[00:00:17] Speaker A: Hello Boulder in Boulder County. My name is Philip Ogren. For Episode three, I sat down with two Better Boulder members, Betsy Martins and David Ensign, to talk about housing. Betsy is the President of the Boulder Housing Partners Foundation's Board of Directors and has spent her career in various roles advocating for affordable housing and building community.
David is a long time Boulder resident, community volunteer, local politics junkie and former planning board member. We sat down in David's dining room and talked about Boulder Housing Partners affordable housing, Missing Middle Housing, and talked about ways to make our community more inclusive and resilient.
Betsy and David were driving forces behind a Missing Middle Housing event that Better Boulder hosted earlier this year and helped create an event report named Creating Middle Income Housing Ideas into Action which you can
[email protected] I have a few quick announcements.
If you are listening to this episode in July, please join Better Boulder and Community Cycles for a candidate form for RTD District O Monday, July 27th at 5pm at Community Cycles. The event is free, but registration is encouraged. More details on this event can be
[email protected] and community cycles.org Also, I have an idea for creating a theme song for this podcast and have jotted down a few lyrics. If you are someone or know someone who can create, perform and produce music, I would love to have you turn my humble lyrics into a 20 to 30 second song that I can use for this podcast. Please reach out to me if you are interested in collaborating.
Okay, back to the show. I hope you enjoyed this interview with Betsy Martins and David Ensign.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Betsy and David, welcome to the Better Bolder Hearts and Minds podcast. So nice to have you this evening.
[00:02:05] Speaker C: Thanks so much for having us.
[00:02:07] Speaker D: We're excited to be here.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Yeah, great.
Please introduce yourselves. Maybe Betsy Martins?
Go ahead.
[00:02:15] Speaker C: I'm Betsy Martins. I have long been affiliated with Boulder Housing Partners for a little bit more than 40 years right about now and currently still affiliated as President of the Boulder Housing Partners Foundation Board.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Cool. David.
David Ensign. I'm sorry?
[00:02:35] Speaker D: David Ensign. I come from the tech world and worked in tech for many years but managed to kind of get an early retirement going. So I ended up doing a lot of volunteer work in the community and that led me to apply to be on the City of Boulder Planning Board. I served five years on the Planning Board and that's where I really kind of got to know a lot more about the landscape of how housing works and how the history of zoning and land use and all those exciting subjects that I'm sure we'll be talking about
[00:03:08] Speaker C: and I will never forget the planning board meeting where I was before planning board and with David for the first time. And after that meeting, we left chambers and I said, who is that guy? I want to know him. Because his questions were so intelligent and thoughtful.
[00:03:26] Speaker D: Oh, my goodness.
[00:03:27] Speaker C: Incisive.
[00:03:27] Speaker D: Well, thank you.
[00:03:28] Speaker C: That's where we really met.
[00:03:29] Speaker D: And likewise, I was at the podium. It was such a pleasure to have experts come and testify in front of us and really learn about how, how these things work. So I learned a lot.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: Well, you both left off, off of your resumes, the fact that you're active members of Better Boulder. And I think that's how the three of us, you know, end up at the same table. And I know that David. Oh, both of you. Betsy and David were both instrumental in helping kick off a lot of discussions and an actual event where we brought a lot of people together to, to talk about missing middle income housing.
And so I know you're both passionate about housing, and I guess like an easy kind of softball question to start off with is how did you get passionate about caring about. I mean, you have a house, we're in it.
How'd you get. How'd you start caring about other housing for other people?
[00:04:31] Speaker D: Yeah. Well, and certainly since we're sitting in this house, I can. It really makes me go back to 1994 when I bought this house. And, you know, it was my second house. I bought a house on the east coast and had that for, gosh, six years before I sold it and moved out here. And back then it was just such an interesting thing because between 100 and $200,000, you could get a house even in. And that was considered an expensive market.
So I feel like. And for me at the time, I felt like that was a lot of money, of course, and, and I was very, very conservative about my approach to getting a mortgage and how much I would actually spend on a house.
But it just feels like back for my generation, if you came from a middle class family or something, you kind of could figure out how to do it. And it just looked to me, when I look at what's going on now, I just think, how would I ever do that? And as a kid today, how would I feel coming out of. With, you know, a certain amount in the, in the bank, but maybe not that much knowing that your down payments are a lot more than $20,000, which it was back then. So, you know, so I. That's a personal feeling of like, gee, you know, what, what can we do to kind of address this situation.
And I know it's tough, but it's really been a personal thing. And then, of course, my involvement with planning board added on layers and layers and layers onto that. So that's kind of probably the basic seed of why I got excited about it.
[00:06:12] Speaker C: And for me, and especially because this is the Hearts and Minds podcast program, I think I'll tell you the heart story that I don't tell a lot, but in 19, let's see, 85, I was the director of Boulder County Community Action, which is a community asset building program. And it gave me just a broad perspective on Boulder, and we were very focused on vulnerable families and what helps them thrive.
I was talking to Phoebe Norton, who was then the mental health director, and she was very troubled and shared with me a story of a family who had six children.
And the youngest of the six children was in treatment, and he was not even six years old.
And kind of the short story is that he had decided that he would take it upon himself to solve the family's housing problem because they were just constantly trying to find a place that could house them all affordably.
And he kept throwing himself into Broadway, trying to end his life, thinking that if there were fewer members of the family, that could be helpful.
And So I was 26 years old, and that story just pierced me. And it still does. But I hope any listener could understand what housing means to families who are really struggling.
