Better Housing Colorado (formerly the Boulder Housing Coalition) creates permanently affordable co-ops across Colorado’s Front Range. Strong communities, safe homes, and shared resources for low-income people of all identities—especially those systemically disadvantaged—are needed now more than ever. Your donation goes directly to making this mission possible.
With the expansion reflected in our new name, Better Housing Colorado now serves communities beyond Boulder, including our newest development: The People’s Mansion, an 11-bedroom historic mansion in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, transformed into a 19-bedroom permanently affordable cooperative home. This flagship house exemplifies our vision: large, vibrant communities where residents pool resources, share responsibilities, and thrive together.
For 25 years, Better Housing Colorado has been a leader in cooperative housing, providing homes to families and individuals ranging from newborns to senior citizens—including single parents, students, artists, activists, and those transitioning out of homelessness.
Our co-ops are about more than just housing. Residents manage their own homes as they see fit, cook together, participate in restorative conflict mediation, and practice consensus decision-making. They pool resources to buy healthy delicious food in bulk, take part in Community Supported Agriculture, and engage in annual trainings on social justice and cooperative skills. The experience nurtures compassionate leaders, skilled communicators, and active, engaged community members.
Better Housing Colorado is committed to social justice, anti-oppression, and inclusivity, building co-ops that are anti-racist, all-inclusive, and wonderfully diverse. We are also dedicated to environmental sustainability, with multiple houses powered largely by solar energy and all featuring productive gardens.
Your support ensures that more people can access safe, affordable, community-centered housing—and that the Front Range continues to have homes where everyone belongs.
Read more about our mission, vision, and values here.
The Boulder Housing Coalition (BHC) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to creating permanently affordable, sustainable, community enhancing, cooperative housing for the people of Boulder county.
In 1995, Will Toor, the director of CU Boulder's Environmental Center, foresaw housing prices soaring out of reach for Boulder's low-income residents. Will and Lincoln Miller, who would become our executive director, knew that housing cooperatives were a radical solution to Boulder's increasing housing prices and decreasing equity, inclusivity, and sustainability; a collective living situation that would decrease rent and increase residents' decision-making power. In 1996, they formed the Boulder Housing Coalition (BHC), a nonprofit with the goal of creating affordable housing co-ops in Boulder. The BHC spent its first few years raising money and support to create student co-ops at CU Boulder, but these efforts were ultimately blocked by the university.
After that, focus turned to bringing this affordable and community-based housing model to the greater Boulder community. The BHC bought its first house, Masala, in 2002; and added its second house, Chrysalis, in 2004. Due to Boulder's occupancy limit laws, it took another decade to add our third house, Ostara. The BHC then worked with community partners and city officials to make cooperatives legal by passing Boulder's 2017 Cooperative Housing Ordinance, after which we were able to acquire our fourth house, Mango Manor. As Boulder has continued to grow more unaffordable, homogenous, and lonely, the BHC's work has only grown more important, and we look to the future with a goal of further expanding to provide as many low-income individuals and families as we can with housing that is affordable, equitable, sustainable, and enriching for individuals and the community.
Organization name
Better Housing Colorado
other names
BHC
1996
Tax id (EIN)
84-1455089
Category
Housing & Shelter, Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy, Community Improvement & Capacity Building, Human Services, Social Science
Organization Size
Large Organization
Address
2711 Mapleton Ave Apt 22Boulder County, CO, US