Bad news, Boulder. During our search for ways to make housing more affordable, we have bumped into two laws of nature that are forcing us to make tough choices. Drat. I hate it when I can’t have my cake and eat it, too.
The first law is from the soft and squishy field of economics that has spent a century astounding us with its inability to predict economic behavior — like how cheap mortgages can make stock markets crash. However, some economic laws actually work, including one that fully explains the root of Boulder’s housing affordability problem — the law of supply and demand.
For those among us who skipped or slept through their economics classes, the law of supply and demand states that when demand for something goes up and supply stays the same, the price of that something goes up. We can reduce the price of that something only if we can supply more somethings.
Boulder’s policies over the past 50 years have hit both the supply and demand sides of that equation hard. First, open space, land use, and building restrictions have collectively limited the supply of housing. And, as anyone who has spent any time in Boulder knows, our community is quick to tell people who don’t like our open space and views to go suck eggs because we are not going to change and that’s that.
But, in the category of fully-intended-consequences, our open space and architecture have made Boulder a much, much, much more desirable place to live. While it’s hard to know how much of Boulder’s current popularity can be tied to these growth-limiting policies and not just Mork and Mindy, any fool in town knows it’s a lot.
So, there you have it — as per the law of supply and demand, we have limited our housing supply and goosed demand, thereby driving up the cost of owning a home in our fair town. To lower housing prices, something has to give.
We could follow the suggestion of the consultant hired by the city a few years back, which was — and he really said this — dump the rocket fuel that makes Boulder so popular and make it more like my home town, Buffalo, New York. Bottom line — reduce the demand for housing in Boulder by intentionally diminishing our quality of life.
We’re probably not gonna do that.
So, the only choice allowed by economic law is to increase the supply of housing. That option leads us directly into a second world of unforgiving laws — the laws of physics, which sound ominous because they are.
These laws inform us that since we don’t want to develop much more open land in Boulder to increase housing supply, we need to increase the density of people within the footprint we’ve already designated for development.
Furthermore, given the limits of a three-dimensional world (yes, even in Boulder, we are stuck with just three dimensions), we have only two choices. First, we can keep our height limits and increase density through things like housing co-ops and tiny apartments. Given the recent shouting and screaming over these very issues, that’s not going to be an easy way to significantly increase the number of bedrooms in Boulder.
Running out of options within our 3-D world, this leaves us only one remaining choice — use that third dimension to build more housing by adding more floors to existing and future buildings.
This spring, Boulder City Council will consider loosening the restrictive height limits in Boulder to allow more affordable bedrooms in Boulder. With higher buildings come many valid concerns about views, skylines, and urban density that make this a tough issue. But, good things can come from higher density in addition to lower housing costs, like the more efficient energy use as well as the vibrant street life that comes with more people per square mile.
Furthermore, since greater density would make Boulder more urban, it will become even more attractive to many potential Boulderites, especially younger ones who appreciate the increasingly cosmopolitan feel of our wonderful town. So, building higher buildings might make Boulder an even more desirable place to live thereby further increasing the demand for housing and driving up prices even more.
Will it never end? Maybe not. Boulder’s pretty nice.
Short of pixie dust, our options for more affordable housing are limited by these simple laws of nature. Study groups and consultants can’t change these laws, so it’s time to either accept what we have or make the tough choices to change.
Email: ron@bikeandsail.net
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