To keep from becoming California, Colorado needs to build
In his State of the State Address last month, Gov. Jared Polis warned Coloradans that if housing policy isn’t changed soon, Colorado’s future could look like California’s present.
Greetings from the future. I grew up in Boulder before moving to California 24 years ago. My mom still lives in Boulder and I come to visit often. On a visit last fall, I noticed that the city today looks a lot like the city I left two and a half decades ago. That’s a big problem — California is the epicenter of our national housing crisis precisely because its cities stopped building new housing.
Perhaps the elected officials of yesteryear were trying to preserve their bucolic towns at a time when the state’s population boomed. Or perhaps they were motivated by changes to state and federal law that prohibited sellers and renters to discriminate on the basis of race. Regardless, housing construction stalled — especially in California’s coastal cities where most jobs are located.
When a region has more people seeking to live in it than there are homes available, newcomers do not simply evaporate. Rather, they start bidding on the existing housing stock which creates a pernicious game of musical chairs. The very affluent will always get a home, the middleclass tread water in the rental market and anyone poorer than that is either displaced or becomes homeless. It’s no wonder that California is seeing an exodus of lower-income households and an explosion in people living on the street.
If this sounds familiar, it should. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Boulder built just 10,400 housing units between 1990 and 2021. Meanwhile, its population grew by about 18,000 people during that time period. But those numbers bely the true demand to live in the city. About 56% of Boulder’s 104,000 workers live outside the city limits.
Boulder, like many of Colorado’s affluent, majority-white cities, makes it extremely difficult to build new housing — especially the dense multifamily housing that’s accessible to lower-income households and necessary in order to maintain the high-frequency mass transit that makes car-free living feasible. The vast majority of residential land is zoned for detached single-family homes only. Even townhouses — single-family homes with attached walls like the South Boulder home I grew up in — are banned in all but tiny swaths of the city.
Despite their outward commitment to progressive values, cities like Boulder are reluctant to change zoning laws in order to make room for newcomers. With Boulder’s median home price growing from about $650,000 in 2018 to $775,000 today, it’s no wonder why homeowners vehemently oppose any new supply that could dilute the value of their scarce and in-demand asset. And they’re vocal about it — researchers have found that the people local elected officials hear from most on housing are overwhelmingly wealthy, white and non-renters.
If California is a future vision of failed housing policy, it’s also a vision of what Colorado needs to do to right the course. In 2021, California recently took the first step to end single-familyonly zoning statewide. The state also banned cities from enforcing parking minimums — which drive up housing costs while also cementing car dependency — near mass transit. California has also legalized and simplified Accessory Dwelling Unit construction statewide. These small homes on the property of an existing home — which are subject to prohibitive regulations in Boulder — let existing homeowners earn extra rental income while providing new low-cost housing options in predominantly singlefamily neighborhoods.
As a recent Daily Camera editorial correctly pointed out, change is inevitable for Boulder. Boulder can either grow up into a diverse, vibrant and green city. Or it can grow old — keeping with the status quo and ending up a declining community of extravagantly wealthy seniors and car-choked streets filled with harried commuters who pile into the city daily from towns hours away.
California already showed America how to manufacture a housing crisis, Colorado can show the country how to build itself out of one.
Dr. Stan Oklobdzija, a Boulder native, is a professor at UC Riverside’s School of Public Policy. He was previously the Research Director of California YIMBY, a group dedicated to reforming housing policy. Follow him on Twitter: @stan_okl.