Max Kronstadt ’20, Liam Reynolds ’21, and Elam Boockvar-Klein ’20 co-founded the Colorado Springs Pro-Housing Partnership (COSPHP) in 2019 to become more involved in the Colorado Springs community and to try to have a meaningful impact on a rapidly escalating local affordable housing crisis. COSPHP now works towards building a housing-justice movement in Colorado Springs through grassroots community organizing. Just five years in, the 501(c)(3) organization has grown tremendously, helped numerous local community members, and taught the three CC grads countless lessons that they will keep with them for the rest of their lives.
“Our mission is to build power among housing-insecure residents of Colorado Springs to win concrete changes to city policy, resource allocation, and development processes needed to ensure everyone in Colorado Springs has a safe, stable, and affordable place to live,” says Kronstadt, who is now COSPHP’s lead organizer.
In 2019, during their sophomore and junior years, Reynolds, Kronstadt, and Boockvar-Klein spent months speaking with local government and nonprofit leaders to determine what was already being done in the community and how they could be most useful.
“We found that there were a lot of passionate homeless services non-profit leaders and city staff doing what they could, but no one doing policy-change-focused organizing work to challenge the root causes of the crisis,” says Kronstadt, who majored in Political Science. “We decided to start an organization to lead that work and, after destroying only one white board, settled on the Colorado Springs Pro-Housing Partnership as a name.”
That year, the Colorado Springs City Council was considering changes to the zoning code to allow Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU) in single-family zones, which COSPHP says will make more affordable housing possible. However, they were facing opposition from local homeowners.
“So, we focused on building a coalition of local non-profits, faith leaders, and supportive neighbors to show up at town halls to support these proposed changes,” says Kronstadt. “We had some success—we turned out 50 people to a town hall in support of ADUs and the city passed a watered-down version of the ordinance in the summer of 2020.”
Between the summers of 2020 and 2022, Reynolds, Kronstadt, and Boockvar-Klein faced a lot of changes, including graduating from CC, the COVID-19 pandemic, and starting full-time jobs, which meant that the work of COSPHP was essentially put on hold for two years. In Fall 2022, however, despite Reynolds and Boockvar-Klein moving away from Colorado Springs, Kronstadt decided to make building COSPHP his full-time job.
“Our work since then has been focused more on grassroots organizing than advocacy and coalition building—rather than try to mobilize supportive groups around specific housing policies, we work to support people within low-income neighborhoods, apartment buildings, and the unhoused community to organize their neighbors around issues they’ve identified, with the goal of both winning concrete changes on their issues and building power towards a citywide housing-justice movement in the future,” says Kronstadt.
COSPHP is currently supporting resident-led teams in three communities. Their first project is to build power in Mill Street, a historically working-class neighborhood on the south end of downtown, which Kronstadt says is facing the threat of gentrification and displacement due to new upscale development on its borders. Mill Street neighbors are working to win a legally binding Community Benefit Agreement (CBA), which covers the redevelopment of the Martin Drake Power Plant. CBAs are agreements between a developer and neighborhood-led coalition, where the neighborhood receives benefits from the developer in exchange for the coalition’s support of the project.
“Community Benefit Agreements are often used in gentrifying neighborhoods to win investments in new affordable housing, strategies to prevent displacement of current residents, and improvements in quality of life for neighbors,” says Kronstadt, who is especially excited to support this project because he also lives in the Mill Street neighborhood. “Mary Sprunger-Froese, a long-time Mill Street resident, had learned about this tool and approached me about helping her with a campaign to win one covering the redevelopment of the Martin Drake Power Plant, which was about to shut down for good. In the three years since, we have built a team of Mill Street residents to survey the neighborhood on key issues, recruit ally organizations into a coalition, and get the attention of media and elected officials to persuade them our neighborhood is worth saving.”
Martin Drake is a former coal-fired power plant that operated for 90 years along the western boundary of Mill Street. Since the power plant was shut down, the area around it is booming and the people who live next to it are worried that they will be priced out of the neighborhood. In the initial survey the team conducted, almost 60% of residents said they were concerned about being displaced. “Through a CBA, we aim to win investments in affordable housing, funds to prevent displacement, a new neighborhood community center, and more,” says Kronstadt, who added that while the long-range goal of COSPHP’s involvement with the Mill Street project is a CBA, they also hope to prevent the demolition of 12 homes through a city plan to reroute railroad tracks through the neighborhood.
