DENVER, Co. — While a spotlight has been shown on the affordable housing supply crisis, experts say how we got here has been a decades-long journey.

"There simply aren’t enough homes for anyone who wants to buy them," said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin.

Supply and demand are causing home prices to skyrocket this year. The average home price is up 13.2%. That’s already a record, but in other spots around the country, it’s worse. The average home price for Phoenix rose 23.5%, Salt Lake City and Denver rose around 20%.

"We got into this mess, partly because in the last decade there were fewer homes built, but in any decade, going back to the 1960s and even before then, we were falling behind on building entry-level homes. Back in the 1980s, about 40% of new construction homes were entry-level. And now, that's down in just single digits," said Fairweather.

A few factors have gone into the lack of entry-level homes, one of them being that construction slowed down to a halt during the great recession, which impacted supply, and now entry-level homes are not being built, because demand has driven up the price of land.

"If a developer wants to buy a piece of land, they want to put the most luxurious building on it so they can recoup the expense of just acquiring that land," she said.

Another factor is zoning laws. Many neighborhoods in cities across America, where land is pricey, are zoned for single-family homes. The power to change that lies on the hyper-local level, but that has proven to be a contentious issue.

"It's very easy for a group of homeowners to rally together, to get a multifamily zoning block. They can show at the town hall meetings and they have vested interest in keeping their property values high. Even if that goes against the community interest and keeping housing affordable. So it's a very hard problem," said Fairweather.

Jonathan Cappelli is an affordable housing advocate in Colorado. He says 37% of all single-family homes in the state are rentals, not owned by the families living in them.

"We're seeing that trend just increase," he said.

Like Fairweather, he agrees that one solution would be to change zoning laws to add more apartments and condos that families looking to buy their first home can afford.

"Density is really synonymous with equity right now," said Cappelli. "If you're against making room for low to moderate income people in your community, then you're kind of taking the ladder that you climb to get to where you are and you're kicking it out for the next year."

He says the best solution is for policies to become more affordable and equitable and that communities need to recognize and embrace that.

With homeownership tied to wealth building, experts and advocates alike say that while it wasn’t our decision to end up in a low housing supply, it’s up to local government and citizens to help fix it.

CINCINNATI — Officials with three local colleges will gather Wednesday at The Banks to kick off a program they hope will help ensure students of all races, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds have the same opportunities on their campuses.

"Moon Shot for Equity" is a national program spearheaded by the Washington, D.C.-based education research institute EAB, with the goal of leveling playing fields in higher education in regards to admissions, academic and extracurricular success, and post-graduation opportunities.

Here in the Tri-State, Cincinnati State Community and Technical College, Northern Kentucky University, Miami University and Gateway Community and Technical College are all participating in the program.

"The goal is, we want to eliminate equity gaps within our region by 2030," said Ande Durojaiye, vice president and dean of Miami University regional campuses' Liberal Arts and Applied Science programs. "So when I say equity gaps, we want to make sure that all students — regardless of their race, their background, their socioeconomic status — are successful in higher education, achieving their goals."

Representatives from the college and two universities will kick off the program at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center Wednesday at 8 a.m. Officials will be on hand to detail specific changes in store for each of their campuses by 2030.

CLEVELAND — It’s not a secret, and the tech industry has a problem.

“It’s always been pretty abysmal,” said David Ferreira.

For David Ferreira, tech’s diversity issues are more than numbers. It’s his experience.

“I went off to college. I was the only Black person in my program there for four years," he said, “Being the only representation of my race.”

When he reached the professional world, things got a little better. He was no longer the only Black person he worked with. But Black people and other minorities were still wildly underrepresented.

White people represent 60% of the US population but 78% of the tech world. Minority groups in tech make up just over half (22%) of where they stand in the real world (40%).

Tech Elevator, a coding boot camp company where David is an instructor, is trying to make a dent in those numbers.

“Here at Tech Elevator, because we have that scholarship that we talked about, we can actually just make it seem that the workforce in our classroom matches what society looks like,” said Ferreira.

Tech Elevator’s Represent Tech Scholarship is available to anyone a member of an underrepresented group in the industry.