And so I reached out to the mayor, who then was Ruth Correll, and I said, I need to be on the Housing Authority board. I need to be part of this solution. And, you know, when you're 26, you think you're going to join a board. And I cannot believe she put me on that board, but she did. And I got what we call the housing bug. Really understood beyond that moment of deep emotion, the power of housing and place and safety and home for people. And so I have essentially committed all the rest of my career to that and to try to assure that no child ever has to think that that is the solution to affordable housing. So for me, it's very. It's very hard, but it's so mind driven because the complications to house a big family affordably are enormous.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: Do you mind if I answer real quick? I had a thought that surfaced as you were, as you were talking. David.
I remember just coming out of grad school, I lived in Boulder, and I found myself constantly talking about housing
[00:09:01] Speaker C: just
[00:09:02] Speaker B: like this, this puzzle of why is housing so expensive? And explaining it through my, my. I'd been listening to A lot of economics podcasts at the time. And I just, I thought I had like a really pretty smart set of answers for what I thought the problem was and what I thought the solution should be. And I just, I just couldn't stop talking about it. And.
And so that kind of led me into trying to learn more and get involved and think about ways to change the conversation.
[00:09:39] Speaker C: We need to interview you.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I found out along the way that I didn't know much.
Well.
[00:09:45] Speaker D: And I don't know if the listeners know that you're on the housing advisory board for the city, so you're definitely in there. So we can think of it as a three way discussion.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I've learned a lot since then. I loved your story about the, you know, appealing to the heart. And thank you for sharing that.
So, Betsy, I know that BHP Boulder Housing Partners is a large institution that weighs large in Boulder politics and in the housing.
The questions that arise about housing. So maybe could you just give us a thumbnail sketch of what a housing authority is and what, what role BHP plays?
[00:10:29] Speaker C: Sure. Happy to. Housing authorities are fascinating organizations because they are quasi governmental. So I often ask people to think about other authorities they know. Typically people know port authorities or transit authorities or library authorities, even in some communities. And a housing authority was created as one of the those suites of public programs it was imagined in the U.S. housing act of 1937.
That was the guiding vision for communities who were housing challenged, which was pretty much every community in 1937, given the economics following World War I.
But they are created in states statue.
And then they must be formed by local government.
So they operate at all three levels of government, but the governing board is appointed by mayor and council.
[00:11:32] Speaker B: The federal government gives some scaffolding to states to say, create more scaffolding for local.
[00:11:40] Speaker C: Exactly.
Local government, yes. So they're, they're a little more complicated, but they share the same powers that authorities do.
The authority to issue bonds on its own, the authority to declare eminent domain if it's necessary, and to develop housing in response to the community's needs.
So Boulder Housing Partners, the housing authority of the city of Boulder, was created in 1966 when council thought there was a significant housing need.
And they're quite similar. Almost every community in our country has one. There are 3,900 housing authorities, again, that all share a similar broad vision. But they're meant to reflect the housing needs and most importantly, the values of the community they serve. Which is why it's so important to have a public community based Board that's keeping an eye on everything.
Traditionally, the traditional role of housing authorities is to operate where the market could not.
So in most rational real estate markets, which I will say at any, at any point in this discussion, Boulders is not. It is no longer a rational real estate market, but typically 25% of any community's population cannot afford a market rent for a variety of reasons, whether it's disability or divorce or disaster or just the generic unluckiness of so many lives.
It's the point at which a.
An economic rent for a developer, there's just the rent that they can afford does not make the housing economically viable for the developer. So that was kind of the genesis of it, deeply affordable. And then as the nation's housing problems have expanded into higher and higher income groups, then maybe the simplest way to say it is the nation's and the states and the city's tools have expanded along with that.
Traditionally, we are serving and attentive to the needs of families who have zero income.
And there's an amazing challenge about how do you house families safely and with great dignity when they have zero income?
Up to 80% of the area median income, which for Boulder, for a family of four, the area median income today is $180,000.
So 80% of that is a lot of money. So it's a really massive, what, span of interest as a housing developer.
And so sort of a snapshot. BHP currently owns between its rental housing portfolio and its rental assistance vouchers over 5,000 units, which is fabulous. And it makes Boulder Housing Partners the biggest landlord in the city of Boulder.
[00:15:05] Speaker B: I expected you to say over 2,000,
[00:15:07] Speaker C: but it's 5,000 when you combine rental assistance plus the developed and purchased units.
Yeah. And I give so much credit to my successor, Jeremy Durham, who's an amazing developer and he's really put BHP on the map in the last couple of years.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Can I ask the executive structure of the organization, does it report somehow through the city manager, through Nuria, or through city council, or it's just got its own board of directors that answers to the county or the state.
[00:15:42] Speaker C: So the political relationship is both by memorandum of understanding, because the city clearly plays a role in housing policy. And so in our relationship, the city creates housing policy, direction, vision, and then also provides some funding. And the Housing Authority implements. So the housing authority, by historical relationship and by legal relationship, is the development partner for the city. Not the only because they're sisil and private developers.
But if at any time the city were not happy with the direction BHP is going as an independent organization. It exercises its influence by removing the commissioners. So it could at any moment replace the board.
[00:16:37] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:16:40] Speaker D: And the board themselves, the council has a role of appointment.
[00:16:45] Speaker C: So during the March appointments.
[00:16:46] Speaker D: Yeah, it's one of the boards that gets filled.
[00:16:49] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a fascinating kind of organization.
[00:16:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, okay, so.
You said that your role right now is president of something.
[00:17:09] Speaker C: I am president of the Boulder Housing Partners Foundation.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: Foundation. So that's a. Funding Mechan Development.
[00:17:17] Speaker C: It's a resource development fund. So part of our job is to raise money for the programs that none of the housing funds will pay for, which is how do you create vibrant communities where people are thriving?
And then we're also trying to get the word out about BHP and what it does and the role it plays in the community, because there are so many people who have never even heard of the organization and what it does or the fact that there is deeply affordable housing in our community. And it's really amazing.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: Sorry, it's. It's Boulder Housing Partners foundation and so separate 501C3. Yeah. You take donations from individuals and we're
[00:18:03] Speaker C: shameless and asking people to give.
