Now their eldest daughter, who lives in Nevada, is planning to move home, too.
Chapman said he feels fortunate he’s able to support his family in a four-bedroom home where everyone has their own space. But it’s a fine line between feeling cozy and crowded.
“Realistically, me and my wife are having to come to terms with the fact that this might be forever,” he said. “I don’t know if I see a viable way for this to change. It’s not like my parents are getting younger.”
Multigenerational households — homes where at least two generations of adults live — are on the rise in Colorado and across the United States. The share of the American population living in multigenerational homes has more than doubled over the past five decades, according to Pew Research, from 7% in 1971 to 18% in 2021.
In Colorado, the share of the population living in multigenerational households is about 3.7%, according to 2020 Census data. That means around 71,300 households in the state feature multiple adult generations living under one roof, up from 51,400 households in 2010 — a nearly 40% increase over the decade.
Experts point to Colorado’s steep housing market, caregiving needs for elders and children, and changing demographics and multicultural traditions as reasons for the rise in families living together.
Colorado boasts four of the most expensive noncoastal housing markets in the nation. In the Denver area, the median price of a single-family home sold in December came in at $613,500, according to data from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors. The median price in 2013 was $290,000, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, amounting to a more than 110% increase in a decade.
Whatever the reason, said Donna Butts, executive director of the nonprofit Generations United, multigenerational households are the way of the future.
“Those who do choose to live together should be valued and respected and, unfortunately, in this country, we look at multigenerational households as having a stigma or that something is wrong, and it’s not,” she said. “Oftentimes, it’s very, very right. Families pool their resources and they live together and support each other. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Realizing the value of family
Thor Kieser, his wife and their 8-year-old daughter live in a two-bedroom home in Golden. Kieser’s father-in-law recently immigrated from the Philippines and can’t afford a place of his own, so Grandpa sleeps on a mattress in the laundry room.
The living arrangement works well for 65-year-old Kieser, he said, because he gets the support he needs.
A few years ago, Kieser was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma, which he overcame. Then, in 2022, he had a serious climbing accident in which he fell and broke 17 bones.
“It was one of those ‘barely survive’ situations,” Kieser said. “But I survived it, and here I am.”
Kieser’s accident resulted in health problems that impacted his mobility and ability to work. He uses a walker to get around and needs assistance getting to and from a slew of medical and physical therapy appointments.
Grandpa takes his granddaughter to elementary school in the morning. He drives Kieser to his oncology appointments, gastroenterologist and physical therapy sessions, and helps around the house while Kieser’s wife works as a certified nursing assistant during the day.
“It works out for us because I need that helping hand,” Kieser said.
Caregiving is a big reason why families are choosing to move in together, Butts said.
The mission of Generations United, the organization Butts leads, centers on improving the lives of kids and elders through intergenerational collaborations, public policies and programs.
During the pandemic, she said, families came together to support each other amid the stresses of a new frontier. Families found that caregiving — whether for children or aging parents — became easier with more people in the home. Incomes could be pooled for more affordable rents. Elderly folks at risk of isolation were around loved ones.
“We need to change our mindset and realize there is great value and importance in families staying together,” Butts said.
“We all help with something”
Many cultures already have adopted this mindset, Butts said.
Multigenerational living is rising partly because the demographic groups comprising most of the recent U.S. population growth — including Asian, Black, Hispanic and foreign-born people — are more likely to live with multiple generations, according to Pew Research.
Diana Cobos Ocaña, 47, lives with her husband, their 12- and 14-year-old children, and her 87-year-old widowed mother in their Morrison home.
Cobos Ocaña grew up in Colombia, where she said it’s not traditional to put elders in nursing homes.
“Besides, she is a great help,” Cobos Ocaña said. “Our kids love having Abuelita” — Spanish for Grandma — “at home, and they are required to speak Spanish to her and teach her English expressions, so that’s another way to preserve our language.”

Thirty percent of the adults in multigenerational households surveyed by Pew say the experience has been very positive while 27% label it as somewhat positive. That’s far more than the 14% who think it’s been somewhat negative or 3% who say it’s been very negative.
