In advance of Boulder’s once-a-decade revision of the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan, city staff released a statistically valid survey capturing how residents view growth, housing, development and the city’s future. Boulder Reporting Lab brought together two of its columnists, Brian Keegan, a CU professor, and Bob Yates, a former city councilmember, to unpack what the numbers might mean for the plan, the politics and the neighborhoods where change is already underway.
What follows is the latest Across the Aisle conversation between two longtime observers of Boulder civic life, one encouraged by the data and one cautious about how it will be applied, as the city embarks on updating what many call its “planning bible.”
Bob Yates: Well, Brian, it seems like just yesterday that the Boulder City Council undertook the 2015 update to the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan, the 1977 planning document that is significantly revised every 10 years, and more modestly updated every five. I served on city council when we tackled the 2015 revisions, so I have a special interest in the 2025 amendments.
As you know, the Comp Plan is the roadmap (some call it “the bible”) for all development and growth in and around the City of Boulder. This year, as part of the Comp Plan’s revision, city staff commissioned a statistically valid survey of Boulder residents, asking their opinions on topics ranging from Boulder’s size, to preferred housing types, to addressing commercial vacancies, to water conservation. Brian, what surprised you most about the survey results?
Brian Keegan: Thanks for kicking this off, Bob. Before diving into the survey results, I want to applaud city staff for investing the time and resources to produce multiple representative measures of public opinion about these issues. All too often in local politics, decisions are shaped — and derailed — by the loudest voices in the room. Council should dive into these results and direct staff to invest in more representative surveys to guide major policy decisions.
I was most reassured to see broad support for “gentle infill.” While Boulder has always had squeaky wheels demanding a halt to development, the community assembly and statistically valid survey results show super-majority support among Boulder residents for “15-minute cities,” “moderate-density housing types” and “mixed-use buildings” in more areas of Boulder.
Bob, you know there’s an ocean separating abstract values expressed in a survey and approving developments that impact neighborhoods. What do you make of oft-repeated grievances that council and staff are ignoring longtime Boulder residents’ wishes to stop growth when the results of elections and surveys alike suggest these concerns are in the minority?
Yates: As always, the devil is in the details (or, in this case, the neighborhoods). So yes, while three-quarters of Boulder residents surveyed said that they support affordable housing, the implied footnote to that is: “…in someone else’s neighborhood.” Nearly half said that “excessive growth and development” is a concern.
When a new housing proposal surfaces, it’s incumbent on our community leaders — including city council — to say out loud how it fits into the bigger picture. For example, in our shrinking town (yes, Boulder’s population has actually declined in recent years), the cohort that has been most difficult to house has been families with kids. That’s why BVSD enrollment is plummeting and some public schools are at risk of closing.
While the city itself doesn’t build housing, policymakers can put their thumb on the scale and make middle-income, family-oriented housing preferred over micro-apartments (lucrative for the developer, but no room for kids) and luxury condos (just plain lucrative). The Comp Plan is the best place to hard-wire these family-oriented preferences into city policy.
With that said, do you think that people have different views based on where they live?
Keegan: One of my favorite cross-tabs was in the appendices comparing homeowners, renters and housing types. There were really strong and statistically significant differences between homeowners, renters, and single-family homeowners across issues like supporting more housing types.
Unsurprisingly, homeowners were more likely to oppose new development and were in favor of preserving single-family zoning. Renters were more likely to support increasing housing options and improving affordability. I would love to see the cross-tabs on where respondents think housing should be built based on where they live to really ground the “someone else’s neighborhood” dynamics you mentioned.
Bob, how should policymakers address these diverging preferences?
Yates: As you say, the cross-tabs in the survey are fascinating to dig into. People who are comfortably housed want less change than those who are still trying to get established. Cynicism aside, there seems to be broad support by both renters and owners for more affordable housing, particularly in East Boulder and Gunbarrel. Surveyed residents favored duplexes, followed by “cottage courts,” clusters of smaller houses around shared courtyards. Both housing types are more efficient uses of our scarce (and expensive) land.
Even before the Comp Plan revisions began this fall, council recognized that duplexes and triplexes are welcomed by many in the community (four out of five, in the survey). In January, council changed the land use rules to make it easier to build them and to split large, existing houses. When council revises the Comp Plan next year, they will undoubtedly take that a step further, changing land use designations (which drive zoning) so that family-oriented housing is favored.
Keegan: Another finding that surprised me was the weak support for expanding into the Area III Planning Reserve. Only 54% strongly favored it, and it came in sixth as the preferred location for new housing. Support was much stronger for building within city limits. I tend to agree that Boulder has lots of strip malls, parking lots and other underutilized commercial spaces that are better candidates for mixed use, in-fill development.
