Opinion: Dealing with the ‘housing crisis’
For the last 50 years at least, Boulder has had a “housing crisis.” Our housing has always been more expensive than in our neighboring cities. We started with a fantastic natural setting and a stable economy because of CU and the federal labs. Boulder’s desirability increased with the Blue Line preventing development on the mountain backdrop, our open space limiting urban sprawl, and our 55-foot height limit preserving views. But over that time period, we went from a town with 30th Street being dirt and a turkey farm at the Williams Village site, to a booming employment center with jobs growing faster than housing. The current high-tech craze, exemplified by Google, escalated the already rapid increase in housing prices, with multimillion dollar cash offers, and the scraping of modest single-family homes and local service businesses and replacing them with McMansions, high-rise apartments, and giant office and hotel complexes. The city’s studies have shown that new, market-rate h