Cobos Ocaña and her husband are both teachers. When they go off to work and the kids go to school, she said her mother takes care of the home by cleaning and preparing meals.
“I enjoy the freedom that I feel when I have everybody in charge of something,” Cobos Ocaña said. “Everybody — my mom, my husband, my kids, myself — we all help with something.”

Feed me to the tigers
In 2014, for the first time in more than 130 years, adults between the ages of 18 and 34 were more likely to live in their parents’ home than they were to live with a partner in their own household, according to Pew, which attributed the change to “the dramatic drop in the share of young Americans who are choosing to settle down romantically before age 35.”
Overall, men and women are equally likely to live in a multigenerational house, but men are more likely to do so when they’re under 40 and women are more likely when they’re over 40, researchers found. Among the oldest Americans — 65 and older — 20% of women live in multigenerational households, compared with 15% of men, Pew said.
A third of U.S. adults in multigenerational households cite caregiving as a major reason for their living arrangement, including 25% who noted adult caregiving and 12% who noted child care, according to Pew.
Evelyn Baker joked that she could write a doozy of a self-help book about the trials and tribulations of trying to date as a single mother of teenage boys living with an elderly parent during a global pandemic.
At the height of COVID-19, the 53-year-old Baker searched for a housing situation that would allow her to better care for her octogenarian mother with Parkinson’s disease.
Baker looked into Lennar’s Next Gen homes, which offer a house with a connected suite with a private entrance to “provide all the essentials multigenerational families need to work, learn, create or have a sense of independence,” the company’s website said. Baker was told they were so popular that none were available at the time, but she was persistent and managed to snag one in the Central Park neighborhood that fell out of escrow in 2020.
“We felt really fortunate,” she said.
Baker’s mother grew up in the Philippines, where multigenerational households are more common. But Baker was born in the U.S.
“There’s an interesting multicultural thing happening, where I feel sort of beholden to some of those cultural expectations,” she said.
On one hand, Baker said the living arrangement has been a blessing. Her children have been able to spend time with their grandmother and understand the Filipino elder in a way they wouldn’t have otherwise, she said.
“I feel really lucky to have had this time, too, though it’s really hard,” Baker said.
Baker isn’t able to have much of a social life, she said, because she comes home from work to relieve her mother’s in-home caretaker. Baker does the cooking and cleaning and struggles to find time and space for herself, she said, while managing anticipatory grief over her mother’s declining health.
“Plus, even as a grown-ass woman, when we moved back in together, all of a sudden all those mother/daughter dynamics come flooding back, and it felt like, ‘Oh my God, I’m 15 again,’” Baker said.
Baker recognizes the financial privilege her family has in being able to purchase a home with space for everyone and to be able to afford in-home care.
“It highlights for me how sucky we are as a culture in figuring out how to deal with aging in this society right now,” Baker said. “We’re lucky to have the resources to figure out the best possible solution, but even the best possible solution feels untenable and heartbreaking on a daily basis.”
Recently, Baker discussed the possibility of going on a safari vacation with her children and needing to find care for her mother during the trip.
“She asked me to take her with me and feed her to the tigers,” Baker said. “We started joking about a business model that was like an end-of-life safari where you can go out with a bang.”
Butts noted that American culture needs to adopt policies to make multigenerational living a better, easier experience.
For example, she said oftentimes there can only be one homeowner or married couple on an insurance policy or loan for the household. Sometimes there are zoning issues that prevent or discourage too many people from living together, she said.
“There is this old John Wayne mentality that we have to stand on our own when we oftentimes need each other,” Butts said.
“Forced into this position”
University of Colorado Boulder economics professor Terra McKinnish said Colorado’s housing market is playing a significant role in generations needing to move in together to afford rent.
The Baby Boomer generation has acquired significant housing wealth, McKinnish said, but many localities have restricted housing supply to such a degree that it’s generated “enormous wealth” for mostly older, mostly higher-income homeowners.
“But then the housing costs faced by younger generations and lower- and middle-income and non-homeowners are enormous,” McKinnish said. “That’s really affected the ability of younger generations to establish their own separate households compared to the Baby Boomer generation. It’s become much harder for the younger generations to break into homeownership unless they’re getting financial support from Baby Boomer parents who have housing wealth.”
