Opinion: Middle-income housing requires math, not maps
Boulder City Council is meeting on Tuesday to consider how to address the loss of middle-income households in Boulder. To make sense of their material, I needed to make explicit some implicit assumptions and conclusions: The council’s goal apparently is to try to have Boulder’s income distribution approximate that of the county or state, to keep from becoming more elitist. The proposed solution is to ensure adequate affordable housing for a large segment of the population. Boulder’s housing programs will no longer just be about providing for “low-” and “moderate-” income people; the target population will now include the “middle” — households of 80 percent to 150 percent of Area Median Income (AMI). So the housing programs will potentially serve the majority of residents. It would not be equitable to use general revenues for funding this middle-income program, since that would be taxing and then subsidizing people in similar financial situations. And because “median” means half a...