On a sunny morning two years ago, a group of state officials stood in the mountains of northwestern Colorado in front of a handful of large metal crates. With a small crowd watching them, the officials began to unlatch the crate doors one by one. Out of each came a gray wolf — arguably the nation’s most controversial endangered species.
Colorado
What’s Working: Colorado builders stick with rate incentives to attract new-home buyers
Traffic picked up this year at the Oakwood Homes sales office for Banning Lewis Ranch, where new homes in the northern Colorado Springs neighborhood start in the mid-$300,000s.
But business is nowhere near pre-pandemic levels or even during the pandemic, when home buying was in a frenzy, Lauren Hanshaw, a new-home counselor at the office, said on a quiet weekend morning last month. She’s comparing it with 2023, which she called “my worst year in 10 years.”
“Traffic is a little bit more pointed. You don’t have as many lookie-loos versus people who are in need of a home,” Hanshaw said. “This year, we’re seeing a little bit more of a calmness because people understand that there’s still a demand, a need for homes and that rates are cyclical. They’ll be able to change that status in a couple years if they refinance their home.”
Since mortgage rates have barely budged even with two interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve since September, Hanshaw’s belief is that shoppers are more educated. They know they won’t walk out the door with a monthly payment of under $1,800 or $2,000 — a very doable feat when rates were below 4% and even 5% at the Banning Lewis Ranch price point. On Thursday, the average mortgage rate for a traditional, fixed-rate 30-year loan was 6.98%, according to Mortgage News Daily, up from 6.62% a month ago and down from 7.41% a year ago.
But builders like Oakwood are doing what they can to get potential buyers in the door with rate-reduction incentives. Nearby Richmond American Homes is touting 3.999% rates (which increases to 5.999% in year three). Baessler Homes, which builds in northern Colorado, has a deal to get payments to “as low as $1,977” in the first year, and is essentially offering up to $20,000 in concessions (housing payments increase after year one to $2,578 in year four, or a 5.99% rate).
Meanwhile Oakwood, which started the year with some 4.99% offers, now has a 2.99% offer on select houses in Colorado Springs and a 3.99% promo in Denver. The builder is also working with the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority to provide down-payment assistance of up to $25,000, plus below-market rate loans. Most of the incentives, though, are only available to certain buyers and for certain houses.
It’s been working, especially after the pullback in 2023, said Michael Fraley, Oakwood Homes’ chief growth officer.
“When we rolled into 2024, we really started to do what we call builder forwards that were allowing us to get the rates down,” Fraley said. “As we started to introduce these rates, the 4.99%, and in some instances we got down to 4.25%, that’s when we saw many customers. In fact, our number one selling collection is the Ascent Collection in Colorado Springs. We sell about eight of those a month and that’s been consistent.”
The lowest priced two-bedroom, two-bath homes in the Ascent Collection are duplexes — 1,264 square feet and starting at $334,990. That’s less than El Paso County’s median sales price of $370,000 for a townhouse or condo in September.
Oakwood could probably sell more but is only building eight a month in that community, Fraley said. However, he added, “Had we not been able to find a way to get those below-market rates, I don’t think they would be selling as well.”
Concessions aren’t limited to new-home builders. Sellers and buyers often negotiate on the list price. According to the Colorado Association of Realtors data, sellers were getting very close to what their asking price in September — or 98.6% of what they asked for. That compares to June 2021, when bidding wars were common and sellers received 104.4% of their list price.
Of course, now, it’s a different market. According to the Denver Metro Association of Realtors, seller concessions were up in June to 48% of sales, compared to 29.2 percent a year earlier. The average concession was $7,295.
It’s all cyclical, said Hanshaw, who began working in the real estate industry in 2014 as the economy was recovering from the Great Recession.
“When I started in the industry, it was like you could ask for the world — a free basement, free backyard landscaping, free fencing and builders would entertain it to obtain a sale. Then it became a market of, I’m not giving you a refrigerator because the next person that walks in the door will take the deal without a refrigerator,” she said. “Now, I’d say, we’re back into negotiating a little bit heavier to obtain the sale.”
➔ 58% of Denver metro rentals offering an incentives. Free parking, free rent and other concessions for renters are on the rise, according to data from real estate site Zillow. In the Denver metro area, 58% of rental listings in October offered some sort of concession, up from 43.4% last year.
