Opinion: Bad land use bills abound from our Democratic-controlled Legislature

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use bill appeared two weeks ago, those legislators told me that the draft they sent me was just for my review and was not for publication.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 all sorts of assumptions, none of which the bill identifies. As I’ve discussed before, potentially enough people want and could afford to live here to possibly double Colorado’s population. In contrast, just our current births over deaths rate would lead to very slow growth, around 0.25% per year. That’s a quarter of the demographer’s 1% per year projection.

HB24-1313 sets its target “net density” at 40 units per acre for “transit areas.” This means dense, tightly spaced, multi-story apartments. The bill’s calculations do exempt some parcels, like heavy industry, flood plains, cemeteries, mobile home parks, etc. But the bill apparently does not exempt transit destinations, like schools, shopping and offices. These are just as important from a transportation perspective. Also, not exempting them will force required housing densities even higher for all the other parcels to meet the overall 40 units per acre requirement. 

The bill has blinders on regarding water. It looks only at the last three years’ water supply to determine adequacy! It doesn’t require any long-term forecasting. Apparently, the Colorado River’s dire situation hasn’t penetrated. If, as I expect, the trans-mountain diversions that supply a lot of the water to the Front Range from Larimer County down to Pueblo are partially dried up, there are going to be a lot of thirsty people; there will be very limited landscape left to xeriscape.

The bill also completely ignores transit’s limitations. The jobs to which the people who live in the bill’s “transit centers” commute may not be easily accessible from these transit lines. But the bill makes no effort to promote car-pooling, which is far more efficient in many of our diffuse metro areas. Also, because RTD is mostly tax-funded, a higher percentage of people using it will require higher RTD taxes. 

As to housing affordability, the bill does mention inclusionary requirements, linkage fees (though the bill doesn’t seem to understand how they work), limitations on short-term rentals, etc. But it puts almost no focus on the details, so all this appears to be an add-on to the basic “densify” approach. It also gratuitously focuses on giving away state money as grants, even though the bill ultimately would force all the regulated areas to comply anyway. Thus, the grants are unnecessary, and appear to be just a political ploy.

Another bill, HB24-1107, is a not-so-veiled attempt to remove citizens’ ability to challenge local land use decisions in court. It apparently makes the citizens liable for the government’s and/or the developer’s legal costs if the citizens do not prevail. But developers do not have to pay citizens’ legal costs if the developers lose. Worse, the bill allows construction to continue until the case gets through court; this could take months or years, by which time the development might be fully built. All this makes coping with the problems HB24-1313 creates even harder. Also, HB24-1107 is unnecessary; the current case-specific laws in CRS 13-17-102 et seq work fine.

Governor Polis, Senate President Fenberg, and House Speaker McCluskie ought to put a halt to these ill-considered pro-market-rate housing, pro-developer bills. They need to do in-depth objective analyses of alternative futures for Colorado’s housing situation, including evaluations of demand factors, price elasticity, land availability, long-term water supply, and successes and failures of other states’ housing approaches. 

Then they should focus on concepts that preserve local control, and do not trash our communities or overuse our natural areas: jobs-housing linkage fees, inclusionary zoning requirements, housing buy-down programs and zoning that balances jobs and housing. Quality of life, not quantity of bodies!

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