Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: What we wind up getting when we make the obstacle course so hard and the bar to entry so high is we only get the most expensive things. The luxury housing, the super expensive commercial space.
Downtown Boulder. We have lots of different overlays of design regulations, downtown design advisories guidelines, urban corridor guidelines. We're trying to get denser buildings with retail on the ground floor and housing above. And, and somehow we've really just been struggling to get stuff that feels like a place that pedestrians or cyclists would want to go to, that they rarely create places.
I have lots of answers and lots of stories.
There's a place over at 13th. Just it really is like the ideal project and it took 11 years to get through the City of Boulder's design processes. It cost them a million dollars just in administrative and bureaucratic navigation. Not the design, not the engineering, just the paperwork and the hearings.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Hello Boulder County. My name is Philip Ogren. Welcome to the first episode of the Better Boulder Hearts and Minds podc.
This podcast will feature interviews with members of Better Boulder, candidates we endorse and other friends of our organization.
We will explore ways to make Boulder better with special emphasis on improved housing access and transportation infrastructure.
In this first episode I sat down with Scott Rodwin at his office in downtown Boulder where he works as an architect. Scott is obsessed with sustainability in the built environment and is a leader in green design in Colorado and is an active board member of Better Boulder. We talked about why it's so difficult to build attainable housing and build great places in Boulder. Along the way we also talked about construction defect legislation, ADUs, the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan and Title IX among others.
But before we start, we are looking for sponsors for our podcast. Perhaps you run a zero waste grocery store or a hot yoga studio. Or maybe you are a highly paid lobbyist for the all powerful bicycle lobbyist or an account manager for a multi state lottery. Maybe you are a conservative news anchor selling personality branded nicotine pouches. Or perhaps you are the son in law of a would be autocrat pimping a new cryptocurrency.
Whatever you're selling, why not advertise it here?
Please reach out if you are interested.
Okay, back to the show. I hope you enjoy this interview with Scott Rodwin.
[00:02:49] Speaker C: Scott Rodman welcome to the Better Bolder Hearts and Minds. Welcome to this kickoff episode of the podcast.
[00:02:57] Speaker A: Thank you. Great to be here.
[00:02:58] Speaker C: Yeah.
So we're here today to talk about the built environment and to talk about the way that society and the economy thrives. When we have a good one.
Tell us just A little bit about your role in shaping the built environment.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: Sure.
So I'm an architect. I own Rockland Architecture here in Boulder and I've been president of the American Institute of Architects for Colorado, president of Colorado Green Building Guild and, and started this firm 25 years ago. I'm deeply invested in seeing our community be vibrant and successful and thrive and have been part of the public discourse in a variety of ways over the last 30 some odd years that I've lived here and just really enjoy engaging with other people. Boulder's amazing because it has so many smart, dedicated, well intentioned people that are willing to commit incredible amount of time to helping making Boulder the best place that it can be. And not just Boulder, but Colorado and the United States and honestly the world. We have so many folks here who are trying to make a really big impact to make life better for everybody that it's a joy to engage in the public discourse around that.
[00:04:15] Speaker C: Well intentioned can be kind of a faint phrase, but I get your point. Like there are a lot of people who are really highly motivated to make
[00:04:24] Speaker A: positive change and a lot of really smart people who are highly motivated. Even people I disagree with here in Boulder, I tend to really respect almost everybody's opinion because they come from a place of having researched, having really thought about it, and in many cases bringing a lot of personal experience and professional experience to the matter at hand. And I look at our city council, I'm like, wow, that's an incredible bunch of incredibly qualified people.
[00:04:51] Speaker C: Yeah. Thank you for your service, City Council.
So we both read a book called Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Excellent read. I think we both highly recommend it, although we haven't talked about it yet. Maybe you hate it.
I assume you love it because you both thought it was a brilliant book.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: I had heard about it from architect friends of mine and they said, wow, you have to read this book.
It's a game changer. And that's what I found as well. I'm not here to promote the book specifically, but to promote the ideas of the book in that it looked at how we go about creating a culture that enables the results that we want. And it steps back and starts by asking, are we getting results that we want? While we don't all agree on exactly what we want in terms of more building, less building, faster cars, less fast cars, things like that, to a large degree, at least here in Boulder, there is a lot of agreement. First of all, we can all agree we need more attainable housing, both in terms of quantity and lower Prices.
And it's not for lack of trying. We have a robust planning department. We have a city council that has been focused on this issue for a decade. We have developers that are ready, willing and able to build what we as a community need. We have, I think, 62,000 in commuters every day to Boulder, which we're trying to create this low carbon community. But our carbon footprint in Boulder is more than double that of the average New York City resident. We're not getting what we want in terms of our environmental footprint.
And we came up with this idea of creating the green belt.
Was it 50 years ago now? Somewhere around there. So we have an incredible amount of open space around us, which sounds great. Hey, we leave the natural areas physical areas, we leave the man made areas, you know, physical, or we keep the man made areas where we have our physical footprint. The downside though is, is that the theory of that assumes that you don't have this enormous demand of people wanting to be in Boulder.
And what that's created is super elevated prices because we've artificially constrained the demand. And then we've made it incredibly difficult to build inside of the city limits of Boulder.
If we're going to limit the city limits so that we have this wonderful green belt all around us, then we also have a responsibility, I believe, to make sure that we're able to provide the needs for our firefighters, our teachers, our nurses. And right now, we can't. Boulder is aging. Boulder is becoming unreasonably expensive and out of reach for almost anybody.
And most importantly, if we look at our environmental footprint and what our goal was of creating this green belt around us is to protect and preserve the earth.
But by forcing everybody to drive, we created something called leapfrog development, where instead of urban sprawl, which most people say, oh, urban sprawl. It's terrible. Yes. And if you artificially draw a boundary, but then don't provide mass transit to get people in, or great biking opportunities around, or the ability for people to get their needs met, and in particular housing within the city limits, then you're going to have what we've created, which is a massive incommute, super high prices, a lack of diversity, a lack of equity in the community, and just going back to all the incommuting and the traffic and the lower quality of life, we've really compromised a lot of the environmental benefits that we've created otherwise for ourselves. With robust green building, with our bike culture, with all the wonderful things that we are doing. Forcing people to drive from Westminster or Erie or Brighton has really compromised our overall goal of trying to be as environmentally mindful as possible.
[00:09:03] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:09:04] Speaker A: So going back to abundance, it asks a fundamental question of are we naturally and easily getting the results that we were hoping for? If not, why not?