County commissioners and members of city council who were previously enthusiastic about building out the Area III Planning Reserve as a relief valve on housing pressures without disrupting existing neighborhoods may have to recalibrate. Lukewarm support combined with high up-front capital costs means relief for renters and people looking to buy in Boulder is still a long way off.
Yates: Brian, I believe the Area III Planning Reserve is our next Gunbarrel. While 44% say the city should expand housing there, some people have the impression that it’s on Mars, a long, long way from the city center. It’s actually closer to the rest of Boulder than Gunbarrel, starting at 28th Street and Jay Road and extending north and east, including the Gateway Park Fun Center.
More than half of the 493 acres are privately owned, most of it by folks who would like to develop their unused land from prairie dog havens into family-oriented housing. While you’re right that it will take decades to build it all out, some of that housing can be started right away. Costs of infrastructure, like streets and sewers, will be borne by developers along the way.
Council already signaled that it supports the Planning Reserve as Boulder’s next area for housing, approving at the end of last year the work necessary to change the Comp Plan designation from Area III to Area II, leading to ultimate annexation and development. Next month, council will consider revisions to the Comp Plan that will advance this.
But, as you point out, survey results show that the city needs to do more work introducing the Planning Reserve to the community as a housing solution. Maybe a neighborhood name with more inspiration. Any thoughts?
Keegan: If I had any competence for marketing and branding, I would be in a better-paying career! Maybe capture some of the indigenous natural character. Something like Cottonwood Crossing, Hackberry Hills, Buffalograss Commons or Redtail Ridge. The “Planning Reserve” does sound like an exclusive enclave, which is very much the opposite of what I hope it becomes. The Holiday neighborhood in North Boulder, Boulder Junction and East Boulder all offer lessons about how to design a vibrant neighborhood with commerce, parks and transportation instead of cramming in as many single-family homes as possible.
Thinking about timelines reminds me that the old IBM campus across Diagonal Highway is not actually open space — it’s Area I. Except for the solar panels, it’s largely unused. With the Diagonal’s soon-to-be revitalized transportation connections, it seems like another ripe opportunity for thoughtful redevelopment.
Bob, we haven’t talked much about the community assemblies that are also reported out in this packet as a part of the Comp Plan process. What stood out? Should the city invest in more of these?
Yates: You’re referring to the 43 residents gathered to discuss the concept of 15-minute neighborhoods and write a report to the city council as part of council’s Comp Plan work. Any community input can be valuable for policymakers, whether it’s a statistically valid survey we’ve discussed, a group gathered to debate a particular topic (like the community assembly), or a resident who corners a councilmember in the Safeway produce aisle. When I served on council, I valued it all. But the current council has its work cut out for it: Only 9% of respondents say officials are listening on growth and development. Not something to be proud of.
Brian, why don’t you close us out. What’s the one audacious, helpful thing council can include in this decade’s Comp Plan? There won’t be another major update until 2035, so this is your chance to make a big wish.
Keegan: My big wish for the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan’s 50th birthday would be for Boulder’s policymakers to leave its Population Bomb anxieties in the 1970s. The way Americans built post-war communities as a monoculture of car-centered sprawl absolutely deserved to be checked with a coordinated policy response like the BVCP. But the biggest threats Boulder faces in 2035 or 2075 are not the stale dystopia of overcrowded collapse, but a pincer of climate disruptions and demographic transitions.
Meeting the first challenge is probably going to require a combination of hardening and managed retreat as well as permitting denser buildings to hit energy and water efficiency goals. Addressing the second will require preparing for a smaller, older and more diverse population that will need different kinds of homes, transportation and tax bases. We need a plan that allows our city to adapt to these changes instead of nostalgically locking it in amber.
Thanks again for teeing up this conversation, Bob!
Is the survey still “statistically valid” since low participation to invitations caused them to open the survey to the general public?
Steve: Good question. You can read about the survey methodology on page 4 of the survey report by NRC/Polco, linked in our piece and also linked below. As the surveyors note in that methodology, the responses were weighted by gender, age, race, and housing type and location, as is typical in statistically valid surveys. The margin for error for any given survey question response is four percent. – Bob
https://bouldercolorado.gov/media/19156/download?inline
Pew Research Center has some excellent resources on the collapse of response rates and how to incorporate multiple methods: https://www.pewresearch.org/course/public-opinion-polling-basics/#is-accurate-polling-becoming-harder-to-do
If the Planning Reserve is going to be a 15 minute neighborhood, there has to be a grocery store and small retail. In my mind, the 15 minute neighborhood is developer greenwash to get buy-in for a project. Same with talk of bus service and biking, this neighborhood is just to far away from services to discourage driving. Prof Keegan would probably hold out Holiday and Dakota Ridge as ideal development, and while those neighborhoods have density, they are still far to small to support businesses like these. The net effect is that this area are just going be sprawl. I’m not sure whether this Yates/Keegan thing is really a debate, they both are pro-growth, where is the other side?
