An oft-overlooked factor driving up the cost of Colorado’s housing? Not paying rent. Other tenants will have to make up the difference and cover the losses sooner or later — in even higher rent.

Another factor driving up the cost of our state’s costly housing? Conjuring up ever more purported rights for tenants who don’t pay their rent. That only ensures even more tenants will skip out on their obligations.

No doubt about it; the cost of living is high in Colorado, and that’s especially true when it comes to housing. It’s why affordable housing consistently ranks as one of the top concerns for voters in poll after poll.

So, it’s tough to make ends meet, especially for renters of modest means. Yet, most tenants manage to budget enough for their monthly rents. Most people understand that keeping a roof over their families’ heads is among their most fundamental responsibilities.

They deserve elected leaders who understand that. Leaders who enact policies that provide due process and other reasonable safeguards for tenants facing eviction — without shifting the burden onto the vast majority of tenants who pay their rent on time.

Instead, Colorado has been afflicted with a crop of lawmakers from the political fringe who are so obsessed with sticking it to landlords that they seem bent on making eviction nearly impossible — no matter how justifiable. They enact laws that upend a sensible balance between landlords’ and tenants’ rights.

Making matters worse, poverty lawyers stand at the ready to exploit such legislative overkill — preempting evictions with endless litigation.

Hence, a recent, newsmaking Colorado Supreme Court case in which justices were tasked with splitting hairs over whether state landlord-tenant law as enacted by the Legislature requires a jury trial for some evictions but not others.

Specifically at issue, as reported last week by Colorado Politics, was whether tenants who aren’t personally served with an eviction notice — they might instead get one in the mail or posted to the door of their rental unit — have the same “right” to a jury trial as tenants who’ve had the notice handed to them.

After initially deciding a couple of months ago that jury trials were guaranteed in both scenarios, the high court reversed itself this month. Upon reconsideration, it found the law left it unclear whether a tenant who wasn’t personally served was entitled to a jury trial, and it left it to the Legislature to clarify. The tenant in whose name the appeal was made before the court had received a notice through the mail and on her front door. So, no jury trial for her. Good.

It strains credulity that tenants have a right to jury trials in what almost always is an open-and-shut case of noncompliance. Judicial review — basically, a lone judge making sure a tenant’s due process wasn’t violated — should be sufficient.

Alas, our Legislature feels otherwise — to the detriment of most renters.

The court-clogging, logistical nightmare — and sheer absurdity — of a jury trial for just about every eviction didn’t put off the head of the Colorado Poverty Law Project, who cried foul. The group had represented the tenant in this case.

“This decision undermines due process for Coloradans at risk of losing housing,” wailed Executive Director Jack Regenbogen.

Oh, please.

In almost every landlord-tenant dispute, all the landlord really wants is for the tenant to pay rent on time and to obey basic rules regarding things such as noise and pets and, of course, not destroying a rental unit. And in almost every case, landlords are willing to be somewhat flexible if there is a lapse by tenants on any of those matters.

Most Colorado renters manage to pay their rents. When lawmakers and lawyers give cover to those who won’t, it only makes life more expensive for all the rest.

The Gazette Editorial Board