[00:18:05] Speaker D: So you actually. And do you fund programs in BHP proper from the general operating in the foundation or.
[00:18:14] Speaker C: Yes, from the foundation. So BHP also funds some. So we invest hugely in an area of. My personal passion currently is early childhood education and what can happen from a housing platform.
We also have very elderly people whose lives need some enrichment and programming. They don't need to be programming, but the communities are quiet. But for volunteers in the community who come in.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: Well, the. The thing that. That raises for me in my imagination, I lived in graduate student housing at CU for a number of years, and they did a really wonderful job of having activities and programming, you know, to get people out of their units and interacting with each other. And so is that the kind of thing that.
[00:19:07] Speaker C: Exactly, exactly.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: So you're helping with whatever community centers exist on BHP properties and making sure that there's a schedule of interesting stuff for people to do to come together.
[00:19:21] Speaker C: And we're focused on our own residents, certainly, but also creating a greater neighborhood around us. So when I was the director, you know, our mission to Mars was. Wouldn't it imagine the time when every neighborhood in Boulder wants a BHV property there? Yeah, I can't say we're there yet, but that's. That's the goal. To bring so many assets to the neighborhood. Not only increased property values, which is pretty much true throughout, but just what we offer and extend into the community.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: So can you give one example of the kind of thing that would happen at, at a, at a shared space or a community center that gets sponsored by the foundation?
[00:20:06] Speaker C: Sure. So currently we are mapping again the educational opportunities throughout a child's life.
So currently we have an early reading and learning program for children ages 0 to 3 and that have been in the home, which is amazing because we're helping parents be their child's first teacher. But then those parents might meet together in the community center for coffee. And then when children turn six, typically there'll be an I have a Dream foundation class that will meet on the site so that kids can do their after school tutoring and support there. So we're trying to do the same seamless home based learning opportunity and it's all captured in a program called Bringing School Home.
Trying to make learning available every minute of every day because that's what kids who have more resources get to do.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:21:10] Speaker C: Thanks for asking about that.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: That's super cool.
I didn't know any of that. I think of BHP as a, a developer that owns properties and collects rents and collects federal dollars. And that's sort of my frame of reference. So to know that there's another, you know, it's multi, multi dimensional and that there's a lot of community enrichment going on. That's really.
[00:21:33] Speaker C: Yeah, it's, it's very much about that. I would say to my staff all the time, the work depending, depending on family circumstance, the. Our work begins when somebody is handed the key to the apartment. That's not when it ends, that's when we begin.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: Wow,
[00:21:52] Speaker D: this really resonates with me because one of the things I've done post retirement is, and even before I was retired I was on the boards of nonprofits. So I'm really very well versed in the whole fundraising world and everything. So it makes me want to get the word out more about BHP foundation because I also was, I also wasn't that knowledgeable. And you know, people are sometimes looking for places to, to support their neighbors. So it's a, it's a good local.
[00:22:23] Speaker C: Similarly, and I know you to be so involved in Patron of the Arts and you. And like we like to think, gosh, but for Boulder Housing partners, I don't know how many artists would live.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:22:35] Speaker C: Really?
[00:22:36] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:22:37] Speaker C: Where do they live?
[00:22:38] Speaker D: I'm on the board of Modus Theater and our, our artistic director, Kirsten Wilson, who's a graduate of Naroko University and an absolute force in storytelling. And she lived in and still does live in.
In affordable housing here in Boulder because she's amazing.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, do we want to talk about some of the challenges that BHP faces?
BHP has accomplished a lot and they're doing a lot of good work. But I assume that the need is bigger than the solutions that are being provided. Perhaps. Maybe. Can you give us a sketch of what BHP's mission is moving forward and what. What the.
I guess what the main challenges are for serving the community?
[00:23:37] Speaker C: Well, we're very aligned with the city's housing goal of 15% of the entire housing inventory being affordable.
And so we're currently at 8.8% I think is.
You probably know you're housing.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: I hear the number and it's.
[00:23:58] Speaker C: And it's taken decades to get there. So BHP aspires to be a major contributor towards that goal.
[00:24:06] Speaker D: I think we have. Isn't it 25% by 2035?
That's what.
Oh, no, I'm sorry. It is 15% by 2035. And we were at 8.7% this time. Time last year.
[00:24:21] Speaker C: Ah, okay. According to our.
[00:24:22] Speaker D: Yeah, so we might. We'll probably.
[00:24:24] Speaker C: I would invite all listeners to fact check anything I say because I just
[00:24:29] Speaker D: happen to have a little year, a
[00:24:31] Speaker C: little time out of grant. I can certainly speak to the challenges and yeah, gosh, there are so many. Just, just when you, when you think about the challenge of essentially buying everything that goes into making a home at market price and then writing that price down to make it affordable for someone whose income is $32,000 a year, for whom an affordable rent. I can't do that math in my brain that fast. Must be on the order of $900 where the current run is 2500.
I mean, so it's such a mathematical challenge. And I listened with great fascination to the first episode with Scott Rodwin where I thought he was brilliant in talking about a lot of the development challenges.
But I'd love to take people through if you don't mind. Just a quick formula that I've often shared with elected officials to help them understand, like Boulder's primary challenge, which to me is land and the way we've decided to zone land and govern land and appropriate land.
So when you think about, you know, my challenge, Jeremy's now challenged to deliver several thousand affordable units to the market in the next couple of years.
You have to think about what does that cost.
And in our world of development, we call that total development cost tdc. That's what matters more than anything.
And it's only made up of Three things.