They go through a series of wonderful case studies where in not just the built environment, but in medicine and technology, they say, what is stopping it? And they found a consistent element. While the specifics differ from place to place and time to time and industry to industry, overall, what they found was that when we, from the best of intentions layer on rule after processes after rule after processes, we create this ninja course that is almost an unsurvivable obstacle course for many projects. It slows things down, it makes them less certain, it makes them more expensive and more difficult.
And when you do, a bunch of things happen. One, it kills a lot of projects. Two, it compromises other projects or makes them invariably more expensive and takes longer. So we don't get housing as quickly as we need, we don't get it as cheaply as we need. It also means that when there's greater risk and greater uncertainty in achieving it, that those who do develop those things successfully want the highest return for their investments. So instead of creating inexpensive attainable housing, they're creating luxury housing, because that's where the best return on investment is.
It's a tough conundrum, but the solution seems to be consistent from industry to industry. And no matter what circumstance their general conclusion is, take a look at the underlying assumption, first of all, of how much control we should have.
So I'm a big believer in balance above all things. Whether we're talking about chemistry or financial policy or building or anything else, or relationships or work life, work life or relationships and anything.
And in general, natural systems and man made systems, economic systems, tend to thrive when they're in balance.
Right now it feels like to me that there is a watershed moment happening where much of the United States, whether you're conservative or progressive, Democratic or Republican, that a lot of people are stepping back and saying, this isn't what I was hoping for.
[00:11:39] Speaker C: We also welcome independence to this.
[00:11:44] Speaker A: Hey, Colorado, that's half of the state.
So absolutely true that no matter what your political stripes, and this is what's really significant in that it doesn't seem to be a partisan issue that almost everyone is stepping back, going, we're not getting the results that we were hoping for. We can agree that we want more attainable housing and everything's too hard. Everything is too hard, everything is too expensive, everything is Too stressful.
And there's a way to step back and, and say, all right, how did we get here?
And I've been a massive proponent of sustainability for over 30 years. I helped write many of the green building rules that we now have to
[00:12:30] Speaker C: play by, like the LEED certification types.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: We did one of the first LEED platinum homes in the United States. And I've worked with the city and the county to give feedback on various policies and rules that they have been considering.
And I've also taught green building all throughout Boulder for 25 years. So I've helped enable this culture of oh, yes, we can. And I firmly believe that yes, we can and yes, we should. And when you layer the most robust green building rules, which we have on top of ignition resistant rules and neighborhood compatibility rules and size restrictions and growth restrictions and a myriad of other well intentioned, well thought out individual rules, what it seems like we don't always do is think about how they interact with each other in combination.
One obstacle can generally be overcome, but when you layer all these on, it's a cumulative effect where it's not even one plus one plus one. It's one to the power of.
And in our experience, we're designing a couple churches in town right now. We've done some schools, we've done retail restaurants and a lot of houses, small little additions and remodels and big fancy houses. And we found that the smaller players, the coffee shop that took 406 days to get through Boulder's building permit process, the homeowner who wants to do did
[00:14:04] Speaker C: they open and are they in business?
[00:14:05] Speaker A: No, they did open. They're doing fine.
[00:14:07] Speaker C: Okay.
Not that they don't have any PTSD from that whole experience
[00:14:15] Speaker A: that especially the small players, the coffee shop, the homeowner who wants to do an affordable addition of a room or two to their house, that those are the ones that get beat up and weeded out by these rules, big, fancy, expensive things, they can afford to hire professionals to navigate them through the process. Even then, it's still incredibly difficult, but at least they have people who know how to navigate through the obstacle course.
But folks who call me up and say, hi, I want to do this little tiny thing, and I take a quick look at the project and say, ooh, you're going to have to get a variance for that, or there's going to be a lot of investigation, or you have to go through a site plan review process, and they're like, really? For this little thing that we want to do, just the amount of time for a restaurateur. They sign at lease, the landlord might give them 30, 60, 90 days of free rent because they know that they have to do remodeling. But if it's a significant remodel, it could take a year before we start construction.
Between the design process, a historic landmark review, right of way permits, liquor license, and then we go through and do the building permit and then we start construction, it might be two years before they're open.
They're a million dollars in the hole on rent before they've opened their doors.
[00:15:38] Speaker C: That's a lot of plates of food.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: It is. So it's one of the reasons. And this goes back to again, are we getting the results we need? So we look around Boulder and we say, hey, we have terrific restaurants here. This is great. But what about the coffee shops? Coffee shops don't tend to do very well here. Art stores don't tend to survive very long here.
Lower budget restaurants have great deal of difficulty surviving in Boulder. And it's because the startup cost is really high. And typically only more expensive restaurants are ones that a lot of alcohol can afford to essentially pay back the long, the high bar of entry that we have.
So again, this just goes back to asking the question, are we getting the results we want? We would love reasonably attainable commercial space for folks, but it's really expensive to go through the building permit process or to build anything. So we want arts in Boulder, but arts have the least amount of money. So. So how do we actually create an environment where they have the ability to survive or to get started at all?
[00:16:46] Speaker C: Please answer that.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: So I don't. First of all, I want to say I don't have all the answers. I don't have any of the answers at the moment. But what I have hopefully is a moment where I can put my finger on something where it says, I have personally had a moment where I am becoming mindful of something that I hadn't before.
I was so focused on sustainability, pushing as far and as hard as I possibly could. And other folks are doing the same thing with ignition resistant construction or ADA
[00:17:17] Speaker C: compliance or ignition resistance is fire resistant
[00:17:21] Speaker A: construction, which is huge here, especially after Marshall fire. And I don't downplay it at all, we will have another Marshall fire here. We need to be ready and we need to be cognizant of that. When we are telling people that they have to build using ignition resistant materials that is typically more expensive than when you're not building with ignition resistant materials. Add on sustainability and they create compatibility And a variety of other things. And there's a reason why we can't build attainable housing in Boulder.
So we're coming back to this moment where I'm having a personal moment where I'm saying, all right, I now recognize that I need to be more mindful of. I've got my sacred cow. It's sustainability. But I need to be mindful of the cumulative impact of adding that to everybody else's sacred cows. And what have we created?
I would say the first thing that we need to do to start to unwind, I.e. be aware of that interrelationship between all those things. And those who don't build every day might not be aware of it. They're aware, oh, I really want an ignition resistant house or a fire hardened house. That sounds fine, but what about all those other things that aren't your particular passion? How does it overlay?
