The City of Boulder will need 10,700 additional housing units over the next decade to meet demand while preventing rent and home prices from rising further out of reach for most people, according to a new study by a regional planning agency. This would represent an approximate 23% increase in the city’s housing supply.
Most of these homes would need to be affordable for lower-income residents, underscoring the severity of the city’s housing affordability crisis.
The study, published earlier this month by the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG), is the latest to put a number on Boulder’s housing shortage. The shortage has contributed to a rise in the cost of living, increased commuter traffic and a shrinking workforce for essential services like education and firefighting. While not a policy recommendation, the study aims to try to quantify the housing gap and provide a more detailed understanding of a region-wide issue.
The report assessed housing needs across much of the Front Range, factoring in population growth, employment trends and commuting patterns. While housing needs are severe throughout the Front Range, they are especially acute in Boulder. The study found that in 2022, approximately 62% of renters in the city were cost-burdened, meaning they spent at least 30% of their income on housing. This figure exceeded that of all other major cities in the region.
“That is not a statistic that I am proud of,” Mayor Pro Tem Nicole Speer, Boulder’s council representative on the board of DRCOG, told Boulder Reporting Lab. “I don’t want us to be that city that is so unaffordable, especially for the folks who are renting.”
Underlying the DRCOG analysis is evidence from cities and towns showing that building more housing helps reduce prices. While the affordable housing shortage is a nationwide issue, Boulder faces several unique challenges to building housing. The city is largely surrounded by protected open space, which is off-limits for development. Height limits restrict the city from building up. And most of the city’s residential land is zoned as low density, requiring a minimum lot size of 7,000 square feet for each housing unit. This limits the number of homes that can be built on the city’s already scarce developable land.
Moreover, according to Jill Grano, a realtor, former city councilmember and researcher at CU Boulder’s Affordable Housing Initiative, an estimated 4,000 housing units in Boulder are vacant. That’s slightly more than the city’s entire stock of deed-restricted affordable housing.
Despite these challenges, experts say there are ways Boulder could ramp up its housing supply.
Grano suggested that the city could update zoning rules in medium- and low-density neighborhoods, such as reducing minimum open space requirements for duplexes and triplexes. Additionally, allowing homeowners to sell, not just rent, their accessory dwelling units (ADUs) could create more smaller, affordable homes. Implementing a vacancy tax on second homes that sit unused could also ease the shortage.
“The number of homes that we need is not surprising,” Grano told Boulder Reporting Lab. “I think that we can do it, but it’s going to take political will.”
Other opportunities for housing expansion lie on Boulder’s edges. City officials estimate that East Boulder, currently dominated by industrial and commercial spaces, could accommodate about 5,000 housing units under a new subcommunity plan. CU South, a parcel of land recently annexed into the city’s southern edge, is slated for another 1,100 units. Additionally, the Area III Planning Reserve, located northeast of the city, could potentially support up to 6,700 units based on preliminary city estimates. Housing advocates have also proposed repurposing the Boulder Municipal Airport into a neighborhood with approximately 2,000 homes.
However, Boulder’s need isn’t just for more housing — it’s for affordable housing. According to the report, most of the 10,700 new units Boulder needs would have to be affordable for people earning up to 60% of the area median income, about $61,000 for an individual. Such housing typically requires taxpayer subsidies.
Boulder Housing Partners, the city’s largest affordable housing provider, has nearly 1,000 affordable units in the pipeline for development, according to its executive director, Jeremy Durham. The city is only about halfway toward meeting its goal of making 15% of its total housing units deed-restricted as permanently affordable by 2035.
Mayor Pro Tem Speer acknowledges both the incremental progress being made and the growing need for housing. In addition to encouraging new home construction, she said the city should prioritize housing assistance and help property owners subdivide existing homes in the near term.
“I think that there are a lot of different things we could try,” Speer said. “If we don’t start working overtime to make up for some of the lack of housing that we have not created in the last few decades, we are going to be in a much worse situation in 10 years.”
Then why did the city council approve 45 300sqft efficiency apartments at $2,500-2,700 a month at Pearl and 22nd?!!!
Yeah, they definitely don’t connect the dots very well. If you build housing far above what the current market rate is for that tiny unit, what do you think is going to happen to rental prices across the housing market? Duh.
Looking at the data from DRCOGs housing needs analysis for Boulder about 65% (7010) of the new housing would need to be for lower income (<60%), affordable housing.
New housing that is intended to be permanently affordable needs deed restrictions.
Boulder can't build it's way out of this problem.
Why can’t they make that many units deed restricted?
Also, sounds like they are not taking into consideration the people renting in Boulder who are cost burdened now, in addition to the 10k estimated growth. If over 60% of our 60,000+ renters are cost burdened, that’ already over 36,000 current renters needing a more affordable option. I seriously doubt that even if the city managed to build the 6500 affordable units the report said are needed that it would have much impact on the rent paid by those other 36,000+ rent burdened people. Maybe rents wouldn’t rise so much so fast, though.
I couldn’t find the full report from the link referenced digging in the article, but there is a version from July here:
https://www.drcog.org/sites/default/files/acc/RPD-GF-DRAFTRHNA-EN-ACC-24-07-29-V1.pdf
It’s incredibly light on methodology, notably how future housing needs are calculated.
I’m sure the demand could be much greater than that for housing targeted at 0-60% of median income (maybe even near limitless demand to the scope of the broader population in the West).
This development is at 28th and iris. There are only 68 units that are affordable out of 300 fair market units plus retail and restaurants.
To the east of this development there are 80 low income family units being built behind the Cork.
All of these people will dump onto 2 lane Iris!!!
Traffic as argument not to offer housing for people is a tired one. Instead, in conjunction with the housing study, we should evaluate travel needs and garner the political will to make big changes for residents – expand the bike networks, incentivize with rebates, establish public transit that actually meets peoples’ needs. I would love to live in a Boulder where I never had to drive a car and more people should have that option. That will leave people that can only think of traffic more road space.