Nationwide, concessions were at a record high with 37.7% of all listings offering some sort of perk, compared with 30% a year earlier. That means landlords are competing for renters, especially after September saw a 50-year high in completed construction projects aimed at renters. Denver metro saw the third-highest jump in share of listings with a concession. >> Details
Sun economy stories you may have missed
➔ How to reduce trash — in outer space? A Colorado company is working on its own WALL-E-like trash compactor for future space habitats. >> Read story
➔ Clean-car sales jump 10% as Coloradans lean on state, federal and utility rebates. EVs, plug-in hybrids, and hybrids made up 38% of vehicle registrations in third quarter of 2024 >> Read story
➔ Denver Health was losing almost 90% of its nitrous oxide to leaks. So it cut the gas. The hospital is switching from centrally piped nitrous oxide — also known as laughing gas — to portable tanks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions >> Read story
➔ Health care prices for Colorado public sector retirees see huge increase for 2025. Two Medicare Advantage plans offered by Colorado PERA are seeing big jumps — 130% for one and more than 200% for the other >> Read story
Election 2024 stories:
➔ View all of our Election 2024 coverage
Take the poll: Insurance woes
If you missed the reader poll last week, there’s still time! The spike in homeowners insurance costs may have wiped out any savings of a low-interest mortgage. Feeling it? Take the reader poll to help us better understand what’s going on in Colorado ➔ cosun.co/WWinsurance
Other working bits
➔ 185 applications for Colorado’s broadband program. And they’re asking for $1.78 billion, which is more than double what the state received in funding for the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program. U.S. lawmakers approved the federal program after realizing in the pandemic that some places in America have mediocre or nonexistent internet service.
Colorado received $826.5 million in BEAD funding and opened its program to applicants earlier this year. If all projects were approved, that would help 111,896 homes, schools, businesses and community organizations, according to the Colorado Broadband Office, which is overseeing the grants. More than half of those locations — approximately 67,559 — are considered unserved with no broadband internet service. The Broadband Office plans to review every application in the coming weeks, which will take up to 160 days. >> Details
➔ Send a question to the EEOC. Any question is allowed, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is hosting the annual end-of-the year webinar Nov. 12 at noon. Will the questions be answered? That’s unknown. But questions need to be asked during pre-registration for the 90-minute session. >> Register
Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww
Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara
Miss a column? Catch up:
What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.
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Corrections & Clarifications
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Colorado
Police issue shelter-in-place order for Colorado Springs neighborhood due to barricaded suspect
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV) – The Colorado Springs Police Department (CSPD) issued a shelter-in-place order Wednesday morning for 7366 Legend Hill Dr.
CSPD says this order is due to law enforcement responding to a barricaded suspect in the area. Police tell 11 News the call came in at 9:15 a.m. for a family disturbance.
If you are in the area, police encourage you to secure your home or business and stay away from doors and windows.
This is a developing situation; Information is very limited at this time. This article will be updated when more information is available.
Copyright 2025 KKTV. All rights reserved.
Colorado
Colorado family calls for answers after 23 year old killed in hit-and-run in Aurora: “He didn’t deserve that”
A Colorado family is pleading for accountability after a 23-year-old man was killed in a crosswalk on Thursday. Aurora police believe Lennard Dawson Jr. was struck by three separate vehicles. Two of the drivers didn’t stop.
Police say the crash happened just before midnight at a signal-controlled crosswalk along the Unnamed Creek Trail at South Tower Road. The third driver remained at the scene and is cooperating with investigators.
Dawson later died at the hospital.
At a vigil Monday night at Highland Hollows Park, Dawson’s loved ones gathered to mourn and remember a young man they described as warm, generous, and always smiling.
“He would talk to everybody,” said his sister, Kelia Brown. “Good or bad days, he always had a smile. He was a great dad. He helped his son learn everything. I feel like I lost my twin.”
Brown said she learned about the crash in the middle of the night and hasn’t slept much since. The family lives roughly 10 minutes from the crash site.
What haunts her most is that two drivers didn’t stop.
“I was so angry,” she said. “If you’re going to leave, at least move him out of the street. He didn’t deserve that.”
Dawson’s nephew, Nassir Bandy, said he modeled nearly everything he did after his uncle.
“I wanted to be just like him,” Bandy said. “He was my role model. I played basketball because he played basketball. I wanted dreads because he had dreads. I was so mad when he cut them.”
He urged the drivers responsible to come forward.
“Take accountability for your actions. Come clean,” he said. “Whatever’s done in the dark will come to light.”
Monday afternoon, dozens of relatives, friends, and neighbors came out, holding candles and singing hymns.
The crash marks the 19th pedestrian death in Aurora this year, part of a growing concern citywide about speeding and reckless driving.
“People in Aurora and Denver can’t drive,” Brown said. “Illegal lane changes, no blinkers, speeding, it’s constant. We need better driving schools or something. They’re giving licenses to anybody.”
Bandy agreed, calling many crashes “preventable mistakes.”
In a statement, the City of Aurora said it’s analyzing the incident as part of its ongoing traffic safety efforts:
“Any loss of life is a tragedy. Public Works is looking into this specific incident as it relates to traffic data. The Aurora Police Department continues to investigate. Aurora’s Public Works Department is working on a Safety Action Plan, evaluating safety and making recommendations across the city. The plan will be completed early next year.”
For Dawson’s family, the grief is compounded by the questions that remain, including whether he might have survived had the first two drivers stopped to help.
“He was a blessing,” Brown said. “A light to life. The biggest star in the universe. We will get justice for Lennard.”
Anyone with information about the drivers involved is urged to contact the Aurora Police Department.
