Opinion: The disastrous ‘Family Friendly Vibrant Neighborhoods’ survey and future densification

I seldom get angry about political matters, since I generally focus on policies rather than personalities. But the October 17 city council session on the results of their flawed “Family Friendly Vibrant Neighborhoods” survey really got to me.

No surprise to me, a substantial majority of the survey respondents did not favor densification of their single-family neighborhoods. After all, people bought into these neighborhoods precisely because of their lack of overcrowding, large amounts of green space and quiet streets. So why would they want to convert to being dense, noisy, traffic-ridden, overdeveloped and overpopulated?

This serious lack of support apparently upset the plans of the “progressives” on the council to use the survey results to support their densification goals. So, they responded at the meeting by undercutting the survey, saying that it was not statistically valid. And, strangely, this view was not refuted by the city staff, who had put the survey out and administered it in the first place.

Why do the survey if you aren’t going to value the results? It was designed to look like a survey; that’s why many people (including me) reasonably expected that the council, given the survey’s clearly biased content and design, was going to use the statistics to validate their policy direction, which upset many of us. And then, when the results didn’t validate their policies, some council members disowned the results and claimed that it was just an attempt to get feedback.

It seems clear to me that these council members don’t really care about finding out what the citizens want. If they did, they would do a proper poll. That could easily be done by sending out letters to all the properties in the relevant areas describing (in an unbiased way) what is being considered for their area, with brief analyses of the pros and cons and the planning context, and then asking people to fill out online or paper response sheets, with a code to prevent duplication. Of course, then the council might have to really take people’s desires into account.

All of this brings up the bigger question about how much more growth the “progressives” want for Boulder. And what is their real policy objective, if it is anything more substantial than being “welcoming” or, more cynically, destroying the remaining willingness of many people in Boulder to work to preserve our quality of life? Or is this part of some deal with the YIMBYs and the developers? Given the council’s failure to require affordability of the housing resulting from the changes, my cynicism may be realism.

Here are some projections a friend did, based on real data, regarding the amount of infill growth already allowed in various areas of Boulder, plus numbers for additional areas under consideration: East Boulder Community Plan, Transit Area Village, CU South, Williams Village II, Alpine Balsam, and other infill is around 14,300 more units, or about a 30% increase in total units in Boulder. The Planning Reserve could add another approx. 6,700. And the Airport, if redeveloped, would potentially be another 2,000 or so. 

All this would total almost a 50% increase in the number of housing units in Boulder, without any of the densification of existing single-family neighborhoods that the “progressives” want to do. Isn’t that more than enough?

Then there are the very real impacts. Almost every time I drive somewhere in Boulder, I hit at least one intersection at Level of Service F, meaning waiting multiple light cycles. Traffic congestion follows a “hockey stick” curve; once an intersection gets congested, its LOS rapidly degenerates toward F. Transit won’t solve this problem, since it requires huge tax subsidies, paid for by the many, to operate for the relatively few riders. 

Our water supply is finite and will likely shrink further from the combination of drier and warmer weather and Colorado River Compact constraints. And the Open Space that makes Boulder so special will become further overcrowded from this massive increase in population, along with our rec centers and parks. Is this the “progressive” future we really want?

To be truly democratic, how about giving the residents in the various affected areas a vote? The council members could make their pitch to the residents as to why they want to densify their existing neighborhoods, but the residents would have the final say. Even better, require a two-thirds vote to up-zone and densify an area. Requiring a super-majority of residents to approve such a radical change would be fair since people bought into it based on its current zoning.

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