Opinion: The future of Boulder — looking at the big picture


Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Boulder is supposed to be one of the most educated cities in the country, so you’d think that we wouldn’t just commit the same follies as every other high tech town. But we’ve been headed that way for a long time.
Boulder’s own Comprehensive Plan states that Boulder is an “employment center,” and for the last quarter of a century our government has encouraged jobs to be added as fast as the space could get built. Even Boulder Junction, started in 2004, would add about as many new jobs as new residents. Boulder has supported spending state tax credits to encourage companies to come to town. Boulder’s city manager unilaterally applied to have much of east Boulder designated an “opportunity zone,” which grants unnecessary huge tax breaks for developers in this supposedly “economically depressed” area.
Affordable housing programs have been implemented, but they couldn’t keep up with the demand, both because the affordable requirements for housing developments were too weak and because new business development was not required to provide affordable housing for its workers who needed it. And the University of Colorado continued to push much of its housing needs onto the community.
Recently, the City Council added a real jobs-housing linkage fee to begin to charge new employment development for affordable workers’ housing. But the fee is less than a quarter of the real cost, so it doesn’t make enough difference.
Our transportation planning failed to recognize our increasing congestion, because the measurement system was so limited that it didn’t pick up the expansion of the rush hour into more of the morning and afternoon, and it also failed to measure all but a few arterial streets. It’s taken until now for there to be a serious discussion about charging auto drivers to pay for transit, van pools, etc. — an approach that actually could mostly solve our transportation congestion.
Boulder’s affordable housing program is currently adding about 30 permanently affordable housing units for every 100 new units. At this rate, Boulder could grow to over 180,000 people and our permanently affordable housing percentage would still be well below 20%. But according to the recent city linkage fee studies, no one even at the current area median income can afford new market rate housing. In other words, over 50% of the people now in Boulder couldn’t live here if they had to live in that new housing.
The current discussion about adding housing for in-commuters by increasing density in single-family neighborhoods is completely unrealistic. To house all our current in-commuters plus existing residents, it would require converting essentially all the houses in our single-family neighborhoods to triplexes and quadplexes, which many commuters wouldn’t want to live in anyway, and it would mostly be unaffordable because of costs and market forces.
The council tried to limit unwanted development in the opportunity zone by accelerating an update to the city’s use tables, which adjusts permitted uses all over the city. But no time was allowed for the necessary market, economic and impact analyses. So this revision should be limited to the opportunity zone, and proper planning should be done before revisions are considered for other areas. This includes the proposed increase in high-density efficiency living units, because they are not what commuters want. And more work is needed on office growth limits; I already found one mistake.
The city’s site review process is still too open-ended; it’s very hard for the Planning Board to turn down big development proposals. So when Google looks for more room than their 330,000-square-foot complex provides, they may push for some other sites to build on. The use tables changes may help temporarily, but the next council could easily reverse course. And tech companies’ expansions will just bump up housing prices further, as happened in other rapidly growing high-tech areas. So we need some permanent fixes.
Bottom line: It simply doesn’t make sense to follow along the same path as every other dense, unaffordable, traffic-congested, high-tech metropolis. Fortunately, this Council has made some tentative starts on avoiding this fate. But let’s not kid ourselves that the work is done. There are many more steps to be taken, especially ones involving the citizens. More on that next time.

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