Opinion: Affordable housing – taking the tough steps


A ffordable housing in Boulder has been an ongoing discussion for as long as I have been involved in local politics, now going on 30 years. Unfortunately, the current Task Force report fails to address the fundamental issues. But fortunately, many City Council members are questioning the advice on what to do and who should pay.
Boulder’s first affordable housing program (that I know about) was over 30 years ago. It required developers to make a small fraction of their units affordable, but these units reverted to market prices after a time, obviously not a long-term solution. When I was on the council, I pushed a conceptual change — affordable housing created under any city program or regulation was to be permanent. In addition, I worked with Mayor Leslie Durgin to develop with a funding mechanism called the CHAP (Community Housing Assistance Program) which included various taxing and fee mechanisms.
The next significant step was Inclusionary Zoning, which required developers to either include affordable units in their projects, or pay a “fee-in-lieu” to support affordable units elsewhere. There was a big debate about whether commercial development should pay a fee-in-lieu; after all, the need for housing is to a large extent a function of job growth. But in spite of this obvious logic, only residential development ended up paying.
About a decade ago, the affordable housing target magically jumped from 5 percent of units to 10 percent, with no real substantive discussion. This led to a citizen revolt over putting hi-rises around the Table Mesa Shopping Center and in other locations near existing residential development. The response was to put housing into commercially zoned areas that had no schools or amenities (the Peleton project and the Transit Village are examples.)
To get to the fundamentals, job growth impacts housing prices. Boulder has the potential for roughly 60,000 more jobs to “reasonable” buildout and nearly twice that to ultimate buildout. Add to this CU’s growth (arguably driven by the pursuit of research grants), and the latest addition — density bonuses for office development downtown, and there is so much pressure on prices that any reasonable level of affordability is unreachable. There has to be some change in the city’s growth agenda before we can do anything meaningful about housing.
Adding housing to attempt to address traffic from the roughly 55,000 in-commuters (estimates vary) will produce far more impacts than it will resolve. Rather than nearly doubling Boulder’s population with no guarantees that the new residents will also work within the city, it would be much more effective to simply impose parking fees in all employment areas to reward car-pooling and pay for transit. Besides, with Boulder’s transportation, library and parks impact fees set so woefully low, service levels would be seriously degraded.
Because of its attractiveness, Boulder will never “solve” the affordable housing issue — more people will always want to live here than there is housing for, or whom the prices are affordable. So it makes no sense to heavily tax everyone to subsidize some affordable units, when, simply by chance, some people who qualify will get the units, and others will have to pay market prices. Promoting carriage houses and accessory units, although appealing to developers, makes equally little sense as these will be highly priced, just as now.
To achieve a higher level of housing affordability (not just meet some arbitrary percentage of some permanently affordable housing units) while still keeping Boulder livable, we will have to push new office, commercial and industrial development to other communities, and require development that does occur here to provide affordable housing for all employees, e.g. by “buying down” existing market rate housing. We should also require that all new residential development be permanently affordable. And Boulder should finally impose parking fees and impact fees so that the rest of us are not burdened by existing and new development. Sounds too tough? Then realize that your taxes may go up to subsidize the new development (and developers) while you suffer the impacts and your quality of life is reduced.

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