It’s a common refrain in Carbondale, Basalt and even Glenwood Springs: if you want cheaper housing, move downvalley.
It’s true — buying or renting a house in Rifle, Silt or Parachute is much cheaper than it is up or midvalley. According to the brokerage Redfin, the average selling price for a house in Rifle was $482,000 in October 2025. In Carbondale, it was over $1.2 million.
In recent years, Rifle has become a magnet for people priced out of the Roaring Fork Valley. Meanwhile, its own population has increased, but that growth has created many of the same housing supply and affordability issues afflicting pricier towns upvalley.
Last summer, Rifle City Council approved a new housing study and action plan to address those challenges. But while Rifle remains more affordable than most surrounding areas, some housing advocates are concerned the plan is insufficient.
Kathy Fitzgerald, a homeless prevention case manager for Catholic Charities, attended a recent community meeting on the housing study and plan, hoping to hear more about how the plan would address affordability for the most vulnerable populations. “There are many, many, what I call ‘invisible’ homeless that you're not seeing,” she said. In Garfield County, she said, the waitlist for senior housing is nearly 10 years.
“These are seniors living in their cars because they've been priced out and they can't get into senior housing.”
Brian Points, the president of Points Consulting, which authored the report, acknowledged that affordability is a major issue in Rifle. Home values have increased 133% in the past decade compared to just 55% for the median household income. The result: 85% of first-time home buyers in Rifle cannot afford to buy an average-priced home.
Part of the solution is more supply, but that won’t solve the entire affordability problem, said Points. “If supply and demand are both moving in the same direction, you could just have an outward shift that doesn't actually decrease price at all.”
A more holistic solution involves changing Rifle’s building code to support a mix of higher density housing options, rather than maximizing single-family homes that early 20th century building codes favored.
That new approach includes developing more cottage housing, duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, and accessory dwelling units, or ADUs.
“Some of that is going to be rentals, and some of it is going to be homeownership, but not necessarily in the low-density single-family setting that people are accustomed to always seeing,” Points said.
For Fitzgerald, who attended the meeting, changing Rifle’s building codes and developing higher density housing is one thing, but she worries that the plan leaves out the lowest-income population.
Most of Fitzgerald’s clients are seniors, people who can’t work due to a chronic medical condition, and single parents who often can’t afford the average $1,400 rent for a two-bedroom apartment — let alone the combined move-in costs of first and last month’s rent and a security deposit.
“I don't know if they're really addressing those families that do make less than $50,000 a year,” she said.
Points said that the goal of his housing studies is to help cities find every possible avenue for boosting affordable housing — some of them market-driven like offering incentives to developers to build affordable units, and some of them partially market-driven in the form of low-income housing tax credits.
Fitzgerald was skeptical. She noted that the new Rifle Apartments affordable housing development created 60 new units, but only 10 of them are available for families whose income is 30% or less of the Area Median Income, or $31,680 for a family of four.
According to the study, Rifle will need an additional 416 housing units for those making less than 30% of AMI.
Still, the plan will mean a significant change in how Rifle’s built environment looks and feels, which is another challenge. In community surveys, Points said there is often a “natural aversion” to higher-density housing — often due to an outdated understanding of what that kind of development entails.
In other cases, he said, “people just really don't like that concept of anything other than a single-family home.”
In response, he tells people to look at the numbers. A mortgage that once cost $1,500 is now $3,100 for the same house. At some point, that’s going to lock people out of the market that could be valuable contributors to Rifle’s economy.
“Perhaps some of your own children,” he said. “At some point you just have to make compromises to allow people to be a member of your community.”