Juan Manuel Ramirez Anzures would like to move out of his grandparents’ West Colfax home, but he’d be shelling out nearly half of his monthly income as a Denver Public Library employee — at least — to afford rent in the city where he grew up.
Anzures’ parents moved to New Mexico when he was a senior in high school so they could finally know life without a mortgage payment hanging over their heads. Anzures moved in with his grandparents and now, at 23, hasn’t been able to afford to leave, he said.
The Denverite has a front-row seat to condo construction around his grandparents’ home. The view is bittersweet. Anzures said he knows more homes need to be built — Colorado is short more than 100,000 housing units, with nearly half of the state’s housing shortfall concentrated in metro Denver — but is worried about gentrification that pushes out marginalized communities.
Living with his grandparents and a cousin isn’t bad, he said. The family eats dinner together and watches telenovelas — Spanish soap operas. But Anzures wants more privacy and the pride of feeling like he can make it on his own.
“Everything is becoming much more challenging to obtain, even the most bare-bones accommodations for oneself,” Anzures said. “It leads to young people experiencing nihilism and despair — that no matter how much I try and try to do things the right way, I’m just stuck or even going in reverse.”
The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Denver in January is around $1,600, according to Zillow. That’s a more than 50% increase over 10 years ago, when the average Denver rent was about $1,041.
The disparity has meant young adults are staying in their parents’ homes longer.
Chapman and his adult daughter — soon to be joined by her sister back home in Aurora — know the struggle.
Chapman said he sympathizes with his daughters, who aren’t lazy, but a victim of circumstance. He knows it’s hard to live a lifestyle conducive to being a young adult while crashing with parents, he said.
“We lived our crazy 20s already, so I’m not trying to live that again,” Chapman said. “I know that’s hard on her. But it is our home. You kind of have to choose at this point if you’re going to live your crazy 20s or live with your parents. They’re kind of forced into this position.”
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Colorado
They hoped their children’s deaths would bring change. Then a Colorado bill to protect kids online failed

Bereaved parents saw their hopes for change dashed after a bill meant to protect children from sexual predators and drug dealers online died in the Colorado state legislature last month.
Several of those parents had helped shape the bill, including Lori Schott, whose 18-year-old daughter Annalee died by suicide in 2020 after consuming content on TikTok and Instagram about depression, anxiety and suicide.
“When the legislators failed to vote and pushed it off onto some fake calendar date where they’re not even in session, to not even have accountability for where they stand – as a parent, it’s a slap in the face,” said Schott, who identifies as a pro-second amendment Republican. “It’s a slap in the face of my daughter, and to other kids that we’ve lost.”
Had the legislation passed, it would have required social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to investigate and take down accounts engaged in gun or drug sales or in the sexual exploitation or trafficking of minors. It also mandated the creation of direct hotlines to tech company personnel for law enforcement and a 72-hour response window for police requests, a higher burden than under current law.
Additionally, platforms would have had to report on how many minors used their services, how often they did so, for how long and how much those young users engaged with content that violated company policies. Several big tech firms registered official positions on the bill. According to Colorado lobbying disclosures, Meta’s longtime in-state lobby firm, Headwater Strategies, is registered as a proponent for changing the bill. Google and TikTok also hired lobbyists to oppose it.
“We’re just extremely disappointed,” said Kim Osterman, whose 18-year-old son Max died in 2021 after purchasing drugs spiked with fentanyl from a dealer he met on Snapchat. “[Legislators] chose big tech over protecting children and families.”
Protections for users of social media (SB 25-086) passed both chambers before being vetoed on 24 April by governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, who cited the bill’s potential to “erode privacy, freedom and innovation” as reasons for his veto. Colorado’s senate voted to override the veto on 25 April, yet those efforts fell apart on 28 April when the state house opted to delay the vote until after the legislative session ended, effectively blocking an override and keeping the bill alive.
The bill originally passed the senate by a 29-6 vote and the house by a 46-18 margin. On 25 April, the senate voted 29-6 to override Polis’s veto. Lawmakers anticipated that the house would take up the override later that day. At the time, according to those interviewed, there appeared to be enough bipartisan support to successfully overturn his veto.
