That’s not a guess — it’s from the Home Builders Association of Metro Denver’s own June 2025 fee study. $78,586 in permits, use taxes, and water tap fees stacked onto a single new single-family home in Thornton, before construction even starts. $57,043 of that is the water tap fee alone — the highest permit-fee total of any city measured in the entire metro area.
Build the exact same house in unincorporated Adams County instead of inside Thornton’s city limits, and the government fee stack drops to $36,247 — less than half. Same house. Same dirt. Different pile of paperwork.
And it’s not just the big number. The city nickel-and-dimes on the way in too: $75 to re-inspect something that failed the first time, $75/hour (two-hour minimum) if you need an inspector outside business hours, $100 just to get a hearing in front of the board, and $1.50 per square foot in “cash-in-lieu” park fees — on a 2,000 sq ft house, that’s another $3,000, before you’ve poured a foundation.
Every one of these fees was added by a government decision, one line item at a time, usually with no public fight and no sunset date. Nobody ever goes back and asks whether they’re still worth what they cost.
I want a public list of every fee added to a new home in HD31 in the last 10 years, and a real answer for what each one actually bought you. Every fee that was added by a decision can be removed by one too.
Fees are one piece of what makes housing expensive — but I’m not going to pretend they’re the whole story. The bigger drivers are supply, interest rates, and debt-to-income — add enough new supply and prices come down regardless of who’s buying; raise rates and buying power drops no matter how many houses are for sale.
I’m buying a house myself right now — not chasing the white-picket-fence version of the American Dream, which I think is a little outdated for a lot of people today, but because a friend of mine on disability needs somewhere she can actually afford to stay for the rest of her life. Her rent went from $800 to $1,300 in four years. That’s demand outrunning supply, plain and simple.
And it’s already correcting itself in places — apartment construction has been booming across the metro, and it’s not uncommon anymore to see rent actually drop, or landlords offering a month or two free just to fill units, which does the same thing. That’s supply and demand doing what it does, without a single new law passed. The politicians convinced they can engineer the ‘perfect’ housing market usually just get in the way of the thing that already works.
Here’s one more piece of the demand side that doesn’t get said out loud enough: population growth is population growth, no matter where the people come from — legal immigration, illegal immigration, people moving in from another state, doesn’t matter. More people needing a place to live is more pressure on the same limited supply. I’d be lying if I told you that’s not part of this.
But I’d also be lying if I claimed to know exactly how big a piece it is — nobody’s tracking rental demand by immigration status any more than anyone’s checking papers on the crew pouring the foundation for the next apartment building. A real share of the labor building new supply is immigrant labor too, some of it undocumented. Both of those things are true at the same time. Anyone selling you just one half of that isn’t being straight with you.
Paid for by Ray Roll for District 31, LLC — registered with the Colorado Secretary of State. · Colorado House District 31 · Thornton, CO