[BoulderCouncilHotline] East Boulder Subcommunity Plan

[Wallach, Mark]

The staff memo summarizing the results of our conversation on the East Boulder Subcommunity Plan is, by and large, quite helpful in framing the issues and strategies contemplated for development of that area. However, one issue that remains quite unclear to me is with respect to the creation of middle-income housing. The second bullet point in the memo states that the plan “provides for significantly more housing opportunities that implement the BVCP goal of providing a diversity of housing types.”

While we all acknowledge that under the plan more housing will be created, the specific question that I raised in my prior Hotline – and which has not been answered – is how this will get us to middle-income housing. It is not the quantity of housing that will provide middle-income housing, but the price. Neither the diversity of housing types nor the use of the form-based code will guaranty middle-income housing, unless that category is defined to include studio apartments and small one-bedroom apartments. To the extent that Boulder needs apartments for families with children (including first responders, teachers, City employees, etc.), those small units are likely to be inappropriate for middle-income renters/purchasers.

At our meeting I also did not receive an answer to a question I posed in my previous Hotline post, and to which I would appreciate a response: Our 2016 Middle Income Housing Strategy contemplated that we would create 3,500 middle-income units (1,000 deed restricted) by 2030, and that 60% of all new homes would be targeted to serve middle-income households. We are 40% through that 15 -year period. How many have actually been created? What percentage of new homes have been targeted to serve middle-income households? And if the answer is as low as I think it is, how will simply providing more opportunities for the development of housing, even through the use of form-based code, lead to the desired result?

New for-sale, multi-unit construction in Boulder (primarily townhouses) now routinely sells for $1,000/square foot, with construction costs (not including the cost of land and what are traditionally viewed as “soft” costs) at or above $350/per square foot. How is anything that we are doing in the EBSP likely to drop the price of new housing to $500-700 per square foot, a level at which middle-income families at least have a possibility of participating? And what in the Plan will cause private developers to forego potential profits by pricing their product below what the market will support, merely to create middle-income housing? The question simply boils down to this: if the market has been incapable of providing middle-income housing during the past 6 years, on what theory do we believe that the market will now do so? This is an important issue, and magical thinking will not get us to the desired result.

The Plan really does not address this issue, and I again request some clarification as to how we get to middle-income housing through the EBSP. The policies of the BVCP and this document appear to be aspirational without a clear road map of how we get from here to there, and that is an issue that should  be remedied.

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