“It was an easy vote for folks because of what we were voting on: protecting kids from social media companies,” said the senator Lindsey Daugherty, a Democrat and a co-sponsor of the bill. She said she urged house leadership to hold the vote Friday, but they declined: “The speaker knew the governor didn’t want us to do it on Friday, because they knew we would win.”
The parents who advocated for the bill attribute its failure to an unexpected, 11th-hour lobbying campaign by a far-right gun owners’ association in Colorado. Two state legislators as well as seven people involved in the legislative process echoed the parents’ claims.
An abnormal, last-minute campaign disrupts bipartisan consensus
Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO) cast the bill as an instrument of government censorship in texts and emails over the legislation’s provisions against “ghost guns”, untraceable weapons assembled from kits purchased online, which would have been prohibited.
RMGO launched massive social media and email campaigns urging its 200,000 members to contact their legislators to demand they vote against the bill. A source with knowledge of the workings of the Colorado state house described the gun group’s social media and text campaigns, encouraging Republicans voters to contact their legislators to demand opposition to the bill, as incessant.
“[Legislators] were getting countless calls and emails and being yelled at by activists. It was a full-fledged attack. There was a whole campaign saying: ‘This is a government censorship bill,’” they said.
The group’s actions were instrumental in a campaign to deter house Republicans from voting against the veto, resulting in the quashing of the bill, and unexpected from an organization that had been facing funding shortfalls, according to 10 people interviewed who were involved in the design of the bill and legislative process. Sources in the Colorado state house spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal from RMGO.
The house had delayed the vote until 28 April, which allowed RMGO time to launch a campaign against the bill over the weekend. When lawmakers reconvened Monday, the house voted 51-13 to postpone the override until after the legislative session ended – effectively killing the effort.
The gun activists’ mass text message campaign to registered Republican voters asserted the social media bill would constitute an attempt to “compel social media companies to conduct mass surveillance of content posted on their platforms” to search for violations of Colorado’s gun laws, describing the bill as an attack on first and second amendment rights, according to texts seen by the Guardian.
A familiar, aggressive foe
Founded in 1996, RMGO claims to have a membership of more than 200,000 activists. It is recognized as a far-right group that takes a “no-compromise” stance on gun rights. Dudley Brown, its founder and leader, also serves as the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, which positions itself further to the right than the National Rifle Association (NRA). RMGO has mounted criticism against the NRA for being too moderate and politically compromising. Critics have described RMGO as “bullies” and “extremists” because of its combative tactics, which include targeting and smearing Democrats and moderate Republicans. The group did not respond to requests for comment on its legislative efforts.
RMGO is a well-known presence at the Colorado capitol, typically opposing gun-control legislation. Daugherty described its typical campaign tactics as “scary”. She got rid of her X account after being singled out by the group over her work on a bill to ban assault weapons earlier this year.
“When we were running any of the gun bills at the capitol, they put my and some other legislators’ faces on their websites,” she said. A screenshot of a tweet from RMGO showed Daugherty with a red “traitor” stamp on her forehead.
The group’s campaign resulted in the spread of misinformation about the bill’s impact on gun ownership rights, sources involved in the legislative process said.
“The reason I was in support of the bill, and in support of the override, was it has to do with child trafficking and protecting the kids,” said the senator Rod Pelton, a Republican, who voted in favor of the veto override in the senate. “I just didn’t really buy into the whole second amendment argument.”
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The bill had enjoyed the backing of all 23 of Colorado’s district attorneys as well as bipartisan state house support.
RMGO’s late-stage opposition to the social media bill marked a break from its usual playbook. The group generally weighs in on legislation earlier in the process, according to eight sources, including two of the bill’s co-sponsors, Daugherty and the representative Andy Boesenecker.
“They really ramped up their efforts,” Boesenecker said. “It was curious to me that their opposition came in very late and appeared to be very well funded at the end.”
