Cautionary tales, opportunity exist in state housing strategy

There was considerable excitement among the members of Better Boulder over the Daily Camera’s coverage on Jan. 22 of the governor’s 2023 State of the State address. Readers interested in regional and statewide approaches to addressing housing affordability and land-use would do well to read the full text of this speech. It hits on an astonishingly large number of priorities Better Boulder’s diverse members have identified and discussed over the years.

As our governor aptly observes: “This is far beyond just a local problem. Since issues like transportation, water, energy and more inherently cross jurisdictional boundaries, it becomes a statewide problem that truly impacts all of us”.

Boulder has made impressive strides in addressing affordability with our inclusionary housing program and has made incremental zoning progress in such areas as encouraging Accessory Dwelling Units and creating Transit Oriented Development hubs within the city. But often we feel we are “going it alone” on implementing forward-looking solutions to our housing challenges, and we have often concluded that outcomes could be dramatically better if our programs dovetailed with a state-wide strategy.

The governor’s use of California as a cautionary tale was bold and appropriate. We have the luxury of being able to learn from California’s mistakes of clinging to mid-20th-century land-use approaches that have negative effects like wealthy communities walling themselves off, while much of the rest of the state suffers from endless sprawl with long carcentric commutes as a solution to housing demand.

We think Boulder’s community of dedicated environmentalists will be more inclined to support progressive housing solutions if we have outcomes that show we are preserving large swaths of land outside city and town boundaries, and that the demand on resources is dramatically less when housing is centered near where people work and transact business.

We hope state legislators will be bold in crafting legislation that provides a good mix of local incentives for making progress on land-use as well as regulations that will discourage sprawl and development that exacerbates housing inequity. As we see regional support for Boulder’s values increasing, we should continue to work on broad community support toward strategically relaxing and empowering our zoning regulations toward better outcomes. Boulder’s leadership in innovation and advocacy around land-use should be a source of pride for our community as we see that leadership advanced statewide. In the role of statewide role models, we could expect to see stronger local support for initiatives like introducing new housing types into residential zones and identifying ways to offset the impacts of large luxury residences.

That leads us to a second cautionary tale. In January, the Fort Collins City Council repealed comprehensive land-use code changes they had approved late in 2022 after a citizen-led petition indicated enough opposition that city leaders decided they needed to back off and do more public engagement before moving forward.

We’ve often seen this kind of pushback in Boulder, but the Fort Collins experience is the latest to demonstrate how important it is for our community to engage in healthy discussion about the vision for our future. We need to get to the point where, as we evolve our land-use policies into the 21st century, we can count on most Boulder residents to enthusiastically endorse the changes.

We appreciate the excellent coverage of the State of the State address in the January 22 article but will offer one suggestion. The use of the phrase “state centralization of zoning” when referring to Polis’ themes feels unnecessarily narrow/negative when everything presented by the governor indicated that we are talking about a comprehensive regional strategy on housing availability and affordability. If we are going to have productive discourse, we would be well served to avoid negative characterizations.

Better Boulder is excited to see a solution-focused approach to housing at the state level, and we hope that our legislators will take this opportunity to realize the Polis administration’s vision of “A Colorado for All.”