Lakewood residents will get a chance to vote on a series of controversial zoning code changes passed by the city’s elected leaders last year after a group of citizens mounted an effort to challenge the new rules.
The City Council decided early Tuesday morning to send its zoning updates, which are intended to spur greater density and the building of more affordable homes in the city of 156,000, to an April 7 special election.
“This is a consequential issue for the city of Lakewood — I think we all agree on that — and I hope that everyone will get out and vote,” Councilman Roger Low said at the end of a Monday night meeting that stretched more than five hours and ended after midnight.
Earlier in the meeting, the council approved a supplemental budget appropriation of $42 million to refund dozens of telecommunications companies for years of improperly collected business and occupation taxes. Last September, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the tax had been imposed in violation of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, which requires any new tax in Colorado to first get voter approval in an election.
The $42,154,189 the city must return to 177 companies represents more than 13% of the city’s 2026 budget.
On the zoning matter, the council passed four ordinances in the last half of 2025 that together encouraged the construction of more varied housing types, and by extension, greater density — with the ultimate aim of lowering home prices in a notoriously expensive metro housing market.
The measures allow diverse housing types — like duplexes and townhomes — anywhere in the city. They also limit new home sizes to 5,000 square feet and urge the conversion of vacant or underused commercial buildings to housing.
The new rules went into effect on Jan. 1.
But opponents of the rezoning effort collected more than 10,000 signatures last fall to place four measures on a proposed March 31 special election ballot — changed to April 7 by the council — that will give voters the final say. The successful petition left the council with the choice of either repealing the ordinances or sending the matter to a special election.
Opponents say the city’s zoning changes will endanger the character of older neighborhoods and won’t actually help reduce home prices.
“These zoning ordinances are not good for Lakewood, because they reduce transparency and have development decisions occur behind closed doors,” said a rezoning opponent, Cathy Kentner, a former Lakewood mayoral candidate who has long fought density efforts in the city. “These ordinances would encourage overdevelopment at the cost of our natural environment and with no guarantee of affordability that we are all looking for.”
In a news release issued last week, fellow opponent and lifelong Lakewood resident Regina Hopkins called the city’s rezoning efforts “a blueprint for crammed, profit-driven development, bulldozed trees and ignored infrastructure.”
“Developers do not build for affordability — they build for profit,” she said.
The resistance in Lakewood echoes what occurred in nearby Littleton last November, where voters approved a charter amendment that will make it more difficult to build anything but single-family homes in a large chunk of the city.
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“There’s nothing about the new zoning code that allows for the bulldozing of neighborhoods — it’s completely disinformation,” Lakewood resident Shane Sarnak said during public comment Monday night.
The median price of a detached home sold last year in metro Denver was $650,000, up 0.39% from 2024 and also from 2022, when the median price was $647,500. Median condo and townhome prices looked more fatigued, falling 2.85% from 2024 to $391,900 in 2025.
A collection of bills passed by state lawmakers in 2024 was designed to increase higher-density living and bring home prices down. Those measures were quickly challenged by several Front Range municipalities in court, with the plaintiffs claiming the legislature and Gov. Jared Polis were encroaching on their home-rule powers to set land-use rules.
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