Steve Pomerance

Boulder City Council is meeting on Tuesday to consider how to address the loss of middle-income households in Boulder. To make sense of their material, I needed to make explicit some implicit assumptions and conclusions: The council’s goal apparently is to try to have Boulder’s income distribution approximate that of the county or state, to keep from becoming more elitist. The proposed solution is to ensure adequate affordable housing for a large segment of the population. Boulder’s housing programs will no longer just be about providing for “low-” and “moderate-” income people; the target population will now include the “middle” — households of 80 percent to 150 percent of Area Median Income (AMI). So the housing programs will potentially serve the majority of residents. It would not be equitable to use general revenues for funding this middle-income program, since that would be taxing and then subsidizing people in similar financial situations. And because “median” means half a

Five members of the Boulder City Council (Appelbaum, Brockett, Burton, Jones, and Shoemaker) are going on a trip to Portland, paid for by you and me, and accompanied by a number of locals, including many representing business/development interests. Why Portland? Maybe it’s because, as Patrick Quinton, the executive director of the Portland Development Commission, said in the Portland Mercury when discussing certain commercial areas, “It’s all gonna be about density. You’re going to see a sharp push to demolish things that are low-density.” The council members allegedly want to study how Portland, and Eugene which they are also visiting, deal with homelessness, affordable housing, transportation, and other policy concerns. The vast majority of the over two dozen additional attendees (over and above the multiple Boulder city government folks)are from Downtown Boulder Inc., the Chamber of Commerce, the Boulder Economic Council, the Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Colorado