COSPHP is also supporting a resident-led team in the Centennial Plaza Apartments, where residents have formed a tenant association to push for better treatment from their building managers and help lead the effort to build a citywide tenant union. Lastly, COSPHP is working to support the unhoused community, where current and formerly unhoused residents have come together to form the Colorado Springs Homeless Union, which is working to fight for more dignified treatment from city government and long-term solutions to the deepening local housing crisis.
While there isn’t an end date on COSPHP’s involvement with the CPTA or the Homeless Union, they plan to continue helping develop the leadership of residents so they can take on more responsibility within both the CPTA and the Homeless Union. “One of the things we learned through our work on ADUs and zoning is that work that isn’t led by people being most impacted by the problem is ultimately unsustainable—it relies on the same activists who show up at everything and eventually get burnt out,” Kronstadt says. “When I resumed work with the COSPHP in 2022, it was with a new strategy of organizing within specific neighborhoods, apartment buildings, and the unhoused community, where the housing crisis is showing up most acutely, around issues that residents identify. In this way, we can both win the changes that the people most impacted have identified, and build power toward larger, systemic changes in the future. Supporting residents in organizing their neighbors looks like coaching them through building an organizing team, planning outreach, facilitating meetings, and providing a budget.”
Kronstadt ultimately believes COSPHP is important because it works to support the people who are immediately and directly impacted by the local housing crisis.
“At the COSPHP, we believe that the set of policies that have created our deeply unaffordable housing market are in place because the people and corporations that they benefit—namely for-profit developers, landlords, and wealthy homeowners in exclusive neighborhoods—have disproportionate power over the political process in our community and beyond,” he says. “Any proposed solutions to the housing crisis that don’t first address this imbalance of power will ultimately fall short of meaningful change. By organizing with the people who are most impacted by the housing crisis, many of whom may not initially share our political outlook or see themselves as potential agents of political change, we can actually build the grassroots power we need to achieve real change. Across the country we are seeing movements of tenants and others pushed to the brink by an untenable housing market gaining strength and winning hard fights, but these movements don’t just spring up on their own, they need to be built through long-haul community organizing. Right now, in Colorado Springs, no one else is doing that movement-building work on housing issues, so we aim to fill that void.”
Right now, Kronstadt is the only employee, but he is working to raise money to hopefully be able to hire two additional staff members next year and expand the group’s capacity. Despite moving away, Boockvar-Klein and Reynolds have remained advisors to the organization and are now both on the board.
Throughout their time at CC, Boockvar-Klein, Kronstadt, and Reynolds were all involved in various activities through the Collaborative for Community Engagement (CCE), which Kronstadt says made getting a footing locally and learning about how to work productively within the local community possible. In 2020, the three received the CCE’s Advocacy and Activism Award, which is an award presented to students who have championed a social or environmental issue through advocacy, awareness-raising, and/or activism.
“We wanted to start the COSPHP because, as students, we spent a lot of time studying housing insecurity, gentrification, and displacement, and it felt a little disingenuous to be living in a community facing those issues and not trying to take part in addressing them,” says Reynolds, who majored in Sociology and is now working as an organizer for United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh. “When we started looking around for groups to get involved with, we found that there were a lot of organizations doing service provision, but there wasn’t an effort to organize people experiencing housing insecurity to build power and make change, so we endeavored to start that process.”
“The Block Plan was also instrumental to our initial success,” says Boockvar-Klein, who also majored in Sociology and worked for Habitat for Humanity Philadelphia before returning to school to pursue a Master’s in Urban Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. “We were used to spending a dedicated amount of time deeply focused on a topic, and that is precisely what community organizing entailed. The key, of course, was sustaining it beyond three-and-a-half weeks. It also enabled us to convene on a routine schedule, which was crucial to getting the organization off the ground.”
Boockvar-Klein says that while he was at CC, he developed an important critical understanding of the world around him. “When Max reached out to me about the possibility of doing some organizing and advocacy around affordable housing in Colorado Springs, I felt it was a great opportunity to tangibly address some of the inequities we learned about in the classroom,” he says. “What, after all, is the purpose of a liberal arts education if we don’t then apply the academic framework to better the urban context within which we lived for four years?”
Boockvar-Klein, Reynolds, and Kronstadt are all grateful for the lessons they learned at CC and continue to use today, and for the numerous professors in the Sociology and History Departments who helped advise them as they got COSPHP started.