The Northern Front Range is currently short 8,000 housing units, and the gap between supply and demand is projected to grow, according to a draft report published this month by the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG), a regional transportation planning agency.
The housing needs assessment considered factors such as housing stock, market trends, and population and job growth. Boulder and Weld counties were combined into the same northern region, though more detailed findings for the City of Boulder are expected later this year.
In the next 10 years, the northern region will need about 37,000 housing units, according to the report. Most of those homes will need to be affordable for people earning up to 60% of the area median income, or about $61,000 for a single adult in Boulder County.
The report cites several barriers to increasing the housing supply, including zoning that restricts the types of homes that can be built, open space and off-street parking requirements, infrastructure costs, interest rates and insurance costs, water supplies and limited federal funding to subsidize affordable housing.
The report comes as the Boulder City Council is expected to expand on land-use and zoning reforms passed in recent years to address the city’s high cost of living. Most renters in the City of Boulder are “cost-burdened,” meaning they spend at least 30% of their income on rent, according to census data. Most recently, in an effort to increase housing supplies and drive down costs, state lawmakers this year eased restrictions on building accessory dwelling units, eliminated occupancy limits based on family status, and relaxed rules requiring off-street parking for housing developments.
The housing needs assessment is intended to inform a regional housing strategy, according to the report. City-specific information on housing needs will be available this fall in a data dashboard, according to Mayor Pro Tem Nicole Speer, a DRCOG board member.
“The goal of this assessment is not to propose solutions or strategies,” Speer said in a recent email to councilmembers. “Specific policy implications for our city will need to wait until we have Boulder-level data this fall, which will provide us with a comprehensive understanding of our unique housing needs.”
Nicole doesn’t need to wait for a policy directive. It’s been obvious for decades. Stop growth. It doesn’t pay it’s way, and city government wastes even more studying it with our tax dollars. Enough already. Let the developers pay.
A “housing shortage” is a consequence of an “overage of people”. It is not difficult to figure this out.
What Boulder has is not a housing shortage, but an excess of demand and an excess of jobs over housing. This will likely remain true, whatever lucrative developments get pushed onto the present residents of Boulder, who may wake from an uneasy slumber to find that decisions about land use and development are in the hands of people outside Boulder. Then again, they may slumber on as Boulder becomes another Denver suburb.
Economic development agencies (including but not limited to the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, the CU Boulder Chancellor’s Office, the Boulder Chamber of Commerce) play an outsized role in driving unsustainable, inelastic demand for housing in Boulder, a city with a maximum sustainable population of 100,000 residents.
The problems began in earnest when Boulder’s population overshot that environmental carrying capacity limit.
CU Boulder refuses to adopt enrollment caps, instead wielding its might as an unsustainable real estate development-driving behemoth with no real democratic checks and balances.
Meanwhile CU offers degrees in “Environmental Studies” and ignores its own faculty experts on a range of existential environmental issues.
And the current Boulder City Council majority does not represent Boulder’s best interests in this regard, reverting, instead, to giving stealth, undemocratic backing to pernicious state-level assaults on local governments right to determine local land use policies.
These source of this unsustainable pro-growth incentivisation and enablement need to be clearly understood by voters, not just in Boulder, but throughout Colorado.