Steve Pomerance

As Boulder’s election season cranks up, there is a lot of noise around Boulder’s sacred cow of affordable housing. Fast-growth candidates seem to assert that building more market rate housing will somehow solve “the problem.” Slow-growth candidates seem to be more measured and consider other dimensions to the issue. But the problem is still ill-defined: Is this something that can actually be solved, or a concern that will persist irrespective of the actions taken, or a surrogate for other agendas, or what? Leaving aside this lack of clarity, the main difficulty we face is that our current affordable housing program relies financially to a large extent on growth of one kind or another. Each new housing development must provide 25% on-site affordable units or pay fees-in-lieu for off-site units. Business development pays jobs-housing linkage fees that cover a bit less than a quarter of the cost of providing housing for workers who need it. A minor portion comes from local taxes and ...

According to the 2018 Boulder Community Profile, since 2000 job growth has been about 50% faster than residential. Excluding kids and retired folks, jobs likely grew at more than double the rate for resident workers. We now have well over 60,000 in-commuters. As a result, traffic congestion has dramatically increased. Unless we make some significant changes, it will just get worse faster, because we have exceeded the capacity of almost all our intersections. Even secondary streets are now heavily congested. Water, Boulder’s prized resource, may finally come under pressure. We get a significant portion of our supply from the Colorado River via the Big Thompson project. Given the multi-decade drought induced by climate change and the Colorado River Compact constraints, at some point, probably sooner than later, we will be forced either to buy out farmers’ water rights or live with a lot less. More people means more big buildings, more views blocked, more open opace trampled, more ...