COLORADO SPRINGS — New numbers show a massive amount of new apartments are coming to our area soon. But relief for the area’s affordable apartment shortage will still take some time.
Alexandria Bellini started searching for apartments in November.
“I was like, oh it’s gonna be easy, finding an apartment can’t be that hard,” Bellini said.
But when she started browsing for places online, she was in for a rude awakening.
“I was telling myself, oh this can’t be right. I must be looking at the wrong area,” she said. “I’ve never really looked for an apartment before and it’s super expensive here.”
Any time she’d find a place that could work for her, someone else would beat her to it.
“I was getting really frustrated,” she said.
Bellini recently connected with Tami Kear to use her apartment matching service,Colorado Springs Apartment Resource.
“It’s been like this before, but not quite as much,” Kear said.
Kear has nearly 30 years of experience matching people with apartments in Colorado Springs.
“The prices are higher than I’ve ever seen before,” she said.
It’s a simple issue of supply and demand.
“If there were more apartments available, that would bring the prices down,” Kear said.
Luckily, more supply is on the way.
“We just saw a huge number of apartment complexes come in,” said Greg Dingrando, a spokesperson for the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department.
He says the department issued permits for 642 new apartment units in January alone.
“When you look at those units, all of those combined, that’s 40 percent of all of the past year’s numbers that we saw,” Dingrando said.
But they’ll take some time to build.
“It just feels like the date’s getting closer and closer,” Bellini said.
She has to move out of the Fort Carson barracks by July, so time is something she doesn’t have much of.
“It’s a little bit nerve wracking,” she said. “Like, oh my gosh, am I gonna find a place?”
