Boulder County Regional Affordable Housing Strategic Plan
Links to the preliminary draft of a proposed countywide affordable housing plan, as well as slides from a PowerPoint that a collaborative of local housing officials presented at Wednesdays’ Boulder County Consortium of Cities meeting, are available on a county Housing Division website, bouldercountyhousing.org.
Over the coming several months, Boulder County’s local governments are expected to consider signing off on, and participating in, a coordinated regional approach to addressing affordable housing needs.
The end result, under one of the goals suggested in a recently unveiled preliminary draft of a Boulder County Regional Affordable Housing Strategic Plan, would be to have 15,000 to 22,000 housing units — residences affordable for rent or purchase by low- and middle-income households — by the year 2035.
The proposed plan’s preliminary version — prepared by a working group of local government housing and community services agencies — was presented Wednesday to the Boulder County Consortium of Cities, a county-sponsored organization of the county’s cities and towns.
Boulder County’s cities and towns already have in place or have plans for acquiring or assisting in the construction of nearly 6,000 affordable housing units, so the strategic plan would call for 9,000 to 16,000 homes to be acquired or built.
Boulder County Commissioners chairwoman Deb Gardner, who’s also chairwoman of the Consortium of Cities, said after the meeting that since the county and the cities of Boulder and Longmont, in particular, already have housing in place or have plans for achieving local government housing goals, “we’re halfway there” toward achieving the goal suggested in the regional plan.
“It’s all do-able if we connect as a community, on a regional basis,” and decide that “this is a goal that we want to achieve,” Gardner said.
“A regional approach is the way to solve the affordable housing problem,” said Boulder City Council member Mary Young. She said the proposal presented to her, Boulder Council member Jan Burton and other municipal representatives attending Wednesday’s Consortium of Cities meeting, “is a good start,” but it “could use some tweaking.”
Young said the draft regional plan should do more to recognize the relationships between residents’ housing and transportation needs and expenses, for example, and should not focus exclusively on the percentages of people’s income being spent on rental housing.
Regional approach offers ‘traction’
“This is indeed a regional problem but also a national problem,” Longmont City Council member Polly Christensen said after the Consortium meeting.
“Lack of affordable housing has been caused by many factors reaching back to the early 1970s reflecting population demographics, poor public policy decisions, and short-sighted economic and corporate decisions. Lack of affordable housing and income inequality are now a national crisis.”
Young and Christensen said both Longmont and Boulder have what Young said are already “a lot of policies in place” to try to increase their cities’ affordable housing stock.
Christensen said Erie, Jamestown, Niwot, Nederland, Superior and Ward “are continuing to explore various paths” toward meeting their community’s affordable-housing needs.
Said Christensen: “We must address this on a regional basis to begin so we can coordinate and gain efficiencies of resources and efforts. Our housing problems are inextricably linked with decades of flat wages nationally and, for Longmont, poorly served regional transportation issues.
Superior Trustee Kevin Ryan said, “Affordable housing is a priority across many towns and cities but the impact has been particularly hard on Boulder County, where skyrocketing housing prices and rental rates have resulted in a dramatic reduction in affordable housing in a short amount of time.”
Lafayette City Council member Alexandra Lynch said, “This regional plan offers us a lot of opportunities.”
“There’s much more traction” with a regional approach, Lynch said. “It really needs to be a multi-pronged strategy.”
Lynch said a Lafayette task force has begun work on its own study of ways to meet that city’s need for a diverse housing stock for current and future middle- and low-income residents.
Range of strategies
Erie, Jamestown, Lyons and Louisville did not have representatives at Wednesday night’s Consortium of Cities meeting, but the preliminary strategic plan will be distributed to those Consortium members to take to their city councils and town boards. Ward is not an active Consortium participant.
The proposed strategic plan’s authors wrote in their report that increases in Boulder County housing prices “have outpaced growth in wages for nearly two decades” and that recent surveys of Boulder, Boulder Valley and Longmont residents stated that the lack of affordable housing is one of those residents’ highest concerns.4
“Across Boulder County, over 9,000 market rental units that were previously affordable to low-income households were lost to price inflation over a 12-year period,” the report said. “In that same period, 21,000 market rate homes that were affordable to low, moderate and middle income households — priced below $300,000 — were lost to price inflation.”
The report’s authors said the percentage of older, wealthier households in Boulder County has been increasing, “while households of younger individuals, middle incomes, and families are declining” At the same time, “Boulder County is a significant regional job center, and employees are commuting longer distances to fill these jobs.”
The report said that “as cities and towns within Boulder County become increasingly land constrained, a higher proportion of the new homes built will need to be affordable to meet community housing goals.
“Due to potential federal corporate tax reform as well as rising interest rates, (there) is currently considerable uncertainty in the national affordable housing investment market. In order for new affordable rental housing to remain financially feasible, local resources will be more important than ever.”
The report’s authors said their proposed plan “recognizes that a dramatic increase in local and regional efforts and adoption of multiple strategies and funding sources are required to regain ground in preserving affordability and price diversity in the regional housing inventory.”
They suggested that those strategies should include: establishment of local and regional housing goals; increasing local and regional government funding of housing programs; securing land and redevelopment opportunities for future housing; preserving existing affordable housing; and aligning local land-use regulations and ordinances to reflect local affordable-housing goals.
Boulder County’s Housing and Human Services Department director Frank Alexander said the strategic plan is expected to “go through a lot of iterations” before a proposed final version is presented to the Consortium, possibly in April.
Presentations may also be made to city councils and town boards requesting them in the coming weeks, as well.
John Fryar: 303-684-5211, jfryar@times-call.com or twitter.com/jfryartc