It's what's your cost to build it? Right. What's your hard cost, construction cost, what's your cost to entitle it, which is a lot of what Scott was talking about. Engineering, permitting fees, architects, all of that called soft cost, regulatory cost costs. And then land.
Right. H +S +L equals TDC. Not to get too wonky.
And so when you think about from a policy perspective and what better Boulder is doing and what David was doing in planning board, which we'll talk about, you can make some changes on the soft cost, and we really need to. And Boulder less so on hard cost. You know, we're doing some things with manufactured housing and more efficient building. But the harder, harder, the overwhelming number is the land.
And so that's just such an enormous challenge. So when I think about, you know, the last piece of land that I was working on buying in Boulder, it was $2 million an acre.
And so if the city will let me put four, four units on that one acre, then I'm starting right before I've done anything before I've taken a breath. I'm $250,000 into the, into the house cost.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: 500,000, I believe, for.
[00:27:37] Speaker C: Oh, do my math for me.
[00:27:38] Speaker D: Thank you.
[00:27:40] Speaker C: Yes, thank you. So you fact check me.
Yes. And that's, that is the number that sticks in my head because that's the last acreage I was working with. It's like, okay, so I'm starting with 500,000. You petition the city, may I please, please, please take that up to eight units?
That discussion might take two years. Right? If I want to double the density.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:02] Speaker C: But then I'm only at 250,000. So it, you can just see where land becomes so important in all these discussions.
[00:28:10] Speaker D: And I'll just add, let's, let's say there is this one acre parcel out there. Okay, here are the questions we have. Can it be subdivided into the four?
And how much work does that take? And then do you have to come up with a shared drive for the four units? And what is it zoned? And what will the neighbors. What will the neighbors put up a fuss?
And then someone comes in who's a tech billionaire and says, oh, I'll buy it and put my, put my big giant home on it. What do you think is going to happen? Right?
So, yeah, so that's, that is what, where we really get, where I get really beaten down sometimes in my time on planning board is seeing how, how it's so much easier in a place that's attractive as Boulder and really attracts, you know, super successful people.
And not to say negative things about those people. People necessarily, but, but it just is really frustrating to see how it can be just a lot easier just to, to have, you know, have a luxury home built on a parcel.
[00:29:17] Speaker C: Yeah. And then the, the corollary, since BHP works at a scale much, much bigger than one acre or is, is very often in the market trying to acquire existing units because that's the most green approach. Right.
To buy what's already built.
We were always outbid by insurance funds, by cash buyers who didn't want to or need to do any due diligence, whereas we had to and needed to. And so that similar kind of big wealth, whether it's corporate or individual in Boulder plays a bigger role than I think people understand in terms of driving prices up or keeping the affordable players out.
It's a really big factor.
[00:30:06] Speaker B: So I find that in these housing discussions we often spend the bulk of our time describing the problems.
And it's easy to do and it's, it's, it's sort of, it's sort of satisfying in a way because like, it's describable. Like we can describe the problems and observe what's going on and wring our hands over what's.
How this excludes people and the way it shapes our communities.
But I wonder if you could give us some thumbnails of maybe visions of optimism or solutions that we have that are, that are on the horizon or that we're just fully implementing right now or you know, like maybe what's.
[00:30:55] Speaker C: Yeah, I think some of that, I think some. Let me share this one and see. It could lead us into some of the things that came out of Better Boulder's recent middle income housing summit, because some of them, again, have to, have to do with the way, have to do with changing the way we do business. And, and I want to start with kind of the broader perspective of Boulder's relationship to affordable housing.
We talk about it a lot.
The broader we.
You can't get elected or appointed to anything unless you're an affordable housing advocate. But it takes so much more than talking we have to do. And one of the, the cheapest ways to do is to facilitate an embedded governmental optimism about it, meaning an orientation to how can we help.
And again, Scott made some reference to this and I want to repeat it here.
As a developer, a seasoned developer in the public interest, what I always hoped for was that if I could put together the financing and the land and a team to Build something.
When I got to the entitlement stage and the approval stage, I hoped that everybody's orientation would be how can we support you?
How can we make this happen?
And I would say with the exception. Exception probably of the holiday neighborhood.
I never heard that in 40 years was always as David was, here is the problem and here is the problem, and here is the problem. So the optimism is other cities are doing it.
And so I just, I want to mention one that because I think it's so close to Boulder, the city of Santa Barbara is a sister city in its demographic. It's a university community. It's beautiful in terms of its planning perspective. It cares a lot.
But their orientation from time immemorial has been if the housing authority can put a deal together, we are going to help.
So I used to trot around with slides of what they were doing and they were getting 200% down density bonuses. So they were building in their urban core at 164 units to the acre where the densest thing in Boulder I'm going to be out of date on this is nowhere near that.
So they were just making one concession after another because they were so clear that their community could only thrive if they could house people who made their community economic, economically viable and vibrant.
[00:33:53] Speaker B: Right, I forgot which city you mentioned.
[00:33:56] Speaker C: Santa Barbara.
[00:33:57] Speaker B: Santa Barbara.
[00:33:58] Speaker C: So that like that's just a great example of how, I mean, I suppose it comes at some political cost to be such a champion, but that orientation would cost nothing and would make an enormous difference because then all of the other regulatory changes could be flow more easily, which is really David's domain.
[00:34:20] Speaker D: Yeah. And certainly on planning board it was a very interesting time because we were just starting really to examine the legacy of exclusionary zoning in Boulder. I feel like there had been actually a lot of episodes of down zoning in the 90s.
We downzoned a zone right next to the downtown zones called RMX1 because people were getting nervous about some apartment buildings being built there.
And as a result, in this area right next to downtown, there's a minimum lot size of 6,000 square feet for a dwelling unit. That means on a normal little lot like this we're on right now, you would not be able to put a duplex on it in that zone so close to downtown.
