Steve Pomerance

My thanks to both the Daily Camera and the Denver Post for publishing my opinion piece in last Sunday’s editions. It was quite long; their indulgence was much appreciated. Also, apologies to former Denver Mayor Hancock; I misspelled his name. I received many emails on this, almost all in support of limiting growth in Colorado. One raised the concern that the “buy-down” program (exchanging down payment assistance for limiting future price increases) would add more housing units. I should have made it clear that this program targets existing units, so it won’t add more.   I thought I’d expand on what the 1,024 Coloradans said in the survey I discussed. The full survey is at  https://coloradosprawl.com/ polls/  and the article on it is at  www.snowbrains.com  entitled “Survey finds majority of Coloradans are unhappy with the state’s rapid population growth.”   Here are some of the survey’s questions:   “The U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates that C...

Colorado’s “housing crisis” is essentially unsolvable by simply building more market-rate housing, at least if we care about our quality of life here in Colorado. According to a 2023 survey of 1,000 Americans, discussed in a recent Forbes story, Denver took first place as the most desired place to live. Seventeen percent of the respondents picked it first; that represents 58 million people nationwide. Even if only 1 in 5 had the means to move here, that’s 11.6 million people, nearly tripling Colorado’s population. Do we want 2-3 times as many people in Colorado, with the attendant crowds, traffic jams, air pollution, water shortages, etc.? How about mandatory reservation systems requiring weeks-ahead planning just to visit mountain areas? Rocky Mountain National Park, Brainard Lake, Mt. Blue Sky, and Quandary Peak already require reservations. Great Sand Dunes may soon, as visitation has about doubled in the last 10 years. What about going skiing, but with even longer lift lines and bi...

Last Saturday, the Daily Camera had some useful commentary by the  Community Editorial Board  members on how citizens could better participate in city council meetings. These were stimulated by Boulder partnering with the National Civic League to run interviews and meetings and provide recommendations. I participated in the NCL process and found it quite illuminating. But in my opinion, the fundamental issue was avoided: For citizen participation to work, the basic relationship between the citizens who want to engage and the citizens who were elected to be engaged with needs to change. What’s missing is “collaboration” — council members and citizens need to “co-labor,” to jointly work together. This cannot be a top-down process; getting elected does not magically endow someone with superior skills or intelligence. When the council sees itself as apart from, more virtuous than or smarter than the citizens, this “collaboration” falls apart. Alternatively, when council member...

After my column on the Zenzinger/Kirkmeyer land use bill appeared two weeks ago, those legislators told me that the draft they sent me was just for my review and was not for publication. This was not clear to me in their original communication. Anyway, I apologized to them. And, whatever their bill’s flaws, it was way better than the latest “housing crisis” bill that I discuss here. Representatives Steven Woodrow and Iman Jodeh’s bill, HB24-1313, sets housing density standards for “transit areas,” those within a half mile of a transit corridor station. It first incentivizes this increase in density, but if the community doesn’t comply, it forces them to do it anyway. All of this will be supervised by Polis’s Department of Local Affairs. Their bill starts with the state demographer making a precise forecast of Colorado’s growth — “ONE MILLION SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED (more) PEOPLE BY 2050.” That’s about a 30% increase, around 1% per year compounded. This is obviously based on ...