Steve Pomerance

The Denver Post recently carried an opinion column by state Senators Barbara Kirkmeyer and Rachel Zenzinger discussing their “response to Colorado’s housing crisis.” Their commendable bi-partisan effort put in more thought than much of the discussion to date. But they ran into the same problems that others have: What is the source of the problem? How big is it? What should we require to be done? How do you respond to Coloradans who don’t want a lot more growth? Their draft Bill hinges on how to define “housing needs.” The problem is that the various legitimate possible definitions are very far apart numerically. For example, per a Forbes survey, 17% of respondents nationwide said that the Denver area would be their first choice to move to. That’s around 57 million people. Even if only one in ten of them had the resources to do it, they would about double Colorado’s population. Should we immediately double our housing supply? Colorado’s births over deaths statistics paint a much differe...

From 1950 to 1960, Boulder’s population doubled from around 20,000 to almost 40,000. This led to Boulder’s most important actions to preserve our natural surroundings: the Blue Line, which limited the City to providing water only below a certain altitude and thereby preserved our mountain backdrop; the Open Space program, which bought land to protect its natural qualities and the species that live there; and the 55-foot building height limit, which allowed us to see above our human-made developments and enjoy the views of the sky and the Flatirons. (Unfortunately, CU is not subject to Boulder’s zoning laws, and so builds as high as it wants.) We now have a population of over 108,000 people, almost triple the 1960 population level. And we are not alone. The Denver metro area has gone from just over 800,000 residents in 1960 to nearly 3 million now, over three and a half times as many. The earth’s population grew from around 3 billion in 1960 to over 8 billion, and could hit 10 billion i...