So we finally are seeing a shift away from that and the ability to see that we want to work on transit oriented neighborhoods, denser neighborhoods around transit and just allow for more options. And what you find is when you loosen the regulations, of course Things don't just change overnight. People just have more options to maybe do more things. So you might see a duplex come up here or there or something a little denser around a transit corridor.
So it's been really interesting to see us really start to move in that direction, but it takes time. The public is not always comfortable with change, of course, so we have to work with that.
[00:35:56] Speaker C: Yeah. And there's also, I mean, I think there's an incredible parsing of values here in Golda. And again, someone like me, who's committed my entire career and every spare minute to a single topic is really biased.
But I think, and again, experts help me. The most recent update to the Boulder Valley comp plan has 72 goals.
And by my way of thinking, I don't see how you can actually pursue and succeed at 72 different goals. some point you have to decide without
[00:36:31] Speaker B: a staff of 10 for each of
[00:36:32] Speaker C: those, like, that's just too big. So I, I think the job of council is to answer three questions. What kind of a community do we want to be? And through the lens of this discussion, it's very much defined by the housing inventory. Who can live here?
Right. So who and what do we want to, to be?
How will we measure that and how will we pay for it? Right. It's like a crystallization and a really, a simplification of a very complicated problem. Like, that's where I'd love to see the focus be.
[00:37:09] Speaker B: I love answering this question of like, what I project, what I would love. Our community.
[00:37:14] Speaker C: Yeah. What would you love?
[00:37:15] Speaker B: Well, so I think about something I enjoy telling people is that, that Manhattan is about the same size as Boulder.
It's about 4 square miles smaller.
And of course, Manhattan has 1.6 million people on it or give or take 100,000, which is. 100,000 is about the size of Boulder. And what that means to me is that you could double or triple or quadruple the population of Boulder and it would be nothing like Manhattan.
And I'm not saying that's what we should do, but, but you know, when you say 164 units per acre, I don't know what that looks like, but I kind of imagine Manhattan style density at that, at that intensity.
[00:37:59] Speaker C: Manhattan's about a thousand units per acre.
[00:38:02] Speaker B: Okay, so.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So. So I don't know what that, what164 means, but, but I, I can imagine. Like, I would, I would love for us to be a people who really cares about land. Like we, we imagine land is sacred. And that it's a precious resource and, and that we care about the climate and we get out of our cars and we walk and. And bike to the extent that we can. And.
And so, you know, I feel like there's. And then when you combine that with the notion that the city kind of. I've heard it described as. Sits on billions of dollars of development
[00:38:48] Speaker C: rights
[00:38:50] Speaker B: in the form of, you know, what you allow really shapes these neighborhoods that we're sitting in. And if you allowed a lot more, those are. Those are development rights that are worth money.
Right. And so is there a way to. Is there a way to have it all where we could have a lighter footprint, more inclusion, affordability, more compact?
You know, so that's. That's. That's me rambling on my. On my vision.
[00:39:28] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, you know, what's interesting to me is that there have been many experiments over time of that more compact living. Let's aggregate the open space to the outside, like the Wonderland neighborhood or the Holiday neighborhood, which BHP was the master developer so quite intimate with what the vision there was. I mean, we were trying to show a different way to do things. Things.
And it's fascinating that those models that have been proven successful over lots of years aren't repeated.
And I don't totally understand that. I mean, holiday neighborhood is 27 acres, and there's not that lying on.
[00:40:16] Speaker B: But. Yeah, but Holiday is not a process. It's a. It's a one. It's one big project.
[00:40:21] Speaker C: Yeah, right. And it was.
It was an imagined big plan.
[00:40:25] Speaker D: Sometimes I do.
I've lived in Europe twice in my life.
Once when I was 12 years old and once when I was in my working years.
And both of those times I was kind of struck by, you know, it's a different approach. There's a more socially connected approach to how they solve things. It feels like. And I do see that there is more.
Like, if you go to Amsterdam, where I have family, you'll see more.
More public. A lot of public discussion, but kind of a cohesive approach that really does, in a much more general way, really address things like how do you make some housing available to people and how do you make it a price they can afford? And it's. It's. I just. The. I guess I have to reveal that this has kind of shaped my politics. I tend to be more on that social.
Social side of things.
And. And that is interesting to be in this country where we let the free market drive so much of what we do. And I got very excited listening to The Boulder Housing Partners story, because that is not just a free market thing. It's like a structure that was put in place to kind of provide these social opportunities. So I really resonate with that.
I would love to see people around me learn about that and kind of if we could move our communities more towards social based solutions, it would be really interesting.
[00:42:09] Speaker C: Yes. And little known fact, Amsterdam's housing inventory is 70% social housing.
And it's beautiful and it's a thing that people aspire to.
It's a very different system that I've studied in some depth, but it's something to be proud of if you are living in social housing, which is by design the opposite of what our equivalent of social housing is here in the United States. The legacy public housing is not something that's respected and admired and that has deep roots in our history that I've also done a lot of study on. I spent some time teaching housing policy at the university and the. Because as a practitioner who was frustrated, I had to know how did we get here in this country?
How did we come upon a policy where if you needed the help of housing, if you needed housing assistance, the effective policy was we're going to make it spare, we're going to make it bare, we're going to make it. It ugly so that it will not can be tall. Right.
[00:43:26] Speaker B: Cinder blocks.
[00:43:27] Speaker C: Yes, cinder blocks. All the housing. You know, when you hear the word public housing, many people from their childhood or, you know, living in other communities can bring something to mind. And it was all done by design with the intention that it could be tolerated and allowed, but never ever something that's desirable or competitive, celebrated. So I have us way off on a tangent.
But those, those things, everything in our housing history has been by design and from the federal perspective.