My focus is on the built environment. But as described in the book Abundance, they talk about the development of new drugs and medical therapies.
We can look at really anything, the creation of new green energy.
So the book describes this process where a lot of the environmental laws and the legal processes that surrounded them were used to stop bad projects going back 50 years.
Now those exact same laws are being used to stop good projects, meaning green energy projects. Green energy projects. So windmill farms and solar panel farms.
[00:19:22] Speaker C: Where's the, the maglev, the high speed,
[00:19:25] Speaker A: the high speed rail, you name it. And you can point to how we've created a culture where we have employed legal tactics to stop not just the bad projects. But unfortunately now we've caught up a whole lot of good projects along with it. And we have a general attitude that we're entitled to do so. We have a responsibility to do so. If somebody wants to build affordable housing in our neighborhood, what's the first reaction?
Oh, my God. There's going to be traffic and there's going to be undesirable people. It's going to lower our property values. But here's the weird thing. We have proposed affordable housing projects in the exact same city council meeting. We have heard two people, two neighbors screaming that it's going to raise their property values and lower their property values. Raise their property values. They don't want higher taxes, lower the property values.
People have a natural tendency, because of the culture we've created, to object to change and a belief that the legal system should entitle them to stop a project.
Perhaps I'm exaggerating a little bit, but I think that all of us know about projects either in our neighborhood or some high profile project in our community where it's like, oh, that would have been wonderful.
And it's run into too many barriers and it dies.
There's a project that I'm particularly aware of called the Pearl East Arts District. I saw it in the paper, I have some friends who are working to move it forward. And I said, wow, that's an awesome project. Because for years I've also been involved in the arts and in talking with some of the big arts boosters here in town. They're like, oh God, Boulder's never going to be able to put it together. We need millions of dollars, we need a piece of land. We're always going to get beat out by for profit developers.
There's no money in the city coffers and arts organizations just can't raise enough to make this happen.
And they own a piece of land. They have dedicated its specifically to the purpose of performance and insight.
[00:21:37] Speaker C: Whose day?
[00:21:38] Speaker A: Oh, so this is. Conscience Bay is the name of the. The owner. I hope they don't mind me actually naming them, but they own this piece of.
[00:21:44] Speaker C: They're on the website, they've gone public with this project.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: They're proposing the Pearl Restarts District. They took it to planning board about a month and a half ago and planning board in a nutshell said, wow, that's a great project. We really love it. It's dynamic and vibrant. It has attainable housing in it, affordable housing. It has a performance space that Sundance will love and we can bring bigger musical acts and arts to Boulder. And it has rehearsal space too, and a vibrant retail and public, public assembly area. So greens and bars and restaurants and rooftop terraces and things like that. It's sort of a laundry list of awesomeness.
And
[00:22:25] Speaker C: the planning board, that's illegal.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: And the planning board in a nutshell so said, wow, that's really wonderful. And it doesn't fit our rules.
To which my first thought was, well, if that's something that we really want and it's going to bring tax revenue and a future growth opportunity for Sundance to help keep them here and keep them excited about Boulder. And it just adds a little bit more of that cool factor back to Boulder that we can do big good things.
If we're saying that our rules don't allow that, then maybe we need to rethink our rules. And equally importantly, we need to rethink the assumption underneath those rules, meaning the idea that, oh well, we have rules and rules are more important, the processes are more important than getting the results that we want.
So it feels like a really important moment between that and the Boulder Valley comp plan, which we're closing in on a conclusion of, and the Area 3 Reserve Discussion, which is a large swath of about 200 acres of developable land just north on the northern edge of Boulder, where we could effectively create another holiday driving 2.0 neighborhood. But do it even better and have thousands of units of desperately needed attainable in this middle housing.
Those things are all happening right now. Pearl Arts District is just one example. It's a nice compact one, but we're looking at these much bigger things too, between Area 3 and Comp Plan.
And then on the small side, what happens to all the individual people, the person who wants to build an ADU in their backyard? The state has done a remarkable job of focusing their attention on trying to make it easier to build housing. Because I don't know if Jared Polis read Abundance, but he seems to have figured it out ahead of time in that for the last few years they have said we have left planning and zoning to the local communities because that's ideally where it should be decided. Local communities know their place best. They know what should be there and what's next needed best. But the result has consistently been the local communities say, well, yeah, we'd really like affordable housing. We just don't want it here in our neighborhood.
And the restrictions that have been created both by NIMBYism and also just by the rules and processes that naturally gum up the works and make it hard to build because municipalities are trying to prevent bad things from happening.
And in the process, they've made it hard for good things to happen too.
And one thing that we can all agree on is that there isn't enough attainable housing anywhere in Colorado.
And it's the municipalities that care most about the quality of life in their place, Boulder, Vail, Aspen, Durango, that have actually made it the hardest to build what is most desperately needed.
So the state said, we're going to override local planning and zoning controls. And they said no more occupancy limits on how many people can live in a house. We're going to allow duplexes and triplexes along transit oriented corridors. We're going to allow ADUs everywhere. And a host of other bills, they did a really important one last year where they changed the construction defect legislation, which sounds really geeky or just building nerd stuff, but 30 years ago, roughly 30% of all the housing built in Colorado were condos for sale. For sale. Condos Then about 30 years ago, we changed the state of Colorado, changed construction defect legislation to make it really easy for class action lawsuits. It only required two people. Yeah, it only required two people. An entire condominium complex. So say Rock Creek, 10,000 units. Only two people needed to sign on. And what happened almost overnight is that almost every condominium project started having lawsuits. Massive project ending, career ending lawsuits.
We got a notice from our insurance company or architectural errors and emissions insurance liability about 15 years ago that said. Just wanted to let you know, if you do condos, you have a 98% chance of being sued even if you did nothing wrong.
Because when a roof leaks, or more specifically in this case, predatory lawyers that work on commission would come. Sorry, lawyers would come knock on people's doors and say, hi, you have something wrong with your condo. And somebody would say, I love my condo. They'd say, no, no, you have something wrong with your condo. If you sign here and join the class action lawsuit, we can get you between 50,000 and $100,000.
And the person would say, oh, that sounds great. Do I have to do anything? No, just sign right here. So they'd sign free money. And in the process they would just kind of sit back and the lawyers would say they would sue everybody involved with the project. Developer, the builder, the architect, the engineers. And they would say, did all of you perform every part of this project to the highest standard possible?