In recent years, RMGO group had been less active due to well-documented money problems that limited its ability to campaign on legislative issues. In a 2024 interview, the group’s leaders stated plainly that it struggled with funding. Daugherty believes RMGO would not have been able to embark on such an apparently costly outreach campaign without a major infusion of cash. A major text campaign like the one launched for SB-86 was beyond their financial capacity, she said. Others in Colorado politics agreed.
“Rocky Mountain Gun Owners have not been important or effective in probably at least four years in the legislature. They’ve had no money, and then all of a sudden they had tons of money, funding their rise back into power,” said Dawn Reinfeld, executive director of Blue Rising Together, a Colorado-based non-profit focused on youth rights.
The campaign made legislators feel threatened, with primary elections in their districts over the weekend, Daugherty said, particularly after accounts on X, formerly Twitter, bombarded the bill’s supporters.
“Folks were worried about being primaried, mostly the Republicans, and that’s kind of what it came down to,” Daugherty said.
Aaron Ping’s 16-year-old son Avery died of an overdose in December after buying what he thought was ecstasy over Snapchat and receiving instead a substance laced with fentanyl. Ping saw the campaign against the bill as an intentional misconstrual of its intent.
“It was looking like the bill was going to pass, until all this misinformation about it taking away people’s gun rights because it addresses people buying illegal shadow guns off the internet,” he said.
Ping gave testimony in support of the bill in February before the first senate vote, alongside other bereaved parents, teens in recovery and a district attorney.
“The bill gave me hope that Avery’s legacy would be to help. So when it didn’t pass, it was pretty soul-crushing,” said Ping.
States take up online child-safety bills as federal lawmakers falter
Several states, including California, Maryland, Vermont, Minnesota, Hawaii, Illinois, New Mexico, South Carolina and Nevada, have introduced legislation aimed at improving online safety for children in the past two years. These efforts have faced strong resistance from the tech industry, including heavy lobbying and lawsuits.
Maryland became the first state to successfully pass a Kids Code bill, signing it into law in May 2024. But the victory may be short-lived: NetChoice, a tech industry coalition representing companies including Meta, Google and Amazon, quickly launched a legal challenge against the measure, which is ongoing.
Meanwhile, in the US federal government, the kids online safety act (Kosa), which had wound its way through the legislature for years, died in February when it failed to pass in the House after years of markups and votes. A revamped version of the bill was reintroduced to Congress on 14 May.
In California, a similar bill known as the age-appropriate design code act, modeled after UK legislation, was blocked in late 2023. A federal judge granted NetChoice a preliminary injunction, citing potential violations of the first amendment, which stopped the law from going into effect.
Colorado
1 dead, 4 injured in Denver crash on I-25

One person was killed and four were injured in a Sunday morning crash on Interstate 25 in Denver, police said.
The Denver Police Department first posted about the two-vehicle crash on northbound I-25 near 20th Street just before 4 a.m. Sunday.
One person died from their injuries at the scene of the crash and paramedics took four to the hospital, three with serious injuries, police said.
Northbound I-25 was temporarily closed Sunday for the crash cleanup and investigation, but all lanes had reopened before 9 a.m., according to the Colorado Department of Transportation.
Information about the cause of the crash was not available Sunday morning.
This is a developing story and may be updated.
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Colorado
Southern Colorado police officer reportedly assaulted, suspect sought

EL PASO COUNTY, Colo. (KKTV) – Police are looking for a suspect that reportedly assaulted an officer on Friday.
The Palmer Lake Police Department said an officer was doing a traffic stop around 11:38 p.m. on Friday near Highway 105 and Peak View Boulevard. During the stop, they said a dark blue sedan with a white rear fender sped by and someone in that car threw a bottle at the officer while yelling obscenities.
Police said that officer got a partial description of the passenger, who was described to be a white man wearing a black shirt. Police said the suspect’s vehicle headed toward the Monument area, near the McDonald’s off Highway 105.
That suspect then reportedly returned to the Palmer Lake area, speeding past the officer again.
Police said they tried to stop the vehicle, but the suspect evaded, heading south on I-25.
If you have any information or footage, you can call the El Paso County non-emergency line at (719) 390-5555. You can also submit an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at (719) 634-STOP.
Copyright 2025 KKTV. All rights reserved.
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