Well said, Sean! And as somebody who served on the CA, I can affirm the entire 15min neighborhood premise indeed felt like a another thinly-disguised ploy to attract investment and this debate between two pro-growth advocates here feels equally contrived. Because we too were never offered any real alternatives “on the other side” of such market-incentivized solutions nor given fair opportunity to discuss different approaches either. For example, any effort to introduce actual progressive policy ideas or float regulation-based solutions such as a Vacancy Tax were ignored or immediately dismissed by city staff. We couldn’t even explore putting prospective approaches on the ballot to grant voters a say in the decision-making. Really mirrored same sense I get from both the Council and City Gov, in that the citizens are never solicited for actual input or meaningfully included in the policy process. Rather we’re used as convenient props to promote further growth or launder preexisting narratives, which for the Comp Plan; despite pledging to equitably preserve accessibility, diversity, and affordability among perserving a vibrant economy in reality has only delivered prosperity to investors, developers, and all the other monied interests that speculatively profit on Boulder’s desirability as a place to live that all comes at our expense and in detriment to community cohesion.
I served on this Community Assembly and want to correct inaccuracies here. There was a huge interest in it, but only 50 people could be selected and yet an impressive 49 participated in the process over seven all-day sessions. And for the record, we were never asked to weigh in on housing/growth/development issues directly, much to our chagrin; but rather were given a narrow scope to define a 15-minute neighborhood. Many of us became a bit disappointed over time how a promising deliberative process felt increasingly reduced to a sandbox by City staff and dismayed by a retracted offer to allow us to submit minority reports to reflect common concerns which included: housing accessibility and dwindling ownership opportunities, contradictory definition of “affordability”, as well as an ongoing cost of living crisis from our personal experiences among growing concerns of employers leaving town and local jobs disappearing. People were equally alarmed how much commercial space and new developments built on the promise of economic prosperity remain chronically vacant. By the end of this process, I also percieved a strong sense of cynicism and resignation the City would heed any input on these matters…perfectly reflected in the statistic that only 9% of us believed they were listening to the public on growth and development issues.
Garrett: Thanks. I sensed the limitations placed on those of you who served on the Community Assembly, and I referred to that in the first draft of the exchange that Brian and I had. Regrettably, that portion of what I wrote didn’t make it into the final version, due to editing for length. Nonetheless, thanks for serving. Having served eight years on city council, I know that it can be frustrating (sometimes we on council weren’t listened to by city staff either). – Bob
I want to hear more about the experiences and frustrations of Community Assembly members like you.
Interesting. Thanks for stating your experiences. This was my take on the community assembly process since before it started – based on other community processes where the city determined in advance the results it wanted to see. I would love to see an authentic community assembly process that takes seriously the topics you mention – like weighing in on housing/growth/development issues directly. And, of course, how to deliver actually affordable housing. No one other that real estate professionals and developers want to see more luxury housing or those awful micro units.
Sean: Thanks. While Brian and I were reflecting on the support by survey respondents for more affordable housing (which is consistent with past community surveys), you might notice some daylight between us, with Brian urging infill within the existing city limits and me arguing for continued consideration of the Planning Reserve at 28th & Jay. Of course, those aren’t mutually exclusive. And, I think that you’re right that any housing ultimately built in the Planning Reserve will need a grocery store nearby. Those of us living in northeast Boulder don’t have many good options. – Bob
Your feeling is exactly how many felt about the public input process on the Iris Avenue project.
I very much enjoy the banter between Mrs. Yates and Keegan. Across the Aisle takes on rich topics which typically include two distinct solutions. Yates and Keegan do a good job of giving space for each to be heard. However, I’d like to see the authors work harder to find common ground. What can they agree City Council should do? What can they agree is a compassionate, practical, and economically viable solution that doesn’t make anyone very happy but makes everyone happy enough. That’s where I believe we readers want to be. And the good natured jostling where this is a gap in thinking definitely makes for entertaining reading.
I took the online survey. The very 1st question asked something close to, “Which of the following types of housing do you want more of?” The choices left out 3 popular options: single-family homes, tiny homes and none of the above.
So I concluded it was a “push-poll,” designed not to get answers but to push predetermined solutions. So I didn’t look at the rest of the survey.