Opinion: Disrupting both our growth management system and our neighborhoods

By the time you read this, the City Council will have decided whether to repeal Boulder’s Residential Growth Management System. This piece of our city code addresses how many housing units are allowed to be built in a year. It has significant exemptions, like for affordable housing units and whole projects with at least 35% affordable units. Thus, it provides an incentive for developers to include more affordable units.

The reason this is an issue is that the Legislature, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the “housing crisis” required them to pass a law last session that forbids local governments from limiting the annual number of residential building permits. They called such restrictions “anti-growth laws.”

But the council’s concern is misguided: Boulder’s RGMS is NOT in violation of this state law, simply because our current RGMS exempts affordable housing units. According to BRC 9-14-8 “Exemptions,” the City can approve an UNLIMITED number of permanently affordable units by right so long as there are no more than 40 units per project. Therefore, the RGMS does NOT “limit… the number of development permits or building permit applications for residential development,” to quote the language of the state law.

So, for example, if in 2024 the City got 100 project applications for projects with 40 permanently affordable units each, a total of 4,000 units, the City could legally approve them. That’s multiple times the current numerical limit. (And by the way, it would have no effect on future numerical limits under the RGMS.)

Therefore, even with the Legislature’s prohibition, Boulder could still allow the construction of thousands of affordable units in a given year, right up to the capacity of the Planning staff to handle the application load and developers to find places to build them. 

What Boulder does do is limit the number of non-affordable units, which ought to be what the folks who cry “housing crisis” want. Unfortunately, if you yell loudly enough, all sense seems to go out the window.

This also applies to the current Legislative push to allow accessory dwelling units everywhere in the state’s metro areas, without regard to impacts and inadequate parking. Worse, when combined with the other state push to forbid occupancy limits, the damage will be awesome — lots filled to within a few feet of the boundaries with housing units jammed with roomers. 

The state’s fundamental failures include the following, the way I see it:

The state has not done any real assessment of total demand to live in Colorado by people from outside the state. No one has a real clue as to whether a few hundred thousand housing units will “solve the housing crisis,” or whether the state would be forced to double or triple its housing stock (and population).

The concept of price inelasticity seems to have escaped everyone. If we added a few hundred thousand units, would prices drop significantly or very little, if at all? Or would it take a couple of million units?

The biggest contextual issue is whether any of the decision-makers care about what Coloradans really want. As I’ve pointed out before, the 2022 Rasmussen Reports poll says that 61% of voters say Colorado has developed too much, and only 8% say too little. If that is a fair representation, why are the legislators and the governor pursuing a build, build, build approach, and not paying attention to these concerns?

This goes to the issue of water supplies. As I have said many times, much of the Front Range, which is where the ADU bill is mostly focused, may lose some or all of its Colorado River water, since current flows are not adequate to meet all the prior rights. And other infrastructure (roads, parks, schools, libraries, etc.) has financial limits since no one seems to want to require impact fees so that developers’ excess profits go to addressing these needs.

The ADU bill has further problems in how it addresses setbacks, PUD developments, on-street parking, solar access, etc. And it apparently allows ADUs as big as the existing house. The bill does not even require a portion of these ADUs to be affordable. And no one seems to pay attention to the costs of adding plumbing, kitchens, etc., plus the costs of building with limited street access.

Finally, there are other approaches that work better than ADUs and with fewer neighborhood impacts, including inclusionary zoning, jobs-housing linkage fees, rent controls, and down payment assistance combined with future price restrictions, all of which are apparently being ignored. 

For more on all this, check out my comments on the accessory dwelling unit bill draft.

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