Did you include all the flashing that is necessary, not just the optional stuff. Did you use the most robust? And eventually they'll find something that is less than perfect or less than ideal, either in the design, engineering or construction.
And there would be a settlement, possibly a judgment in a court, but possibly just a mediated settlement. Either way, everybody is paying for this. Insurance rates went up exponentially. And the bottom line, or the result of this well intentioned consumer protection law was that developers, architects, builders and engineers stopped building condominiums. Right now, roughly 2% of all the housing being built in Colorado this past year was condos, 2%, down from almost 30% if you take a look at,
[00:28:38] Speaker C: and I assume of those 2%, it's mostly luxury. Yeah, I was gonna say maybe all luxury.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: That's where the least risk is.
[00:28:47] Speaker C: That's a good challenge. Find me one naturally occurring, affordable new.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: There are a handful of affordable housing projects where it was, that was the contract that was stipulated by the city or nonprofit saying, we're going to build for sale condos. Both pretty darn rare. I happen to live in one.
The bottom line is one of the things when we look at attainable housing. So going back to the core question of did we create or are we creating this thing that we want? The result that we want is a. It's not just attainable housing.
[00:29:20] Speaker C: We tried to protect these.
[00:29:21] Speaker A: But an important spectrum of attainable housing, meaning starting from the lowest end, 40% of area media needs come really basic efficiency apartments, up to really nice townhomes that might be suitable for a family of four.
Because right now we're getting a lot of luxury apartments. It's not ideal for families. They want a yard, they want a place that they can have a dog, they need a parking garage, and they need a place where they can connect to their neighbors if they have kids. When you live in an apartment, that's a lot harder, especially if you're not in a dense urban environment like in New York or someplace like that.
So one of the things that we did that really hurt us is that we cut off the bottom couple of rungs of the, of the attainable housing or affordable housing ladder. In that in order to eventually get to what is still considered the American dream of having a freestanding single family home, you have to work your way up, you have to get out of college, you share an apartment with a few friends, eventually get your own apartment, and then someday maybe you buy your first condo because that's the most affordable housing that you can typically buy.
And then you work your way up, maybe get a townhome after that, maybe then you get a starter single family home and eventually you graduate into a full family home. That's sort of the American dream.
[00:30:44] Speaker C: That's how the board games laid out,
[00:30:46] Speaker A: that's how the board game, that's how Monopoly's laid out.
And right now we've cut off the bottom two rungs of that ladder. The only people that can jump from a shared apartment in college to owning a starter home are people that come for money.
And that is not helpful to our, to our aspirations of diversity and equity and inclusion because it predominantly excludes minorities and people that don't have some intergenerational wealth.
So I'm rambling all over the place in lots of different directions, but you can see how this one thing of wow, we created a rule about green building or fire resistive construction. And it contributes to this overall both culture of we will create rules without a consideration of the holistic impact of them.
And that each of these chips away at our ability to attain our other goals of providing decent affordable housing to everybody, of limiting the need for people to drive from Far away, ruined our collective carbon footprint and add more traffic to our streets and lower our quality of life and also to increase our diversity and equity and inclusion.
[00:32:04] Speaker C: Can I add to that, Liz? I want to live in a great city. Yeah, you know, like we, we have a city handed over to cars and almost everyone, everyone goes everywhere in their car and we spend tens of thousands of dollars to go to Europe and enjoy a week or two in car light environments.
And we think, oh, why can't we have that here? Well, it's just too hard to have it here.
[00:32:34] Speaker A: So I grew up in Connecticut, which is part of the New England general hemisphere.
Interestingly, you go there and they are typically more bike friendly even though the weather is not as pleasant because a lot of those cities were laid out before the car took over. So Europe did have a big advantage in that they didn't. It wasn't because they were, well, attention. It was because everybody walked.
[00:33:00] Speaker C: Actually, actually I would push back on that pretty hard. If you ever watch the YouTube channel, not just Bikes, they talk about how much political will it took to reclaim urban city, urban cores from the car. Like they let the car in, it ruined everything and they kicked the car back out. And we could do that.
So anyways, there's a fascinating history around
[00:33:25] Speaker A: cars and the politics of it here in Boulder, right along Broadway, you know, we used to have a trolley that ran up and down Broadway and the car companies paid Boulder to rip it out so that they could actually sell more cars.
So hopefully it's not an urban myth that I'm just recirculating, but I believe it.
But yes, it's true. So I think it is a combination of that. They have the advantage of generally being built back when people walked or took a horse from point A to point B, but they had to, yes, also fight for the value of creating pedestrian environments. And I've spent lots of time in Europe and I completely agree with you that there is a quality of life and a vibrancy to having places that are not so car dominated. Boulder, I think, has been trying as hard as almost any American city to make it happen in folks like you and many of the wonderful bike advocates in town that are really
[00:34:26] Speaker C: keeping the
[00:34:26] Speaker A: pressure on to create safe ways to get around other than by car.
And that also combines with this. So let me step back for a second.
Downtown Boulder, we have lots of different overlays of design regulations, downtown design advisories guidelines, urban corridor guidelines. We're trying to get denser buildings with retail on the ground floor and housing above and somehow we've really just been struggling to get stuff that feels like a place that pedestrians or cyclists would want to go to, that they rarely create places.
I have lots of answers and lots of stories. There's a place over at 13th, just south of Walnut that has this beautiful fountain. If people haven't been to it, it's kind of the northern edge of the civic area. If you've been to the Boulder Farmers Market, just keep walking north and you'll discover this fabulous little hidden park.
There's this giant fountain that frankly should be in front of the Boulder County Courthouse because it's big and spectacular and very few people ever make use of it as a public place. When it first opened, and I know the architects here who designed it and they had this well intentioned, European inspired thought to it.
There were all kinds of rules about the building that surrounded and created this wrapper around this urban space.
The urban space did a lot of things right. It has a nice curve to it. It creates an actual space.
[00:35:58] Speaker C: So the block of the one block of bike path going through there is the nicest one.
[00:36:04] Speaker A: They have a bike path, they have shaped trees, There is some urban sculpture and shade covering. The scale of the buildings is good.
It really works. And it failed for one reason.
The building itself had retail along the retail shops that are very permeable to that urban plaza.
[00:36:30] Speaker C: Isn't there a fancy cigar shop there?
[00:36:32] Speaker A: There was fancy. I think that came later, but yes, it was a fancy cigar shop, but there was. There were two cafes and a sandwich shop in particular down there and then a couple of other little retail places.
