Editorial: Boulder County and cities must address housing costs

It shouldn’t take a research paper to figure out that the reason the cost of living is driving workers and young families out of Boulder County is one thing. It’s not the cost of food, or clothing, or utilities, or other essentials of living that makes it unaffordable to live here.

It is the cost of housing.

Yet the governing bodies in Boulder County have taken only token steps to address the shortage of affordable, attainable and workforce housing their own policies have created. It’s much too little, and too late. A recent study concluded that Boulder needs an additional 10,700 housing units by 2032, with amost 9,000 of them affordable. Longmont, with a similar-size population, needs 6,020 more housing units in the same period.

Instead, government officials have focused on raising the minimum wage to projected heights that are unworkable.

The result, if the current and proposed ordinances of the County of Boulder and City of Boulder remain in effect, is that Boulder County will be a mecca for high-income earners and wealthy retired folks, at the expense of small businesses, and even employees.

But the charm of Niwot and Gunbarrel’s small businesses will likely be lost, as commercial space will be limited to office space and high-priced restaurants.

How did we get here? In the 1970s, the City of Boulder adopted the Danish Plan, which limited residential development to 3% per year. Boulder County adopted a Comprehensive Plan, and also led the effort to create a Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan. The idea was to preserve the identity of cities, including the unincorporated community of Niwot, by creating open space buffers that limited housing development, and pushed commercial development to the cities.

Restrictive housing policies throughout Colorado led the legislature to limit how much cities and counties can do, and several have had to revise their ordinances to comply with state law.

It shouldn’t take that, but it did. Essentially Boulder County and the cities have adopted the ultimate “NIMBY” approach to housing needs. If you’re not already here, good luck, unless you are rich.

Full disclosure – I was involved in Niwot’s effort to shield itself from Boulder and Longmont, when in the 1980s, the Niwot Community Association negotiated with Boulder County to agree to take approximately 73 more housing units through the Transferable Development Rights (TDR) program, on the condition that they be transferred by the owners of farmland surrounding Niwot, to land adjacent to existing Niwot subdivisions. I also served on the Boulder County Planning Commission from 1993 to 2000, when we approved many TDR transfers.

It worked really well for its intended purpose, preventing Boulder and Longmont from swallowing up Niwot. The problem is that commercial development in the cities had no such limitations, and as a result, the cities have welcomed businesses with open arms, adopting the mantra that “more is better.”

The result is that people who are not high-earners, such as teachers, firefighters, law enforcement personnel, food service workers and retail workers can no longer afford the housing costs in Boulder County. Just ask the next one you run into where they live, and if they do live in Boulder County, whether they got in when housing prices were reasonable.

Currently, these workers share housing costs where allowed by law, or more often, they move to Erie, Frederick, Firestone, Dacono, Fort Lupton, Berthoud and north Denver suburbs to live. The result is more traffic, more pollution, more wear and tear on roads, and lesser quality of life due to the hours lost in commuting.

Efforts of organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and churches, which try to bring affordable housing to the county, are met with roadblocks from outdated land use regulations, and Comprehensive Plan provisions.

While some cities have begun imposing fees on market rate housing developments to go towards building affordable housing, or have required developers to build a certain percentage of affordable housing units, there is nowhere near enough such housing to meet the needs.

Raising the minimum wage in unincorporated Boulder County to $25 per hour by 2030 is not the answer. The cities of Longmont, Louisville, Lafayette and Superior appear to have rejected Boulder County’s effort to get everyone in the Boulder County Consortium of Cities to go along with Boulder County. Only the City of Boulder appears poised to raise the minimum wage drastically over the next several years, in a misguided effort to give every adult worker a living wage. The result will likely be the closure of many small businesses in Boulder who simply cannot afford to pay those rates.

The former Colterra restaurant property at 210 Franklin Street in Niwot sits empty seven years after a fire. When 1914 House in Niwot closed last spring, one of the reasons cited by the owner was the rising cost of everything, including the minimum wage projections for the future. Other restaurants and retail shops are also struggling to survive. They don’t need a drastic rise in minimum wages on top of increased taxes, insurance and utility costs.

What to do? Change housing regulations to allow more housing immediately. Focus on affordable, attainable and workforce housing. Remove barriers to creation of such housing. Limit new commercial development in Boulder County. Get busy updating the comprehensive plans as a priority – not as a several-year project. Stop raising the minimum wage until you have a consensus among all of Boulder County.

Quit spending staff time and energy at Boulder County Department of Community Planning and Permitting on moratoriums and other land use matters where there is no public opposition.

Only then will we believe that the governing bodies in Boulder County are actually serious about traffic congestion, climate change, limiting pollution, and equity.