City’s history of high costs, racism and exclusion discussed
In 1859, historical records show that the Boulder City Town Company divided the area that’s now Boulder into about 4,000 lots and sold each for $1,000. At the same time, agricultural land to the east and north of Boulder was selling for about $1.25 an acre.
Here begins Boulder’s history of unaffordability, according to Clay Fong, who works in Boulder’s community relations department.
“We are establishing Boulder as a place that’s not necessarily inclusive for the working person or the person who has limited resources,” he said.
Fong’s presentation on the history of race, class and housing in Boulder kicked off the city’s inaugural Housing Equity Symposium on Wednesday evening.
The event, hosted in partnership with the Boulder Chamber and the Urban Land Institute, aimed to raise awareness and understanding of the city’s history as it relates to race and class and how Boulder’s past impacts the city’s current housing challenges. The symposium was in person at etown Hall and also was streamed virtually.
Fong acknowledged that Boulder’s past can create feelings of shame but said it’s important to push past that and understand where the city has been and where it can go.
“We did a lot of things with the best intentions. We wanted to protect our built and natural environments. We wanted this to be a good place to live,” Fong said. “But the problem is the past has set a stage that impaired our ability to look at … this with a critical lens that would help us to build a more equitable and just community.”
Currently, about 8.4% of all housing in Boulder is permanently affordable, though the city hopes to push that to 15% by 2035.
When Jennifer Fluri, a geographer at the University of
Colorado Boulder, first began researching affordable housing in Boulder, she said examples of institutionalized racism currently in place were not immediately evident. However, as the work expanded into more qualitative research, the stories from people who live in the city shed a new light.
“Part of doing qualitative research is being open to having your hypothesis challenged; being open to having your preconceived notions about a community challenged; and being open to being wrong,” she said.
During Wednesday’s event, Fluri shared audio clips and written narratives from her work with the Boulder Affordable Housing Research Initiative, interviews with people who either currently struggle to afford housing in Boulder or who moved after experiencing racism or being unable to afford housing.
One person, who was Black but was otherwise not identified for confidentiality purposes, shared an experience of being followed regularly when shopping. Another said the small, nuanced microaggressions added up and made living in Boulder untenable.
Abby Hickcox, who works alongside Fluri at CU Boulder, also has conducted extensive research on the intersection between racism and environmentalism in Boulder.
Often, Hickcox feels a false binary is created: Either Boulder offers affordable housing or it preserves its natural spaces. She argues it can be both/and.
“For more than 50 years, Boulder has been at the forefront of creating progressive environmental and open space policy,” she said. “The city has an opportunity to join cities at the forefront of affordable housing. Boulder has the opportunity to be a city that leads the way in providing both open space and affordable, equitable housing for low-income residents.”
Doing so is important because, at the end of the day, it’s all connected, according to Tiffany Manuel, president and CEO of Thecasemade. Creating public will and understanding around challenging subjects is one of the primary goals of her company.
Affordable housing and environmentalism are intricately connected, and in Boulder it’s about helping people see that so they begin to care about both, Manuel said.
“Unless you’re making an intentional effort to bring people into the conversation in a very thoughtful and constructive way, often a lot of the sort of larger messaging on what we’re talking about backfires,” she said.