Opinion: The future of downtown Boulder


I went to the City Council meeting on Tuesday evening to ask the council to call up the decisions made by the Planning and Landmarks boards regarding the buildings that will replace the former Daily Camera offices. These buildings will occupy the block between Walnut and Pearl from 11th Street to roughly to where 10th Street would be. They will be precedent-setting for our downtown, but the decision process and the council’s struggles with whether to engage are symptomatic of the flaws in how we deal with our downtown.
There were a number of other people who also asked that this project be reviewed and that the final decisions be made by our elected officials, and not just the appointed boards. The council spent three hours (unprecedented in my experience) making their decision, 5-3, to not call it up. One council member recused himself for reasons not revealed, and the mayor acknowledged that he was happy that he wasn’t the deciding vote. The board decisions were also close: The Planning Board approval was 4-3 (actually closer than that, according to testimony by the chairperson), and the Landmarks Board was 3-2.
The result is that we will have buildings that will have major impacts on downtown in terms of increased in-commuting, parking demands, shading, loss of views, and less open areas. Such a proposal should have stimulated a real reconsideration of the whole planning process for downtown. Instead the majority of the council avoided full engagement and the associated opportunity to hear from citizens. So the deciding votes on the actual approvals ended up being a function of who was appointed to the two boards. One change and we would have had a different outcome.
To briefly and incompletely summarize the history of downtown planning, back in the dark ages, buildings could be built to any height without any real review. Then the voters amended the charter to limit height to 55 feed. Additional limits were imposed relative to available parking. More recently, density bonuses have been added for housing, on-site parking reduced, and last year a density bonus for office space was added! The process putting these bonuses and reduced requirements in place has been pretty much ad hoc, and without any real systemic look at their overall effect.
The result is that the underlying zoning limits, including the 1.7 Floor Area Ratio (the FAR is the ratio of building floor area to lot size; these buildings’ combined FAR is over 50 percent greater) and 38-foot height limit (these are 55 feet), no longer match what the City Council seems to want for downtown development, and are routinely avoided through bonuses. But what do the citizens want? Clearly the current excesses have not gained citizen support, as the testimony on Tuesday night confirmed once again.
Also, developers argue that they need to build significantly more than the underlying zoning allows so that they can recover their investments, which of course they made with the expectation that their requests for bonuses would be approved. The result of all the above is a high level of uncertainty for everyone, an ever-expanding, time-consuming and costly approval process, and larger buildings.
So where do we go from here? Do we in Boulder really agree with the proposition that “More is Better?” Do we really need to keep adding office space downtown just because businesses want to move here? Do we really want yet more tall buildings that block the views and shade the streets in the winter? Do we really expect that eliminating parking spaces will magically ensure that the thousands of new employees will ride the bus or bike or walk?
From my perspective, it would make a lot more sense to put all the effort that goes into reviewing individual buildings one by one into a comprehensive planning process that really involves the citizens, and that addresses these critical and overriding issues for the downtown as a whole. Then come up with detailed zoning, design, and use standards that lay out explicitly what is wanted and needed for the whole downtown area, so that we don’t destroy its human scale. Some flexibility could be reserved for extraordinary situations and to allow for some options, but as a rule, developers should have to build within the resulting limits and standards. Maybe then we could save our downtown.


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