It’s how the Austrians must have felt after breaking the Turkish siege of Vienna. 

OK, maybe just the way you feel after shooing off a door-to-door salesman. 

Point is, the barbarians were at the gate — and finally were sent packing. And even if they’ll be back sooner or later, we can breathe a sigh of relief for now.

That was one upbeat takeaway for Colorado’s homeowners after the 2026 legislative session. After years of attacks by the Capitol’s ruling Democrats on local neighborhoods — in an attempt to radically reshape them and ultimately ruin them — the latest such efforts fizzled this year by the time lawmakers adjourned. 

It’s not just that single-family homeowners got a reprieve when lawmakers killed bills that would have forced smaller residential lots as well as split lots on their neighborhoods. It’s that those defeats might signal a broader retreat by the self-anointed urban visionaries who think they know better than the rest of us how our neighborhoods and communities should look.

It seems they encountered far stiffer opposition than they had anticipated.

“I think there was exhaustion and local-versus-state-control fatigue,” Colorado Association of Home Builders CEO Ted Leighty told the Colorado Chamber of Commerce’s Sum & Substance news service the other day. “I think even those that supported previous bills with elements of preemption in them said, ‘We’ve done too much preemption.’”

The misbegotten measures were planks in the “affordable housing” platform of legislative Democrats and Gov. Jared Polis. Over the past few years, they have enacted several other encroachments on local land-use powers, all aimed at the densification of our state.

The assumption is that getting more people packed into smaller spaces somehow will lower the cost of housing. In some theoretical sense, it might hold true. As a practical matter, it’s unlikely. Far more likely in Colorado’s population centers is that existing lots will be subdivided to create dense, higher-end housing.

A central feature of that agenda is its implicit attack on an American institution, the single-family home. Judging from the fact two-thirds of Colorado residences are single-family homes — as is the case nationwide — the vast majority of Coloradans evidently prefers them and the extra breathing room they provide between neighbors.

Colorado’s rank-and-file homeowners have made that preference known — and have pushed back. Not only at the state effort but also at similar efforts by some local governments to impose the state’s density agenda through the back door. 

In April, Lakewood voters overwhelmingly turned back a policy adopted by their City Council in October to scrap zoning rules that long have safeguarded quality of life in generations-old neighborhoods. The Lakewood vote followed a similar, popular uprising last November in Littleton. There, voters amended their city charter to ensure current zoning would remain intact after their City Council had taken steps to undermine zoning in the historic town.

And earlier last year, six cities, including Aurora, Colorado’s third-largest, sued the state over the legislature’s efforts to undercut local zoning statewide. 

The rebellion certainly compelled local governments like Lakewood’s and Littleton’s to regroup and reconsider the density dogma. 

It also obviously sent shock waves all the way back to the Capitol — where the topic never should have come up in the first place. Land-use regulations constitutionally, statutorily and historically have been reserved to local government in Colorado, and with good reason. It’s closer to the people — and more easily set straight when it missteps.

At the moment, it looks like the state government has been set straight as well.