And one by one they all failed in large part because the rent was too high and they didn't get enough foot traffic coming through.
But what happened is as soon as they vacated their leases, there was a marketing and then a few financial firm up above them that own some high cost office space and they were doing well. When the coffee shop closed, they closed the doors, replaced it with sealed storefront and took it over for the office space that was above that. It wasn't created in such a way that only retail could really survive there.
I spent a lot of time in Europe and especially in southern France, the small towns, not the petite villages, but the towns that are modern, towns that are really thriving.
Something interesting about the retail that's there is the shops are like 150 square feet. They're tiny, they're only 15ft deep.
And having a very small amount of square footage footage enables startups, if they're selling shirts or bread or something like that to survive. When you have to take over a 1500 square foot space, which is kind of the standard module on downtown, that's really expensive, typically it's like 30ft wide and 50ft deep or something like that.
I'm getting down into the weeds. But what I'm really trying to say is that we have created, created an extremely prescriptive way of entitling people to build space. If I were a developer and I wanted to come and build a new wonderful space downtown that would be just absolutely fabulous, everything.
The number of hurdles and rules that I would have to go through would take probably two years or more. I'd have to hire a professional, top professionals to guide me through the process. And I'd have a high probability of either not getting through it or of being told by various boards, well intentioned boards full of people that are giving up their nights and weekends to serve on planning board and downtown design advisory board and city council who then come in and tell the architect and the developer and the builder and the engineer how they should do their job. Jobs.
About 15 years ago, I designed a large church, 800 seat church for the oldest black congregation religious congregation in Colorado. It was down in Colorado Springs. I don't know why they chose me. I didn't have the resume for it. But when I interviewed with the congregation, they decided that they wanted to have me as their architect.
I did a sketch of a site plan, literally back of the napkin and a watercolor. I did a watercolor section through the building showing what I imagined for them. I showed it to them, they loved it. They said, oh my God, that's our building.
As an architect, I can say we never have clients say that on the floor. Shut up, this is it, we're done.
But I showed them the site plans, floor plan and section. They're like, that's it. You totally understood us.
I called up the El Paso Development Services, which is their building department down there, and said, hey, I'm working with this church and we're in a tricky neighborhood. It's right on the intersection between single family homes and a watershed on a very steep piece of property. And, and we have this concept and I want to bring it to you in our earliest phase so you can give me feedback and direct me as to what kind of process you want us to go through.
So they said, great, we'll make an appointment in two weeks and send us what you got. Two weeks later I went down and had a one hour meeting surrounding this big conference table. Were the heads of each department, Public utilities and transportation and building department and everything else. So these were the directors of each, not staff directors.
And they went around the table and each of them took about five minutes or so to give me their feedback about this is what I want about egress and this is what you should know about water and everything else.
And after an hour the director of land use said, well, there you go. And I said, great, that was all terrific feedback, thank you. It all makes sense. And I said, what's the next step with the entitlement and planning and zoning process? And he looked at me like I was an idiot. And he said that was it. And I said, I don't understand.
And he looked at me like I was really brain damaged. And he said, you're a licensed architect, right? I said, yeah. He said, you worked really hard to become a licensed architect, right? I said, yeah. He said, you're gonna hire a licensed civil engineer, right? I said, of course. He said, they worked really hard to become a licensed civil engineer. I said, yeah. He said, good, do your jobs.
And he said that was it. He said, you go straight to building knuckle bump. Seriously. And I just kind of sat there dumbfounded because I had not experienced that. Now, Colorado Spanish is perhaps not the best place to hold up as being a well planned city. They had their troubles. They went bankrupt because they spread out too fast and too far like a mini Phoenix. And it's very expensive to as a city to supply water and sewer and electricity and fire department services to a large spread out place. It's also a little hodgepodgey downtown. That said, it's dramatically more.
If you look at Colorado Springs, they're almost a perfect parallel to Boulder.
They've got institutions down there comparable to our university and federal labs. They've got an urban backdrop that looks just like another version of ours.
There's so much alike and yet we chose two divergent ways of thinking about control of the built environment. They're super kind of libertarian and I've always found it funny that progressives or liberals are extremely conservative when it comes to land use planning and the built environment and that conservatives are extremely lax or hands off when it comes to the built environment. You'd think that those terms would actually the political names that we give ourselves or designations that we give ourselves are actually opposite when it comes to the built environment and land use.
[00:43:27] Speaker C: Is that sanctuary built now?
[00:43:30] Speaker A: No. So that's another story. That's another story. Basically we came up with a design. They said Go ahead. I designed it. And then they decided that they didn't have enough money to do what they wanted. That's true of so many nonprofits. And actually circling back to Boulder, we work with a lot of nonprofits we're working with. We're designing two churches right now.
Nonprofits schools.
We did a couple Waldorf schools and churches. They don't have a lot of money. These are not for profit developers, but they're held to essentially the same standards as for profit developers.
So this is going back to the question of if somebody wants to build a coffee shop or do a little addition to their house, or we want artists residences or want a church, or we want a Waldorf school or a preschool or something like that. These folks don't have the money or the ability to endure the rigorous process. So what we wind up getting when we make the obstacle course so hard and the bar to entry so high is we only get the most expensive things. The luxury housing, the super expensive commercial space.
So this goes back to the question in abundance of if we're not getting the result that we want, we have to go back and ask ourselves, what system did we create? Can we instead of create a system that naturally and easily produces the results that we want and as a matter of fact, skew things towards the result that we want?
[00:45:02] Speaker C: Can I circle back to something you brought up earlier?
Did we end up with the construction defects?
Are we going to build more condos soon?
[00:45:13] Speaker A: Through the American Institute of Architects, we helped support and champion a bill that went through several years ago and then a better one this year that changed the construction defect litigation so that the bar is much higher. If somebody wants to sue for construction defects, they now need 65% or essentially 2 thirds of any development.
Residents must sign on to the class action lawsuit, and they have to demonstrate that the professional was actually negligent and caused the damages and that the developer, builder, architect, engineer has the right to remedy the defect, which eliminates a lot of the incentive for predatory lawyers to come in and work on commission and say, we'll take 50% of whatever you get from the insurance companies, because now the money is likely going to fixing the thing. Instead of paying lawyers, you put all those together and it substantially changes the playing field so that now developers, architects, builders, and engineers can start to say again, huh? It's now safer to build condos. And hopefully over the course of the next decade, because it takes a long
[00:46:23] Speaker C: time to filter through when you destroy an industry, yes, it'll take a while
[00:46:29] Speaker A: to come back but at this point, we've created a playing field where folks who want to build entry level housing condos can actually do it again in a way that does not guarantee that they will be sued.
