Tag: Daily Camera

Boulder: 250,000 or Bust

Boulder has a housing problem. If you own your home, and everyone you’re close to here owns their homes, it can seem like Someone Else’s Problem. Or maybe an abstract problem to be solved in your spare time. Or maybe it’s not even a problem — just an unfortunate reality. When you rent, and are surrounded by other renters, it can feel like everyone is just waiting and wondering if they’re about to be sent into economic exile by the next rent increase or employment gap.

A couple of years ago I was at dinner with a group of younger professional types. The topic of housing came up. Those who’d bought condos were giddy — their “investment” was growing by double digits each year! Those renting were despondent. They felt like they’d missed their chance to stay here and be part of the community. It was an uncomfortable microcosm of Boulder’s housing wealth divide, playing out over years instead of decades. We quickly moved on to less divisive topics, but the divisions remained.

There are tens of thousands members of our community who don’t live here. Many would like to, but instead they drive into the city every day. We should invite them to spend the night. People working here should have the option of living here. We can do it without building on Open Space, and without building anything more than 55 — or even 38 — feet tall. If we want to, we can make most of the new housing owner occupied and permanently affordable to middle income folks, and we can do it without a mountain of public money.

However, we can’t do it without changing the city.

We can’t create affordability on a grand scale by moving money from one group of people to another. As He Who Shall Not Be Named has often informed Council: $100,000 per home to make 10,000 affordable homes is a billion dollars, or $10,000 per resident of the city! No linkage fee or tax or city bond can raise that kind of cash. It’s taken Open Space 50 years to spend its first billion.

But we can create massive amounts of durable affordability by allowing people to live modestly and share. Instead of a 5000 square foot monster home, we could allow five 1000 square foot apartments. Instead of a 3 people in a million dollar house on a $500,000 lot, we could have 12 people in five $200,000 flats, with each household paying another $100,000 for land. These numbers are rough, but some version of this strategy can make as much middle income housing as we care to have. And unlike an ADU, this density bonus is big enough that permanent affordability can be required, and still have building more housing be the most profitable option. If we did this on 10,000 single family lots, we could house 50,000 commuting households and put half of the city’s housing outside of the speculative market forever. Low income housing would still need financial support, but this strategy drastically reduces the funding required per home. It also preserves scarce public funds for helping those who actually need it.

We could do this, and we’d be much better stewards of the environment. Instead of long commutes to big houses, many folks might not drive at all, and would live in small homes built to Boulder’s stringent energy efficiency standards. City tax revenues would increase. Mass transit could be convenient and affordable. People who are already part of our community could be part of our civic life. Immigrants might actually feel welcome here. Most people wouldn’t have to worry about being priced out. A Boulder of 250,000 would still be an exclusive enclave — as any desirable place with a population cap must be — but we could choose something other than wealth as the criteria for inclusion.

This wouldn’t be a concrete jungle — it’s the same big houses we’re getting now, on the same big lots, on the same tree-lined streets. But instead of sheltering isolated millionaires, they’d be filled with people who want to share the city. Who would you prefer scraped your house?

We could do this, but we probably won’t. As the capital creeps in and sterilizes this place completely, remember that it was a choice. Remember that we chose to preserve our zoning rather than our community.

Zane Selvans wanders the Earth by bicycle with a laptop, liberating climate and energy data.

On the Politics of Civic Engagement

Boulder faces an interesting decision in the wake of an Ignite Boulder talk by Code for America’s Becky Boone, exhorting a relatively young, tech-savvy audience to engage in the city’s civic sphere. Some have objected to her use of profanity, but given the positive response of the 21 and over crowd and the content of past Ignite talks, these concerns are overblown. Daily Camera columnist Steve Pomerance and neighborhood blogger Kay MacDonald have tried to level a more substantive criticism: they feel that Boone’s presentation was pro-growth, and that such advocacy would be inappropriate for even an off-duty city consultant.

I’ve watched the talk repeatedly, and transcribed it word-for-word.  Boone clearly takes no such stance.

She highlights the accessibility and value of participating in our local democracy, and gives a couple of positive examples: the Fairview High Net Zero Club’s campaign to implement a grocery bag fee, and an unidentified citizen group gathering signatures for a fall ballot measure whose content is unmentioned. She also asks her audience their thoughts on whether Boulder’s housing issues result from too many jobs, or insufficient housing — a question that’s been raised by Boulder Housing Partners commissioner Dick Harris, among others.

None of these statements is political advocacy.

Rather, the political content of Ms. Boone’s presentation resides with her choice of audience. The Ignite crowd and Boulder’s startup community are younger and newer to Boulder than those traditionally engaged in city governance. They’re also probably more likely to be renters. Despite the city’s laudable efforts to recruit representative citizen working groups, these demographics have been woefully underrepresented in our housing policy process.  We know this because we’ve collected demographic data at the city’s housing events. Engaging the Ignite Boulder audience makes our discussion more representative of our citizenry. This is good for our democracy.  It also has political implications.

By definition, rallying a disinterested population to participate dilutes the power of those who are already engaged. To their credit, and despite this difficult set of political incentives, the city has prioritized “developing new approaches and tools that support more inclusive, transparent, collaborative, and interactive community engagement” in the development of our Comprehensive Housing Strategy. This is exactly the job that Becky Boone was hired to do, and which she has apparently done a bit too well for the comfort of some incumbent interests.

We now have a choice, and it’s an unavoidably political choice.  Do we want to cultivate a representative democracy in Boulder that proactively seeks input from as broad a population as possible, or would we prefer a narrowly targeted discourse that is intended, through its choice of media and venues, to preserve the status quo?

If we choose to limit our communications and data collection to serve incumbent interests, then we must admit that Boulder has become a fundamentally conservative place. The choice to collect or avoid data or is often political. When congressional Republicans vote to de-fund NASA’s work documenting climate change, or block the use of statistical sampling in the census, they are advocating an Orwellian world in which Ignorance is Strength.

Boulder should be better than that, and so I favor proactive engagement, as I believe much of City Council does. They need our support to make the right choice: to stand behind Ms. Boone and build upon her valuable work in Boulder going forward. We should live stream and archive any city meeting taking place in Council chambers on a well used platform like YouTube. We should subtitle the archived versions in Spanish. We should expect our elected and appointed policymakers and city staff to participate competently in social media, and use it as the incredibly cost-effective and democratically empowering platform that it has become worldwide. It’s been a long time since the Internet was the exclusive domain of a technological elite — today it is the people’s platform, much more so than Wayne’s World style public access cable TV, or even our beloved Daily Camera. Newer digital platforms that are accessible to parents with young children and full time jobs need to be weighed heavily in our policy discussions, right alongside inconvenient, time-consuming public meetings.

Given last week’s firestorm of activity in support of Boone on Twitter I suspect that going forward, Boulder politicians and policymakers will ignore the digital realm at their peril.  Just because you do not take an interest in social media, does not mean that social media will not take an interest in you.