This was a massive moment for conservation.
While gray wolves once ranged throughout much of the Lower 48, a government-backed extermination campaign wiped most of them out in the 19th and 20th centuries. By the 1940s, Colorado had lost all of its resident wolves.
But, in the fall of 2020, Colorado voters did something unprecedented: They passed a ballot measure to reintroduce gray wolves to the state. This wasn’t just about having wolves on the landscape to admire, but about restoring the ecosystems that we’ve broken and the biodiversity we’ve lost. As apex predators, wolves help keep an entire ecosystem in balance, in part by limiting populations of deer and elk that can damage vegetation, spread disease, and cause car accidents.
In the winter of 2023, state officials released 10 gray wolves flown in from Oregon onto public land in northwestern Colorado. And in January of this year, they introduced another 15 that were brought in from Canada. Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) — the state wildlife agency leading the reintroduction program — plans to release 30 to 50 wolves over three to five years to establish a permanent breeding population that can eventually survive without intervention.
“Today, history was made in Colorado,” Colorado Governor Jared Polis said following the release. “For the first time since the 1940s, the howl of wolves will officially return to western Colorado.”
Fast forward to today, and that program seems, at least on the surface, like a mess.
Ten of the transplanted wolves are already dead, as is one of their offspring. And now, the state is struggling to find new wolves to ship to Colorado for the next phase of reintroduction. Meanwhile, the program has cost millions of dollars more than expected.
The takeaway is not that releasing wolves in Colorado was, or is now, a bad idea. Rather, the challenges facing this first-of-its-kind reintroduction just reveal how extraordinarily difficult it is to restore top predators to a landscape dominated by humans. That’s true in the Western US and everywhere — especially when the animal in question has been vilified for generations.
Why 10 of the reintroduced wolves are already dead
One harsh reality is that a lot of wolves die naturally, such as from disease, killing each other over territory, and other predators, said Joanna Lambert, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Of Colorado’s new population, one of the released wolves was killed by another wolf, whereas two were likely killed by mountain lions, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
The changes that humans have made to the landscape only make it harder for these animals to survive. One of the animals, a male found dead in May, was likely killed by a car, state officials said. Another died after stepping into a coyote foothold trap. Two other wolves, meanwhile, were killed, ironically, by officials. Officials from CPW shot and killed one wolf — the offspring of a released individual — in Colorado, and the US Department of Agriculture killed another that traveled into Wyoming, after linking the wolves to livestock attacks. (An obscure USDA division called Wildlife Services kills hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of wild animals a year that it deems dangerous to humans or industry, as my colleague Kenny Torella has reported.)
Yet, another wolf was killed after trekking into Wyoming, a state where it’s largely legal to kill them.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife has, to its credit, tried hard to stop wolves from harming farm animals. The agency has hired livestock patrols called “range riders,” for example, to protect herds. But these solutions are imperfect, especially when the landscape is blanketed in ranchland. Wolves still kill sheep and cattle.
This same conflict — or the perception of it — is what has complicated other attempts to bring back predators, such as jaguars in Arizona and grizzly bears in Washington. And wolves are arguably even more contentious. “This was not ever going to be easy,” Lambert said of the reintroduction program.
Colorado is struggling to find more wolves to ship in
There’s another problem: Colorado doesn’t have access to more wolves.
The state is planning to release another 10 to 15 animals early next year. And initially, those wolves were going to come from Canada. But in October, the Trump administration told CPW that it can only import wolves from certain regions of the US. Brian Nesvik, director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agency that oversees endangered species, said that a federal regulation governing Colorado’s gray wolf population doesn’t explicitly allow CPW to source wolves from Canada. (Environmental legal groups disagree with his claim).
So Colorado turned to Washington state for wolves instead.
But that didn’t work either. Earlier this month, Washington state wildlife officials voted against exporting some of their wolves to Colorado. Washington has more than 200 gray wolves, but the most recent count showed a population decline. That’s one reason why officials were hesitant to support a plan that would further shrink the state’s wolf numbers, especially because there’s a chance they may die in Colorado.
Some other states home to gray wolves, such as Montana and Wyoming, have previously said they won’t give Colorado any of their animals for reasons that are not entirely clear. Nonetheless, Colorado is still preparing to release wolves this winter as it looks for alternative sources, according to CPW spokesperson Luke Perkins.
Ultimately, Lambert said, it’s going to take years to be able to say with any kind of certainty whether or not the reintroduction program was successful.
“This is a long game,” she said.
And despite the program’s challenges, there’s at least one reason to suspect it’s working: puppies.
Over the summer, CPW shared footage from a trail camera of three wolf puppies stumbling over their giant paws, itching, and play-biting each other. CPW says there are now four litters in Colorado, a sign that the predators are settling in and making a home for themselves.
“This reproduction is really key,” Eric Odell, wolf conservation program manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said in a public meeting in July. “Despite some things that you may hear, not all aspects of wolf management have been a failure. We’re working towards success.”
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