Boulder should support statewide land use reform

The City of Boulder should seize this opportunity to lend support to Governor Polis’s recently announced land use reform recommendations. Because our housing stock is insufficiently diverse and increasingly expensive, we are losing our wisdom (the elderly) and our youth. Both demographic groups are struggling, the former to maintain their foothold, and the latter to secure one. Our workforce is moving further and further away, driving until they qualify and filling our streets during the day, without contributing to and strengthening our community at night or on weekends.

Affordable housing is both a regional and a transportation challenge. Density along transit corridors and cooperation at a regional level are both required in abundance, and urgently. No community can long survive its own hollowing out. But neither can a single community, acting alone, meet the challenge.

An incremental regional sales tax should be authorized by the legislature and be spent, cooperatively, by communities willing to address together the affordable housing and transportation challenges and opportunities they share. We don’t have and may not need regional “government,” but we desperately require regional thinking at scale, with adequate funding (ideally, matched), to empower local governments willing to play fair with each other, who bring some of their own skin to the game, to address this existential, spiritually compelling challenge.

If our land use policies don’t enable ALL of our people to work, shop and play closer to where they sleep, what kind of community are we building? Apartheid created on purpose is no less shameful than apartheid created unintentionally, when, once revealed, nothing is done about it.

Step up, Boulder. Lead the way. Carpe Diem!

— Ed Byrne, Boulder