So far, it’s paid for all or almost all of 135 students’ tuition through the program. Those recipients have gone on to make a combined $337 million, according to the company.

Jasmine Brown had been looking for a change after spending seven years as a speech therapist.

“With speech pathology, there really isn’t too much to do other than being a speech therapist. It wasn’t horrible, but I didn’t feel the field, and the passion wasn’t there,” said Brown.

85% of her tuition is taken care of because of the scholarship.

“That was the only way I was going to be able to come, was with the scholarship," she said.

She loves the program but growing up, and she never saw this career as an option.

“When I was younger it was just something I didn’t really think about just probably because I didn’t see myself represented,” said Brown, “I have a lot of families that’s in education social work, things like that and so it just seemed natural to go that way,”

She didn’t have an example or role model in this world, so she never thought it was an option.

The hope is this scholarship will help build the pool of qualified coders, so diversity in tech can grow. And tech elevator isn’t the only one offering scholarships.

A quick search on bestcolleges.com shows 25 scholarships available to minorities and the same number to women.

“You have that network starting to build of candidates who are used to and willing to vouch and reach out to folks of different backgrounds,” said Ferreira.

While the pace of change is still slow, Tech Elevator hopes to make the industry look more like the world we live in.

RICHMOND, Va. — Duron Chavis is trying to right an environmental wrong in his neighborhood that’s been generations in the making.

In Richmond’s Southside neighborhood, heat radiates from the asphalt and relief is hard to find. For the last five years, Chavis has been building community gardens as a way to rectify that, but he says the way his neighborhood is set up today, was no mistake.

"What we've decided to do and what the work that we enjoy doing is work. To remedy that neglect and that discrimination," Chavis said.

Starting in the 1930s, banks would "redline" nieghborhoods that it determined would be risky to give out loans to. This practice had a lot to do with race, as the main factor in determing which neighborhood would be redlined was whether or not the majority of its population was Black.

Southside is one of the neighborhoods that was redlined.

This isn’t just a Richmond problem, 200 American cities had neighborhoods that were redlined. Today, the majority of those redlined neighborhoods are primarily Black, Latino, and low-income.

According to research done at the nearby University of Richmond, formerly redlined neighborhoods are on average five degrees hotter and can be up to 20 degrees hotter than neighborhoods that weren’t.

Because of a lack of investments over decades, formerly redlined neighborhoods have less parks and trees and more asphalt and buildings - leaving folks who live there more susceptible to heat-related illness and impacts of climate change. This is called the Urban Heat Island effect.

"What does that say when the neighborhood that you lived in, all the people who look like you and there's all this, like, all this abandoned property, all of this just willful, benign neglect," said Chavis. "But then you go across the bridge onto another side of town and you see just all of the things and but none of those folks look like you. I think that that does something to the consciousness of a people."

A few streets over from Broad Rock, hidden behind kudzu and chain link, is a dirt path that will one day soon lead to a brand new green space.

"It's part of a realization of how past actions have led to current realities," said Ryan Rinn, the business services manager from Richmond's Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities.

When the city of Richmond saw the data on the heat and green space disparity, they put together a team and made it their mission to make sure everyone is within a 10-minute walk of a park.

"What I think more green space coming into the Southside will show is that we value the people that live here and we want people to enjoy the space right outside their front door," said Javonne Bowles, a community advocate with Virgina Community Voice.

Bowles is a part of the on-the-park initiative, making sure the Southside has a voice in its creation. She says while there’s excitement around the project, the skepticism of some neighbors can’t be ignored.

"There has been a lot of broken promises, particularly in the Eighth and the Ninth District of South Richmond," she said.

"However, a lot of people are also grateful for the opportunity for people to see, again, that there is something beautiful already right here in Southside of Richmond that we can take advantage of," Bowles continued.

Addressing systemic wrongs that were put in motion generations ago takes time, but it also takes care and while neighbors like Chavis put in the work, he also hopes the care he and others put into these spaces catches on.

"Spaces like this create the common ground for folks to love up on each other, you know, build relationships with each other, and do something for each other that I don't feel like any other space of social justice allows us to do," he said.