And it's never been with the goal of really enriching people's lives by any great measure. So I like to think bolder would be the opposite of that and think only about enrichment of the community through housing.
[00:44:20] Speaker B: I've never thought about it that way.
It seems like so much of federal policy when it comes to helping people is about incentivizing them to get out of their situation. You know, like to, like to graduate out of affordable housing, for example. And it seems like a perverse incentive to make it just barely livable and kind of bleak so that people make. I mean, I kind of assume the narrative is like, well, if we make it too nice, people will just stay.
Right?
[00:44:55] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, and what we quickly learned is that when things were in huge high rises and blocked cylinders and really ugly, then no neighborhood wanted it. And so then it swung the other way where people are saying, huh, you know, it's really very nice. Does it have to be so nice? It's like, what has to be somewhere in the middle, right. I mean, so neighbors didn't want it when it was.
When it was very ugly. And now neighbors who have seen a history of very beautiful housing being built are still having trouble with it.
[00:45:36] Speaker D: Yeah. And if you go to a place like Amsterdam, you're not going to see everything.
Not everything's going to look like, you know, the neighborhood where the Anne Frank house is or, you know, the Ordaine, which is historically just incredible. Some of them are, you know, they're not absolutely stunning buildings, but. But they're comfortable and they create great neighborhoods in their own right. So having that diversity of, like, the historic and beautiful and then maybe some more practical neighborhoods is kind of nice, honestly.
[00:46:12] Speaker C: But to your question about optimism, I've been thinking a lot about something that is an optimistic challenge. But I think, and again, invite all the fact checking there is out there.
I have not seen Boulder do an interesting assessment of the jobs that make our community interesting, nationally, attractive, viable, and vibrant, and to see how much those jobs pay, and then how does our housing match up with that?
And then make yet another intentional decision. Do we want to ferry people in to do those jobs, or do we want to make the investment for them to live here?
Because that to me, is also an equally simple assessment. It goes right to that question of what kind of a community do we want to be?
But first, you start with, what does it take to be this community? Right. How many baristas, how many waiters, how many school teachers? I mean, the thing we talk about all the time, that can be quantified.
That's all knowable.
[00:47:27] Speaker B: Right.
[00:47:28] Speaker C: And it's also reasonably knowable, how much do you earn if you do that?
And so a thought exercise a person that way.
[00:47:37] Speaker B: A thought exercise I always do do is like, would I want my barista? Or, you know, I don't really drink coffee, so. But name your service worker. Would I want them as a neighbor?
You know, I'm interacting with this lovely person.
And the answer is almost always yes, of course.
[00:47:55] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:47:56] Speaker B: And so why would we opt for the ferry, the men from, you know, somewhere else in Boulder County?
We ought to. We ought to make room for new neighbors and it.
[00:48:08] Speaker D: And it. And we could go on school teachers, firefighters, I think in the police department. I may have heard that we don't have anyone on the police force who lives in the city, which is really something.
They all, they're all coming in from, from out of town. And again, we would, we would love to be able to, you know, accommodate more, more, more of these families here.
[00:48:32] Speaker C: And you know, and, and normally, I mean, normally commuting in is, is, it's, it's uncomfortable, it's not environmental, it takes a long time, but it is doable for the most part. But there was a moment for many of US during the 2013 floods when the essential workers, including my own maintenance staff, none of whom were able to afford to live in Boulder, could not get to Boulder to do the jobs that we needed them to do. Right. Similarly, the police and fire personnel in general live outside of Boulder. And there were so many roads that were impassable.
And so, like so many times in our history, you think, okay, this will be the moment, right, where this is, this is the wake up call. This is a problem when the essential workers can't get to Boulder. But in fact, you know, by driving an extra one hour up through the mountains, however they got here, you know, it's problematic to not be able to house the people who are essential in your community.
[00:49:43] Speaker B: Well, so I think this is a good segue into talking about middle, missing middle housing.
And I know Better Boulder spin really having a lot of dialogues around this question of how do we make it easier for lots of income levels to be able to afford to live here. So maybe could you give us an outline of what Better Boulder's efforts are here?
[00:50:10] Speaker D: Yeah, well, I'll just start by saying that I was shaped on my time on plan Planning board. And that was right before I joined Better Boulder by a lot of what's going on with our affordable housing. We call it the inclusionary housing program for people making up to 80% of AMI. And that means that we have 25% of new development goes to either being on site affordable or paying into cash, what they call cash in lieu to, to subsidize affordable housing. And I saw how it was moving the needle. And so I really could see here's a solution that's having an effect.
That's where we met, Betsy and I, and it really gave me a lot of hope that there are solutions to these kinds of challenges. So on Better Boulder, we just started to think about this issue with the missing middle that gets so much attention.
And I started chairing the Housing and Zoning subcommittee about a year and a half ago. And one of the things that Just kind of popped up was, hey, what can we do to kind of move the public discussion on missing middle income housing? And so we took on the idea of putting together a position paper which we released, gosh, it was almost exactly a year ago, I think it was in June of last year, where we really did research.
We looked at the data that was out there and we just kind of tried to enumerate the approaches to how you can do missing middle. But we did discover that it's more difficult than subsidizing directly housing because you're trying to move market forces, but maybe create the ability for someone to get into the market so that they have their investment. And it's not necessarily subsidized or
[00:52:10] Speaker C: deed restricted.
[00:52:11] Speaker D: Thank you. I was having trouble.
Deed restricted, where you actually can't sell, kind of limits how you can sell at an appreciated value.
So this is a pretty interesting. And so we talked about a lot of the land use things that you can look at.
There's also, I find a lot of sausage making that happens before the planning board sees things. And so if you look for, gosh, is there a property owner out there who is maybe passionate about working towards it? Sometimes you can get certain specific opportunities. There's a place out here called Peacock Neighborhood where, where the property owner was really interested in having an affordable middle income housing result.
