Opinion: It’s time to separate planning from development


I read in Wednesday’s Camera that the Boulder planning staff is proposing a moratorium on new buildings over 35 feet, except in downtown and Boulder Junction. They are also proposing to implement jobs-housing linkage fees, through which business development would pay for affordable housing for lower-income employees. And they are pushing for form-based zoning, which, if done properly, should produce much better design and, more importantly, eliminate most of the “let’s cut a deal” bargaining where a developer gets more height in exchange for providing some alleged “community benefit.”
Pardon my cynicism, but I am highly suspicious that this will amount to anything. There are any number of 55-foot buildings already approved or in the review process in Downtown, the Boulder Junction area, on 28th Street, and elsewhere. Will all these be put on hold? Linkage fees only count if they are high enough, and Boulder’s existing fee is a tiny fraction of what is required. Form-based zoning only matters if it includes a meaningful height limit.
Our mayor is already trying to push this back, apparently into the meaningless ritual of the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan update; simply put, the BVCP policies have no force of law. The great thing would be for those council members on the fence about these issues to actually take a stand and push for stronger requirements that will really make a difference, rather than once again just tweaking things around the edges. People will remember this come election time.
All these ideas have been around for years; linkage fees have been in place in many cities for decades. The time to implement them (and net-zero requirements for transportation impacts, full cost impact fees, etc.) would have been during the development lull in the recent recession. That way, when the building boom came, we would have had in place tools to ensure great design, maintain view corridors, prevent traffic increases, provide adequate affordable housing, and fund our infrastructure needs. But that horse is long gone from the barn: Boulder Junction, Google, the Camera building replacement, etc., are all but cast in concrete. Playing catch-up is better than nothing, but the real opportunity was wasted.
The staff is also proposing to put on hold the “Envision East Arapahoe” project. That’s important, as this project came across more like a planning grad student’s thesis project than the least impactful solution to real needs, like office space for hospital-related activities. This “hold” should also be applied to the city’s Comprehensive Housing Strategy. It has many problems, including that its goal statements are variously vague, overreaching, unrealistic, and/or under-researched. This project is simply not ready for prime time.
If the council really wants to fix what is broken, it needs to deal on a more fundamental level. Physical planning focuses on more growth, as if that were synonymous with progress. But when I look back over Boulder’s last half-century, the big decisions that have shaped Boulder all restricted growth: the Blue Line that limits building up the mountainsides, the Open Space program that set physical boundariesfor the city, and the charter’s 55-foot height limit that helped protect our views. The Pearl Street Mall and design guidelines preserved Downtown from overdevelopment (at least until now) and the Boulder Creek Path kept that riparian area accessible.
We need a planning department that focuses on sustainability, resiliency, and quality of life. This involves understanding the interactions and doing the quantitative analysis, not just writing goal statements or pushing nice sounding concepts. For example, advocating for more housing without limiting employment growth or requiring development to pay for its impacts just leads to a bigger city with increased traffic, stressed services, and higher taxes. And it will produce no real improvement in housing affordability because the increased demand from new employees will push prices up. Besides, adding large primary employers has risks. If one of them goes stale or threatens to leave, as has happened before and will happen again, then there will be pressure to save them rather than letting them go, creatingspace for the next startup.
There’s a lot more to say about this. But, bottom line, it’s time to separate the city’s planning and development functions. This new department should not be tied to the development business, either in training or in function. Then it would be free to communicate openly with all citizens equally and devise long-term solutions that will allow its “constituency,” the whole community, to thrive.


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