[00:46:42] Speaker C: Cool.
On a related note, I got to listen in on an update on ADUS and how those are going and that we're on pace for a banner year for new ADUs.
[00:46:54] Speaker A: We are the only thing that's really stopping them because between what the state has done to say ADUs everywhere and the city of Boulder also participated and ratified a lot of the state's directives and codified it into our land use. We have made it very achievable. And most homeowners don't really understand how favorable the conditions have become to building ADUs. The downside is that it's still very expensive, construction costs are really high, and because there's still a fair amount of paperwork to go through the process to design it, and each one's generally going to be custom.
When people see how much it costs to build an adu, a lot of enthusiasm gets dampened.
[00:47:40] Speaker C: Yeah, but the bottom line, I also heard that two of the new ADUs this year were, were manufactured. So maybe it's some trend in that direction will help with that.
[00:47:52] Speaker A: One of the many bills that passed this past year was that the state unified all of the manufactured housing codes because manufactured housing relies for its economy of scale and low prices on being able to knock out a thousand houses that are the same and can go anywhere in their sales region. So let's call it Colorado.
Previously, Durango had very different rules from Boulder, had different rules from Colorado Springs, which meant that a lot of the economies that normally would benefit manufactured housing they weren't able to take advantage of because they could only do small one off projects. Now they have the ability to standardize their methods of construction to meet the state standard for manufactured housing housing. And that will start to unlock our ability to deliver lower cost housing.
We need a whole quiver of solutions because there is no one silver bullet. And ADUs and construction defects and manufactured housing rules, all of these things just help make the environment more conducive to getting the results that we want.
[00:49:03] Speaker C: Can I share what our mutual friend Brian Bone would call a cool project?
I have this fantasy of conspiring with a downtown property owner and leasing their roof space with sewage and electricity hookup. And in the dead of night you have a crane that just drops in a tiny home.
[00:49:27] Speaker A: Do you want to be putting this on air?
[00:49:29] Speaker C: With the setback? With the setback Just far enough so that no one will notice from years and then, you know, anyways, I don't know if that's. If there's.
Every time I'm downtown, I just started looking at the roofscape and I think, man, it'd be fun to live on top of that building.
[00:49:47] Speaker A: So actually you're giving a wonderful story of a mental attitude that is, I think, the way that we need to go.
It really comes down to how can we say yes to the things that we want? How can we facilitate it and make it easy.
When I was working with Colorado Springs, that literally was their motto. They called themselves the Development Assistance Office. I believe it was that their overall mission was to facilitate the kind of development that they were wanting.
And in Boulder, my experience has generally been the opposite of let us tell you why you can't do what you want to do.
And even when it wasn't the rules and process of the staff that societally that we have created, that all the rules that we have in place and all the processes come out of us as a culture, the culture said we want more protections against bad development.
[00:50:51] Speaker C: We want to control where our neighbors are.
[00:50:53] Speaker A: Exactly. So we elected city council officials that created more pool and they in turn appointed planning board officials that interpreted those rules in a way that essentially prevented development we didn't want.
But in the process, we have this collateral damage of also unintentionally eliminating or compromising a lot of projects that we did want.
There's a wonderful project up on Broadway around called Washington Village. And I'm friends with the developer and the architects who worked on it.
And it really is held up as poster child of what development should be. There was an elementary school that was a historic building. It closed because of lack of enrollment, because we were having an aging population, fewer kids, not enough to support another elementary school in essentially West Boulder.
So they closed the school and instead of demolishing it or turning it into super high end condos or something like that, the developers said, all right, we're going to look at this whole block and we're going to create tons of affordable housing. We're going to create some attainable commercial space.
We're going to create shared urban amenities, pocket parks, and have a gradation of different kinds of housing all on this one piece of property. And we're going to preserve the, this historic landmark building. Actually, I think they landmarked it in the process of doing this and I think it was a LEED gold project overall. So really just kind of checked every box, just Fabulous. Oh, and it's on an urban transit corridor.
Walk, bike, take the skip to absolutely everything you need. It really is like the ideal project.
And it took 11 years to get through the city of Boulder's design processes. It cost them a million dollars just in administrative and bureaucratic navigation. Not the design, not the engineering, just the paperwork and the hearings.
The developer, who also won Green Developer of the Year nationally right about that same time that it was completing it, essentially said, after that project, I'm done. I'm just. I'm so exhausted by this process. I saw him get beat up in the newspaper. There was a. There was an op ed in the newspaper that said that Texas developer should go back where he came from. He was born and raised in Boulder. He is literally, this is one one Custom Homes and the founder of that. He was literally the guy who championed being the good guy developer in the entire country.
And he was just eviscerated by other folks here in our community saying he should go back to Texas, where he wasn't from to begin with, that he cared only about money, which is not true because I've seen his books and I know that he was probably the least profitable developer I've ever seen because he kept on doing these wonderful projects that were more about community good and pushing the edge of sustainability and historic preservation. All these things that are expensive and don't improve the bottom line. And he did them anyway because he believed they were the right thing to do.
So we.
[00:54:14] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:54:14] Speaker A: So I would say so after that, he told every other developer, don't do this.
Which means that you've created a whole group of people that are normally the people creating what we want. We're now like that. We're not going to do that kind of project anymore.
[00:54:27] Speaker C: Yeah. So I feel like.
I don't know if a weakness in your argument is the right way to phrase it, but there's this sort of Achilles heel of, what is it that we want? You know, who is we and what do we want? And, you know, I was at the farmer's market last Saturday and we were collecting, we're ramping up a little bit of social media content. And we had a little sign that said, how would you make Boulder better?
[00:54:57] Speaker A: Is this a Better Boulder?
[00:54:59] Speaker C: This is a Better Boulder thing.
And we got lots of answers.
[00:55:02] Speaker A: I didn't announce it. So we both serve on the board of Better Boulder because we believe in creating a better and more vibrant place.
[00:55:08] Speaker C: And one guy came by, he just snarkily said, well, we should evict Half the people.
And then as he's walking past, I was like, oh, that's, you know, that's hilarious, your hyper violent fantasy.
And he's like, but the only question is which half? You know, and it's just there's a contingent in Boulder of people who walk around harboring these kinds of fantasies.
