Cost of living, housing top list of Coloradans’ concerns in new poll

A "For Rent" sign is seen in Denver's Capitol Hill neighborhood on April 5, 2024. (Quentin Young/Colorado Newsline)

There’s near-universal agreement among Coloradans that the rising cost of living, and housing costs in particular, are among the most serious challenges facing the state.

Nearly two-thirds of Colorado residents say that housing and living costs are both “extremely serious” problems, according to the 2024 Pulse poll , a yearly survey conducted by the Colorado Health Foundation. About a quarter say they’re “very serious” problems, and only 2% told pollsters they’re “not too serious.” Homelessness ranked just behind them as Coloradans’ No. 3 concern, with 79% saying it’s an extremely or very serious problem.

Concern over these top issues is “broadly shared across racial and ethnic subgroups,” as well as across income levels, said Dave Metz, a pollster with FM3 Research who helped conduct the survey, during a briefing Wednesday.

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“This anxiety about inflation, about the cost of living, really does cut across the entire socioeconomic spectrum in Colorado,” Metz said. “Obviously it may affect different households in different ways, but it’s very much a present concern across the board.”

The Colorado Health Foundation bills the Pulse poll, conducted annually by a bipartisan team of pollsters, as one of the state’s most comprehensive opinion surveys, with a special focus on collecting responses from a representative sample of communities of color and rural communities. The 2024 results are based on surveys of 2,404 Coloradans between May 20 and June 24, and have a margin of error of 2.9%.

While most of Coloradans’ top concerns are shared across the political spectrum, two hot-button issues broke down sharply along partisan lines, the poll found.

Among Colorado Democrats, 4 in 5 said climate change is an extremely or very serious problem, compared to fewer than 1 in 10 Republicans. Conversely, while 85% of Republicans said that unauthorized immigration is a serious problem, just 27% of Democrats said the same.

A dramatic year-over-year rise in the number of Republicans calling unauthorized immigration an extremely serious problem — from 44% in 2023 to 64% this year — vaulted the issue to No. 8 on the list of Coloradans’ top concerns in 2024. It ranked last among 17 problems polled by the Pulse survey last year.

We believe that a sense of belonging — being connected to community and feeling that our contributions are valued in the places we call home — is essential to people’s health and well-being.

– Kyle Rojas Legleiter, of the Colorado Health Foundation

Concern about most other issues is relatively unchanged since last year, the poll found. The share of Coloradans who said “crime in general” was a serious problem ticked down slightly from 62% to 59%. After rising during the COVID-19 pandemic, crime rates in Colorado have been on the decline since mid-2022, according to Colorado Bureau of Investigations data.

For the first time, pollsters asked respondents a separate question about “crime in your neighborhood,” and found a stark difference in results; just 26% identified that as a serious concern, the lowest rank of any of the 18 issues polled. It’s another result that is consistent across demographics, Metz said.

“It does seem to be something that’s just sort of part of the mental framework with which Coloradans, in general, view these issues,” he said. “Even if you are not seeing evidence of crime in your own community, you read about it in the news, you see posts on social media. There are things other than direct personal experience that may provoke concern.”

A ‘sense of belonging’?

Another new set of questions asked in the Pulse survey this year related to what, if anything, made respondents feel like they “did not belong somewhere.”

“We believe that a sense of belonging — being connected to community and feeling that our contributions are valued in the places we call home — is essential to people’s health and well-being,” said Kyle Rojas Legleiter, the Colorado Health Foundation’s senior director of policy. “With a large sample size, we’re able to analyze and compare across key demographics, the relationship between respondents’ sense of belonging and the other challenges confronting them, such as high costs of living and housing.”

Nearly half of LGBTQ Coloradans report feeling like they don’t belong somewhere because of their sexuality, the poll found, and 51% of Black Coloradans said the same about their race. Others cited age, disabilities, religion and other factors as a cause for similar feelings. But across the population as a whole, far and away the top reason cited for a lack of belonging was a respondent’s political beliefs.

The feeling was most pronounced among Colorado Republicans, 54% of whom reported a lack of belonging because of their beliefs, compared to 40% of unaffiliated voters and 31% of Democrats.

“We’ve heard people, again, in focus groups, tell us that they’ve lost friends, they’ve gotten disconnected, even from family, because of political beliefs,” said Lori Weigel, a principal at New Bridge Strategy and one of the Pulse survey’s pollsters. “And that really dominated here.”

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