Opinion: Dealing with the ‘housing crisis’


For the last 50 years at least, Boulder has had a “housing crisis.” Our housing has always been more expensive than in our neighboring cities. We started with a fantastic natural setting and a stable economy because of CU and the federal labs. Boulder’s desirability increased with the Blue Line preventing development on the mountain backdrop, our open space limiting urban sprawl, and our 55-foot height limit preserving views.
But over that time period, we went from a town with 30th Street being dirt and a turkey farm at the Williams Village site, to a booming employment center with jobs growing faster than housing. The current high-tech craze, exemplified by Google, escalated the already rapid increase in housing prices, with multimillion dollar cash offers, and the scraping of modest single-family homes and local service businesses and replacing them with McMansions, high-rise apartments, and giant office and hotel complexes.
The city’s studies have shown that new, market-rate housing, whether owner-occupied or rental, is now too expensive even for people significantly over the area median income. So if our goal is to maintain something like our population’s current economic diversity, over 50 percent of all new housing will need to be permanently price-controlled, including granny flats and garage apartments.
In addition, the continued job growth, combined with the demand from people who would just like to move here, means that the market is insatiable — there is far too much demand to have any reasonable increase in supply make much difference in the price of housing. Simply put, building more market-priced housing won’t help much at all.
Some have argued that building more housing here would decrease our commuting traffic. But a lot of the people who work here want single-family houses, which is why they live in the east county where those houses can still be bought at relatively reasonable prices. And there is no significant amount of vacant land left here to build them, even including the Planning Reserve, northeast of U.S. 36, at least not relative to the demand. Also, most auto trips are not commute trips, and so instead of our morning and evening rush hours, we’d have continuous traffic jams. We have to face the truth — we can’t absorb much more growth without having things get really unpleasant, like in other big cities. (And, in any case, the City Council should require new development to fully mitigate its traffic impacts, to keep congestion from gridlocking us.)
The idea of a “regional solution” has also been proposed, meaning asking the other cities to absorb the housing demand, while we get all the jobs. But they wouldn’t even consider this without some contentious tax-sharing plan. Far better would be to have businesses that want to expand move to these other cities, and allow Boulder to return to its roots as a place for startups. This would both reduce commuting and automatically share the tax benefits, such as those might be.
“Community land trusts” have been proposed as the magic bullet. But the only local model, the Colorado Community Land Trust in Denver, depended on getting free land, which doesn’t exist here, and free water and sewer tap fees, a cost to existing residents and businesses.
The current move by the City Council to increase the required percentage of permanently affordable housing in new residential development is a good first step. But the maximum they can extract, given the economics, is about 25 percent, less than half what is needed just to stay even on economic diversity. To get above 50 percent will require significantly increasing the jobs-housing linkage fee charged to new commercial development. The council recently set this at a pathetically low $12 a square foot, about a third of what the residential developers will pay, and a tiny fraction of what is needed. Obviously, this needs to be increased.
Once we have dealt with new development, we can address existing development. We can down-zone areas that have existing affordable housing, and that will preserve some. But ultimately, we will have to decide whether we want to spend a lot of our money over a long time to “buy down” existing housing — paying the owners to accept deed restrictions or other legal devices that would hold the price increases down to around inflation levels. But this is a decision that should be put to the voters once the council has taken all these other steps. After all, it’s our city, and we should decide what kind of city it’s going to be.


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