And that really went a long way.
We also find that if the city owns property where you can have more control over the outcomes and you can do a form based code that actually has more modest housing forms that hopefully will get priced, and if the city owns the property, there can be ways that we can assure that the prices are a little more affordable. So those kind of things we enumerate in here and also trying to think about how we can maybe make the revenues sources a little more progressive.
Right now everything's flat, so everybody pays, you know, regardless of the dwelling unit, we all pay the 25% into affordable housing. If we build a new unit. In Boulder, I constantly try to ask us to think about, gee, is there a way we could kind of shift the burden a little to the upper end? Because we are, and this is something we've struggled with, we are definitely kind of making it more expensive to build the middle income housing if we got that 20% on top, 25% on top. Right.
So that's something that we struggled with. And I would not want to take the focus off getting to that 15% affordability by 2035. But I also would like to see how we can Continue to fine tune who bears the cost of those a little bit.
[00:54:27] Speaker B: Interesting. I always think about, well, if you're developing a single family home in Boulder from, from an empty lot, you're already at some at the upper end of the wealth distribution. But if, if you, if you have a notion to build a 4 Plex that's satisfies that middle market, then yeah, maybe so this, but this has come up recently in city council, then, then contemplating the possibility of adjusting inclusionary housing fees based on the kind of units you're building.
[00:55:08] Speaker D: There was one ordinance that went through last year, or maybe it was the year before that tuned it a little bit to be more square footage related. So it did kind of make it more dependent on the size of the unit. So we have moved a little bit in that, that direction.
But I don't, I don't know that we've really had deep discussions on that. But it is something that we kind of looked at and we kind of discussed in the, when we were putting the paper together.
[00:55:38] Speaker B: Does the position paper suggest or does it explicitly say let's change the inclusionary housing?
[00:55:44] Speaker D: No, no. I think that we all are too concerned about making sure that we don't, that we don't mess it up.
[00:55:52] Speaker B: Mess something up. Right.
[00:55:54] Speaker D: So we, we do look at, we do talk about whether we should consider, you know, luxury home taxes, second home taxes, real estate transfer fees, things like this that could potentially bring in revenue from other sources than, you know, then, and, and maybe that would open up some doors and maybe there are exemptions that could be looked at if you can actually prove that you're targeting a specific market. But at this point I don't think it's been gone down far enough to be implemented.
I don't know if you have any further thoughts on that.
[00:56:37] Speaker C: No. But I'm interested to hear you talk a little more about two things because there was a lot of effort that went into the position paper. I know it was widely read.
[00:56:46] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:56:46] Speaker C: And then followed up by a summit, a gathering of experts and I'm even eager to hear your sense of how that went. Yeah, both the paper and then the summit.
[00:56:58] Speaker D: So yeah, I think that the paper did spark a lot of interest and there were a number of events that other organizations had last year, TEDx talks and, and things like that.
And then we decided to host a Better Boulder event early this year and invited a lot of experts from all different sectors. Public officials, developers, non profits who work in the housing space.
So we had of course BHP and Thistle and get everybody Together and maybe try to take it to the next step where we actually do kind of working breakout sessions and see where that leads us. We also kind of, I think our position paper was really focused on the whole affordable affordability landscape a little more. We actually kind of looked at, maybe we should focus heavily on middle income homeowners because we, when we looked at the rental market, the, it wasn't quite as dire. In the rental market, there actually is available rental for people in the middle.
You know, it's not, it's not the lowest rents in, in the region, but. But it is attainable, we felt. And so the real shortage is if you want to actually buy a unit or buy a, buy a, a housing unit. So we kind of focused this event on that and so it was really interesting. We got a huge response. We completely filled up. We had probably 20 people in each of the breakouts, so maybe 60 to 80 people total in attendance. Most of the city council people were there. We had county commissioners and there was just incredible, incredible number of interesting ideas. So we wrote up the report and we enumerated all these great ideas and there they are.
And we'd love to see.
You know, I've seen some interesting kind of things bubbling from that and I think it sparked some creative thought in the community.
[00:59:17] Speaker B: I know you enumerated a few of those just a bit ago, but do you mind highlighting again, like what. What are a couple of your favorites of what you would, you know, if you, you're. You're instead of a weak mayor, you're a strong mayor. That's like a, you know, maybe this isn't the right thought exercise, but you know, you're the, you're the dictator of Boulder and you get to set policy. What. What would you do?
[00:59:41] Speaker D: Well, I think I, I think like Betsy said, the land costs become the. One of the biggest things. So continue to look for ways to reduce the land costs through loosening the zoning restrictions that might make, make things, make it more difficult to build things. So zoning and is really super important there and something that the city can do.
[01:00:04] Speaker B: That's a surprising statement because I always think of as you loosen the zoning, the land becomes more valuable in terms of the market.
[01:00:12] Speaker D: Well, that's in. In some ways I guess it should be, but that it's not clear. You know, I mean again, you still have those luxury homes penciling out over, over maybe the, you know, I guess
[01:00:28] Speaker B: one way I actually think about it is single family zone neighborhoods are actually heavily subsidized by all the development rights that are withheld and, and the land is actually way undervalued based on how poorly it's utilized.
So I don't know. I mean, like, I'm not trying to be negative here.
[01:00:50] Speaker C: I just.
[01:00:51] Speaker D: Well, I think that's exactly what, why we're saying to remove barriers.
[01:00:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:00:57] Speaker D: So yes, we, that's the hope is that if you remove the barrier barriers then it will become more attractive to build those pocket neighborhoods and those more affordable solutions.
And you know, there are state things in state law that can cause things to be more expensive that we can look at reducing some of the, of the condo development fees and things like that. And the
[01:01:27] Speaker B: construction defect.