I don't know if it's a fantasy per se, but it's like, it's like he thought that was funny. So something about him thinks that that's a reasonable thing to quip about.
[00:55:49] Speaker A: So I'm going to say this is fairly controversial. There are legitimate reasonable arguments to make about the carrying capacity of a place that is short on water.
It is also worth noting that I think 80% of the Colorado river is being used for agriculture, not development.
[00:56:09] Speaker C: And the kind of agriculture that turns into feed for feed laws.
[00:56:13] Speaker A: Correct. Typically, I believe 7% of Colorado river is used for residential development and all its associated uses, including things like parks, golf courses and front lawns and all that. So only 7% goes to all of the housing of all of us.
And the other, I think is like 8% was industry and manufacturing.
And then there's a few percent that's for a variety of other things, but.
But it's mostly agriculture. So when people do bring up the argument of carrying capacity of this region and it is semi arid, high desert, at least part of it is that we should say, all right, well, before you pick on the little guy housing, maybe we should ask the bigger question of how do we think about agriculture? That's a whole different battle. And I don't want to throw agriculture under the bus, but I do want to.
I do.
Because unlike this snarky fellow at the farmer's market, I believe that it's important to realize that we as a society have stated that we have needs and this is how we want to try and meet them. All government is simply our best attempt to figure out, in an ideal situation, to figure out how to best meet our needs. Yes, there's corruption in government. There's. There's all kinds of influence that goes in a different direction about meeting needs of individuals and greed or something like that. But let's assume for a moment that everybody working in all levels of government is essentially attempting to represent the collective will as best as we understand it. Because this is going to your question of what do we all agree on that we want.
There's a ton of stuff that we want to on. There's a ton of stuff that changes over time.
One thing that we can almost unilaterally, almost by consensus agree on is the need for more table housing. So let's start there. And I only brought up agriculture because I want to dispel the myth that some folks who are anti development or anti housing, especially anti attainable housing, are building missing middle say, well, we shouldn't have more people here, so we shouldn't build more housing for them because it'll just induce growth. Just like on a highway, if you build another highway lane, it'll induce more cars. If we build more housing here, it'll induce more growth and living here.
That's true.
And the impact or consumption of water, particularly for attainable housing. We're not talking about mansions with sprawling yards.
We're talking about small compact housing. Is that they. That kind of housing in particular is the most sustainable.
That if you don't allow someone to live here, they have to live somewhere.
[00:59:05] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:59:05] Speaker A: There's this myth that if we stop development locally, that we've stopped development.
[00:59:10] Speaker C: That is not true. Like anti growth is a local problem.
[00:59:14] Speaker A: It's not. It's a regional ratio.
I was on the Sierra Club's fall and transportation committee for many, many years. And we fought this myth tooth and nail because Sierra Club national did something amazing about 20 years ago. They issued a white paper that essentially said we have a policy position where we want the cities to be densified and the natural areas to be left alone rather than endless urban sprawl. Because they said, we understand that if you don't allow cities to be densified and you have people moving there for jobs or entertainment or lifestyle, whatever it is, that they will either sprawl or they'll do what we have here, which is leapfrog development. They will drive until they qualify.
[01:00:01] Speaker C: The easy thought exercise is think about the people living in Washington park less than a mile from here on the skit, and their peers who are living in Erie or Lafayette or whatever and driving in. And you can compare the spaces that they occupy too. Right. Like the single family home versus a compact.
[01:00:21] Speaker A: Yeah. Their sustainability footprint measured carbon footprint. Carbon footprint measured in the need for more highways, measured in water in really everything is much lower by being in the city. So when we stop a development in Boulder and it winds up springing up in Brighton or Erie instead, and we still have this jobs to population imbalance where we've got a lot of jobs here, then we're going to, by just its nature have created a system where we are forcing people to drive in by the tens of thousands and nobody likes that result.
[01:01:01] Speaker C: So I think we all hate the cars. We all hate the cars. I mean, in terms of other people's cars, I think we're divided about whether we like our own.
[01:01:12] Speaker A: So my challenge to everybody here in Boulder, from our city council to planning board to every advocate for every issue, just like me, who's been fighting for sustainability with a giant flag for 30 years. Thank you.
You're welcome. And I had an adverse impact too, because I didn't realize what our holistic impact was, is to step back and ask the question, are we getting the results we want overall? If we're not, what is our part in it? How do we untangle that? Can we reduce a rule?
I'm going to give you a silly little example.
We designed a house recently. This is net zero energy, you know, super sustainable house here in town.
The previous owner had a 60 year old house that was essentially falling down. They took down the house and then decided to sell a lot. So we got a blank lot here in town. Rare thing, we designed a house for it. We submitted it to the city, Boulder. It took eight and a half months to get through the building building permit review process. At the end of that eight and a half months, no substantial comments were made, meaning the city didn't change anything that was significant to the benefit of the public good. They didn't protect people from a monster house or huge height or bad anything.
So the comments were really small. But it took eight and a half months to get through.
In many other peer cities around Colorado might take eight days or eight weeks to get through.
A lot of the comments that we did get back were different parts of the city of Boulder fighting with each other because they both had the rules and the processes that they needed to get through and they were duking it out amongst themselves. We also had some where when the feedback came back, we had one where we had a solid front porch wall 34 inches high.
And the comment from the reviewer was, well, it doesn't say in the Boulder code that you're allowed to have a wall. It says that you can have a fence or a rail.
And we said, drive up Mapleton, you'll see tons of beautiful houses that we love that have essentially solid walls.
And what's the definition of wall versus wall fence? The intention is the same, that it has a front porch and you're allowed to have it yay high. And they said, well, it doesn't say that in the rules. We had to enlist the help of the Director of Land Use to override that Interpretation, not a good use of his time.
And he said, yeah, the rules were being overly enforced.
And that's really the crux of it, that when rules are down on paper and processes are written down in order to treat everybody fairly, and because we've agreed that these are the rules and policies that we want, we have to generally follow them. There's very little flexibility built into the system, and there isn't a lot of ability to say, oh, is this achieving the result that we're hoping for? Getting a house built that's attractive to the community. Community and fits within our general rules?
And I just. I want to say we need to comprehend. We've gotten very good at making rules and policies in Boulder. We're great at it.
We do them like nobody's business. Can we be equally skillful in doing the opposite of saying, all right, adding more rules and processes didn't get us the results we want.
