Opinion: It’s time for the council to ask the neighbors who live there

Maybe the truth might be too uncomfortable to hear. I’m talking about the latest densification proposals being bandied about at recent Boulder City Council meetings. Last year there were some relatively innocuous moves to up-zone a few areas to allow for a bit more housing. But now the push is on to densify many single-family neighborhoods. I’m not talking about a few limited-size accessory dwelling units (ADUs), but wholesale changes in the zoning itself to reduce minimum lot sizes that would multiply the number of houses and people.

Let’s be clear — the “progressive” majority doesn’t seem to really care about making housing truly more affordable. If they did, they would have already raised the percentage of permanently affordable units required for new developments from the current 25% (some or all of which can be off site) to 50% on site. This is the minimum required to even come close to maintaining our economic mix of citizens. And they would have increased the jobs-housing linkage fee paid by new employment development from the current $30 per square foot for office space to what’s needed, which is multiples higher.

But apparently, some progressives’ agenda is not just up-zoning to the limits of the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan by reducing minimum lot sizes. It’s also changing the rules by including “open space within neighborhoods,” like parks, schools, roads, etc., in the acreage used to calculate units per acre. That way the current density is diluted, so more houses can be added within the Comp Plan’s maximums.

The BVCP is an agreement between the City and the County. It’s not a state law that can be enforced by ordinary citizens. So, it’s up to the county commissioners to disagree and force the “progressives” to comply with the BVCP’s intent, assuming this council discussion goes further than just words.

It’s likely that this notion will initially only be applied in a few neighborhoods, like the ones near high-frequency transit that HB24-1313, Housing in Transit-Oriented Communities, focuses on and, if passed, mandates a housing density of 40 units per acre. (Single-family zoning is typically just a fraction of that.) The difference is that the legislators averaged the residential density over all areas within one-quarter mile of such transit (plus areas within a half mile of transit stations). But the council progressives’ proposal is targeted geographically, and not averaged over large areas.

City staff claims that Boulder, once the zoning for the Transit Village expansion and East Boulder Subcommunity Plan is finished, will meet HB24-1313’s requirements. City staff calculated that over 146,000 housing units could be built just within the area impacted by HB24-1313, if all that land were developed to its maximum allowed residential level. Add that to all the housing units allowed in the rest of the city, and we’d be talking about at least tripling Boulder’s population.

Not that this will likely happen here, because a lot of that land is already in use for shopping, offices, etc. But apparently the folks at the Legislature didn’t consider that. Nor did they look at the huge demand for housing in Colorado, now that remote work has become so popular. If they had, they would have faced reality — that, just as became clear in Boulder decades ago, demand will far outstrip any attempts to meet it that would be tolerable in terms of quality of life and of the environment.

Anyway, the idea of the council actually polling the neighbors in an unbiased and informed manner is now a joke, given the City’s distorted polling in the last few years. Fully informing people would require acknowledging that complete information still has not been developed about long-term future housing demand and about price inelasticity (how little difference adding housing will make on prices or rents), showing them good data on the negative effects on air quality, water supply and noise pollution, discussing how future planned business growth will make the affordable housing situation worse, revealing the lack of impact fees to pay for transportation improvements, parks and new rec centers, quantifying CU’s unbounded growth, etc., etc.

Asking every voting resident of the targeted neighborhoods what they want in an unbiased and informed manner is also fraught with peril. People might say that they like their neighborhoods the way they are, and that they moved there with the very reasonable expectation that the government would not destroy their quality of life just to meet those politicians’ political whims through gratuitous densification.

Suppose these neighbors do say “no.” Then what?

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