Accidental racism in Boulder?
If whites move into town, it’s called gentrification, and that’s racist. If whites move out of town, that’s called white flight, and well, that’s racist, too. But what if it African-americans move out? Well, that would just be called Boulder.
As my colleague Randal O’toole pointed out this month, U.S. Census data shows that between 2010 and 2016 the population of Boulder grew by over 10,000. At the same time the black population of Boulder dropped by 30 percent. Gotta love progressive policies, like growth control, that victimize the very people progressives spend all day yapping their sympathy for.
Boulderites use limits on new construction, growth boundaries and open space to stifle growth in order to enrich themselves — I mean, preserve Boulder’s charming and unique character.
By some small miracle my wife at the time and I were able to scrape together enough for a down payment for a shoebox house in 1992 for $120,000. Thanks to Boulder’s elitist policies it’s now worth at least $750,000. (Don’t worry, after a very expensive, yet amicable di- vorce, my share of that appreciation isn’t that much.) Point being, this forced market scarcity makes Boulderites asset-rich with a stroke of the pen. And isn’t that how wealth should be created?
But white privilege isn’t without its charity. Boulder has developed ways to give working poor people the illusion that they too own piece of the rock, while keeping them asset-poor and creating a permanent under-class.
Boulder requires those few developers who can get a building permit to sell 25 percent of their units as “permanently affordable,” far under market value. They make up the loss by jacking up prices on the remaining 75 percent of the units, making them even more untouchable for working people late to the game.
But how can a home be “permanently” affordable? My house was barely affordable when I bought it, but now it’s worth something I could never touch if I didn’t already own it. Well, when the poor schmuck who “buys” one of the these permanently affordable units (via a non-profit organization), he agrees that when he sells it he can only sell it for the original price plus inflation.
The house I bought in 1992 I now rent out. It’s my one and only investment property. I’m even thinking about going all Trump and slapping my name on it in gold letters. My hope is one day that income can help my handicapped son when he grows up. By contrast, the owner of a permanently affordable home is basically forbidden to rent out his place. I guess his income should always come from his labor, not investments. Hope his kid isn’t handicapped.
Imagine seeing your nextdoor neighbor sell his nearly identical place for twice what he paid for it, knowing you are barred from doing the same. Imagine watching your neighbor borrow on the massive equity in his home to put his kids through college or to start a new small business, while you and yours are forbidden the same opportunity. Which of you has a shot at the American dream?
Boulder is conning people into thinking that they are homeowners, when in reality they are just renters. And we in Boulder are pretty proud of this cruelty, using well-intentioned social engineering to smugly keep people in their place.
How much effort and exunfairly pense would you put into maintaining and improving your home knowing that when it came time to sell it you couldn’t recoup your investment? Probably the same amount you spend washing a rental car.
Over time this will create the hippest of Boulder-style ghettos. Most of the “affordable” units are stacked atop one another in areas of new building or renovation, pockets comfortably away from the established, older neighborhoods where many of the elected policymakers live.
The city is looking to annex new areas into Boulder, requiring a whopping 50 percent “affordable” mandate. A more skeptical person might suspect they’re wanting to create areas on the outskirts of town packed with a certain dependency-voter demographic.
But fortunately, progressives don’t think in those terms of identity politics.
Jon Caldara, a Denver Post columnist, is president of the Independence Institute, a libertarian-conservative think tank in Denver, and host of “Devil’s Advocate” on Colorado Public Television.