How about if we try asking the question of, could we eliminate this rule? Would it harm us or would it help us? Can we also consider this rule and how it's interacting in concert with the other rules that we have in place?
Because just looking at rules in isolation is kind of what got us into the problem in the first place. We want to design a system that works better now.
[01:05:29] Speaker C: So the BBCP is in flight. And it's, I think. I think, the calendar for that. If you want to put input into that. Too late.
But it seems like it's shaping up to be something that's kind of consistent with a lot of the themes there that we've talked about.
There's a push right now in the political discourse about Title IX and simplify that.
[01:06:00] Speaker A: Title IX is. Yes, sir. It's our comprehensive land use code. And for, well, 20 years, I've heard discussion around making Title IX work better. But what I have heard for the time, first time, probably, and this is why I wrote the op ed about abundance and built environment now, is because it feels like there is a moment, a watershed moment that is happening on the national scale, on the state scale, and locally right here in Boulder, where people are all realizing, wow, life is too hard. We've made it too hard for ourselves. Whether we're talking about filling out medical forms when we go to the hospital or a building permit form when we want to do a little addition to
[01:06:38] Speaker C: our house, or our brightest minds spending all their time writing grants.
[01:06:43] Speaker A: Writing grants and filling out forms accounting
[01:06:47] Speaker C: for the money they spent in that.
[01:06:49] Speaker A: It's become pervasive in our culture, and it Feels like there is a moment of cultural shift where people are broadly realizing that we have done this. And no matter what field you're in, that we've all experienced the negative impacts of this. I'm not saying throw at every rule.
Donald Trump is doing it with a sledgehammer and explosive at the federal level. And frankly, he is creating more problems than he's solving by doing it and hurting lots of people. And he's doing it without thought or conscience. But I think that the reason, in part, and I've been a staunch liberal Democrat, progressive my entire life, and I hate him. I hate Donald Trump. And I think that the reason that he got elected is because he put his finger on the gestalt of our country at exactly the right moment where he said that we progressives, and I'm including myself foremost in that, have made it too difficult to do stuff.
And as much as I hate everything that comes out of his mouth, sorry for the partisan slant on this podcast, that in that he might have been right, his solution for how to deal with it is totally wrong. But there is, I think, that we've collectively come to this realization, wow, we've made life difficult for ourselves. We're not getting the results that we want as a society.
How do we step back and reconsider how we got here and change the system that we built?
That's what we're talking about. So I don't have answers about do we get rid of this law or that law, or this policy or process, but I would say that most of us touch some part of this policy and process that we've created. Whether you're on school planning board or submitted a building permit to the city, that we all contribute to it moving in a particular direction, and that it feels like it's time to start asking the question of, can we refine the system? Can we remove a rule here, can we change or modify it here? And most importantly, can we change the mindset that assumes that we are supposed to have so much control over the built environment? Because the so much control attitude has not gotten us what we want. Matter of fact, it's very specifically blocked us from creating the things that we want and need.
[01:09:17] Speaker C: I think one of the. One of the ironies of fearing something ugly going up next to you, for example, is kind of embodied in this neighborhood. If you go two blocks west and you just look at the buildings individually,
[01:09:33] Speaker A: it's around 7th and Pearl.
[01:09:35] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of ugly buildings.
But as a collective neighborhood, I think everyone loves Being on West Pearl, walking up and down it and looking at what's there and it's just kind of. There's an irony to the fact that if you isolate any one building and you imagine surrounding it with parking or something, they're kind of like, that's a weird building.
[01:09:56] Speaker A: It's true. West Perl is full of odd duck buildings. And then here, and this is so important. Go down to Walnut or sorry, Canyon between Broadway and 15th. There is no portion of Boulder that has been more highly regulated than that. There were rule upon rule and board and processes determining exactly what the step back and materials would be and the public process to get the buildings essentially from the St. Julian over to about 15th street or so Canyon was on the north side. Yeah, on the north side was incredibly rigorous. And yet if you ask the average Boulderite, do you like that stretch of Boulder General?
It's boring and I don't really like it. And it's like wow. Because we elected city council members that appointed Boulder planning board members and wrote downtown, that directed staff to write downtown design guidelines. And the architects, I'm friends with one of the architects who created one of these buildings, he said, I followed that guideline to a T.
And people now turn around and say, I don't really like that building. It's meh at best. It doesn't have the life that we want to it. So my intuition is that we need to start by allowing trained professionals, artists, people who have spent the last 30 years going to school and then training in the profession, to exercise their craft with less honestly lay oversight.
Imagine if you were a doctor and before you performed any surgery or dispensed any medicine, you had a group of 10 or multiple groups of 10 people that were not medically trained telling you that they don't like how you're prescribing medicine. I know it's not a perfect analogy by any stretch, but that's the life of architects, developers, builders and engineers, where we have folks that are not trained architects for the most part telling us what we should be doing and often overriding both our professional judgment and our clients desires and wishes. I'm not saying we should get rid of it entirely because it is, I think appropriate to have boards help stop the most egregiously bad ideas.
But I think that we have overall gotten out of balance to the point where now we're compromising good ideas, sometimes stopping them altogether, all in the name of preventing bad, and in doing so creating a physical environment that doesn't deliver us either the aesthetics or the type of buildings that we agree that we need or want.
[01:12:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I sometimes joke that our organization is not called Perfect Boulder for a reason.
We're trying to make it better. Perfect is often the enemy of better.
[01:12:54] Speaker A: That's the perfect summary of what we've been doing that we have made perfect the enemy of the good.
[01:12:59] Speaker C: Yeah, that sounds like a closer to me.
[01:13:02] Speaker A: That feels like a perfect place to end.
[01:13:04] Speaker C: Thank you Scott for your time.
[01:13:10] Speaker B: Better Boulder is a non profit political action committee that endorses candidates and ballot measures and develops and promotes policies that we believe will make Boulder more vibrant, livable and connected. We are working hard to create and enhance sustainable, walkable neighborhoods and to champion well designed infill and redevelopment that reduces our impact on the climate, encourages less driving and keeps our community welcoming and economic thriving. This podcast is not governed by a consensus driven approval process that carefully regulates messaging. Opinions expressed on this podcast are solely those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Better Boulder organization.
We hope you enjoy the diversity of opinions and perspectives and that these conversations spark improved dialogue in the community.
Please visit betterboulder.com for official positions on a wide variety of topics. While you are there, please consider donating money if you value our work.
This episode of the Better Bolder Hearts and Minds podcast was produced and edited by Philip Oakren.
