Opinion: ‘Inclusivity’ could just mean intolerable density


Why are we chasing Denver’s density?
A friend asked me what I knew about Boulder’s plans for increasing density. She was concerned about the push for Boulder being “inclusive,” a catchall phrase currently bandied about that means pretty much whatever the person hearing or reading it imagines. Certainly there has been a lot of verbiage about “densifying,” like forcing neighborhoods to accept multi-unit buildings or high-rise developments right next to or replacing single-family houses, schemes that the current Boulder City Council seems to have abandoned, at least temporarily, because of public outcry and anger. So I can understand her concern.
Since at some level this is a numbers game, I did a bit of research comparing Boulder to Denver. Obviously, Boulder is smaller than Denver, but I thought the ratios would be interesting:
Per the 2018 Boulder Community Profile, our city occupies 27.3 square miles, had a population of 108,507 people, and had 100,148 jobs when the data was gathered, which I presume was around 2017. The 2040 projections have our population growing to 123,000, and jobs to grow to 117, 000 over that period.
Let’s compare that to Denver. According to the city of Denver planning department, in 2017 Denver is about 112 square miles (not counting Denver International Airport), and had a population of 705,000 people and 584,000 jobs. They project a population of 894,000 by 2040 and job numbers to be 720,000, without expanding the city limits.
The first thing of interest to me was the jobs-to-population ratio, since clearly Denver has a massive in-commuting headache, and people fantasize about Boulder somehow transplanting all its in-commuters to residences inside the city limits.
Denver’s jobs-to-population ratio is 0.83. And Boulder’s is 0.92. In other words, Boulder already has a worse in-commuting situation than Denver, at least in relative terms. Boulder’s projections have our 2040 jobs-to-population ratio getting even worse, to 0.95. (By the way, had Boulder stuck with the outcome of the 1993 Integrated Planning Project, which four out of five survey respondents supported, our jobs-to-population ratio would have been a tolerable 0.8.)
Denver does have a higher population density, about 6,294 people per square mile, versus Boulder’s of 3,974. But of course, Denver has massive high-rise development with no charter height rules, like Boulder’s 55-foot limit. But if Boulder became more “inclusive” and, for example, somehow got all the 62,000 in-commuters to live here, we’d have a population around 200,000, assuming the jobs-to-population ratio of the whole Denver metro area at about 2-to-3 (last time I checked) and accounting for commuting University of Colorado students and assuming very few more jobs. That would give us a population density of roughly 7,300 people per square mile, approaching Denver’s 2040 projection of 7,982. So if that’s your picture of inclusivity, there’s your future.
Of course, reality would impinge. Many of the in-commuters would not be willing to give up their single-family houses in the surrounding area for condo life, so we’d have to convert some currently undeveloped land (parks? open space?) to single-family. So we’d be lower density, but have sprawled out, insulting all the people who worked very hard to keep Boulder compact and surrounded by a greenbelt.
Instead of taking that unpleasant path, let’s try some out-of-the-box thinking, like seeing if we can get other nearby communities to create some room for Boulder businesses, especially those that have expansion in their futures. Louisville is currently subsidizing the re-use of the old StorageTek site, so clearly there’s interest in having a multi-centric business structure, rather than having Boulder be the commuting hub, with the attendant traffic jams, skyrocketing housing prices, and overuse of city assets, like open space.
Another opportunity still available is to take advantage of the “opportunity zone” debacle and use it to redevelop Diagonal Plaza, which allegedly was the city manager’s original motivation for grasping at the federal opportunity zone designation. That is one of the few sites in Boulder where some medium-rise residential development could be combined with local services and shopping. It would probably take using the city’s urban renewal authority, plus condemnation powers, plus getting some of Boulder’s private planning expertise involved. But two and three story buildings, with good spacing, landscaping, and real trees (not Boulder Junction’s dense, monolithic sterility) could be done, and the opportunity zone’s tax scam could help pay for a lot of permanently-affordable housing.
But given the frustration that I’ve heard from Council members about how things are being run at the city, the next Council will have to work really hard to get any of this done.

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