[01:01:28] Speaker D: Construction defect. Yeah, exactly. So it's a, it's, there's a lot of recommendations we had around how can we make it lower the bar for, for middle income housing. So that, I thought that was, that was pretty stunning.
But yeah. I don't know if you had any other thoughts. You, Betsy, unfortunately you weren't able to make the event.
[01:01:54] Speaker C: It was not. That's why I'm listening with such attuned interest to be reminded of the nuggets that came out of it. I mean it's an extraordinary challenge, especially for those who would like to do it without subsidy for very good reasons. But I mean imagine you're trying to pull between 2 and $500,000 dollars of cost out of each thing you build. And that's, that's a tall order.
So I, I applaud David and the brave people who really spend a lot of time thinking hard about it because it's. Yeah, it's not a nominal goal for Boulder to be talking about, but it's laudable.
[01:02:42] Speaker D: Well, one of the things that was kind of cool and it started with the TEDx talk that was held at the library in the fall, but we really kind of zoomed in on there's a cultural thing here.
We have a cultural. Our generation, Betsy and my generation are used to the 1950s idea of, and not us personally necessarily. But, but there was a whole cultural thing about families should have this home with a yard and detached home with a yard.
And so it becomes very difficult to provide that housing type if people are so bought into, it has to be that.
So we always use the Erie example. Erie has a lot of space to develop.
So will a person just buy a $600,000 house in Erie with this giant yard? And rather than compromising some of that space for their family and that cultural shift may be happening. Younger people today are not necessarily going to drift towards that desires so quickly because I think we're in a changing world, we're in a more populated world.
And I think that when you're young and you start to see different ways, you don't necessarily have to have that same thing.
So that's a little bit. In some ways that's a little bit depressing because it's like, oh, well, we're not going to solve it overnight because we have to wait for the culture to shift.
But. But in some ways it's helpful too because it isn't something that can be obviously solved overnight.
So I do think that I am encouraged when I see younger people who maybe don't even need a car and don't use a car. And so that provides more space for your house and. Yeah. Who are interested in maybe living in a more walkable neighborhood with maybe not quite as much need for private space.
[01:04:57] Speaker B: One of the transportation advisory board members, I think it was Alex Weinheimer, told me that of those 25 square miles, about 5 of those square miles are paved.
And if we could reclaim some fraction of that, that's a lot of. A lot of car light housing we could build.
I also think I'm in a space aspiring minimalist. And so you're, you're preaching to the choir when you talk about, you know, the six hundred thousand dollar house in Erie with the two car garage and the large yard and, you know, a lifetime of packing it full of, you know, I think it's. There's never been a better time to become a minimalist than today.
And I, I just, I hope, I think it's a very attractive philosophy to like make your life simpler and easier and more filled with people and relations rather than all the stuff that we try to accumulate to substitute for those things.
[01:05:57] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. And the overlap with transportation is interesting. And we didn't actually, as a subcommittee, we kept the housing subject pretty well.
Transportation things would come up and we put a little bookmark on it.
My husband's on the transportation advisory board, so I get a nice window into a lot of the things that are being worked on.
It's interesting. We think of the housing thing as being so difficult and meeting public opposition. Try the car thing.
People love their cars. And so it's a very similar thing.
And so I don't know. There needs to be a car version of Yimby, I guess, you know, that.
[01:06:40] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:06:41] Speaker D: In my backyard.
[01:06:42] Speaker B: Or.
[01:06:42] Speaker D: Yes.
[01:06:43] Speaker C: Or a bicycle version.
[01:06:44] Speaker D: Yes.
[01:06:44] Speaker C: I'll.
[01:06:44] Speaker D: Yes. I'll give up that need to just sit in this giant thing to get to where I'm going and maybe do something else.
[01:06:52] Speaker B: Well, I would love to create a pilot neighborhood at the corner of Baseline and Broadway or name your favorite blighted downtown area and try to build a neighborhood that was car light. Very intentionally car light because I think it would prove the demand is there. I think there's a lot of people who would love to live lighter on the planet and be in bolder.
[01:07:22] Speaker D: I want to say that we're starting to see some of those more bold developments. I've seen a couple come in with less than one car space per unit and that's something that's very dramatic for sure, given where we were at.
Yeah. I've got this Meadows Shopping center down distance from me and it is an expansive of asphalt for as far as I can see. And it's just, and I know this is the zoning there and it's just so funny. I've been pushing for these zones to be targeted for much more, many more options for a long time, but it takes a while.
[01:07:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
Any closing thoughts?
[01:08:05] Speaker C: I don't know how you close such a big rambling conversation.
Well, I'm hopeful, maybe we want to end on the hopeful note that Boulder can embrace its potential, will see its way to understanding that a diverse and inclusive community is going to be the strongest possible way to go into a very complicated future.
And the way to get that diverse, inclusive community is to provide housing options.
[01:08:43] Speaker B: Amen.
[01:08:44] Speaker D: Absolutely. I am an optimist and I.
That's what was so fun about this work that we did was we really, we did spend time framing the problem, but then we really did push towards let's enumerate those solutions. So we didn't even really talk about things like modular home factory that we have here in Boulder. And you know, there's, there's a lot of stuff that's, that's, that's coming forward and a lot of opportunities that we can, we can leverage.
[01:09:09] Speaker C: So I'm excited so listeners could find that optimism on the Better Bolts website. Absolutely right.
[01:09:15] Speaker B: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for being here this evening and I thought it was a very interesting conversation. Excellent.
[01:09:23] Speaker C: Thank you for hosting.
[01:09:24] Speaker D: Thank you.
[01:09:26] Speaker A: 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 economically 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.
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This episode of the Better Bolder Hearts and Minds podcast was produced and edited by Philip Ogren.
