Steve Pomerance

I just read an excellent paper called  “The Questionable Economics of the 15-Minute City”  by Rachel Meltzer, a professor of planning and urban economics at Harvard. To quote her, “The economics of the 15-minute city don’t really work.” Her analysis points out that any kind of establishment, whether it is a supermarket or an urgent care clinic, has fixed costs. So, the “catchment area” needs to be big enough to have enough customers to cover those costs. Also, many stores have become bigger and contain a wider variety of goods than 20 or 50 years ago. Thus, any given area is now served by fewer stores with more goods per store. Looking at Boulder, we see these economics at work. For example, we have about 10 grocery stores, and over the last years, we’ve had two supermarkets close and a couple of new ones open, that I can think of. And they are mostly distributed geographically. So, even with all the planned growth in East Bo...

 I’m sure many of you read in the newspapers recently that the Earth’s population of humans has now reached 8 billion. To put this in perspective, human population reached 1 billion in 1804, 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in 1960 and 4 billion in 1974. The UN projects there will be 9 billion by 2037, and then (hopefully) stop increasing at around 10 billion in the 2080s (data per Population Connection’s white paper). The planet’s human population has doubled since many of us first became aware of the existential threat of global warming due to excessive emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. In the early 1800s, carbon dioxide emissions were relatively small. But by 1950, the world’s carbon dioxide emissions totaled around 6 billion tons per year. By 1990, this had almost quadrupled, reaching more than 22 billion tons per year. Now, emissions are over 34 billion tons each year, according to Our World In Data. As a result, Earth’s temperature has risen by 0.14 degrees F...

The city council recently took up the issue of allowing more “accessory dwelling units” in single-family neighborhoods. An ADU is a self-contained apartment within a single-family house or in a separate building on the same lot. Currently, Boulder has significant limits on ADUs, including requirements for off-street parking and density limits, like allowing only 20% of houses in a 300-foot radius to have ADUs. These were carefully worked out several years ago. Now, some council members are pushing to allow all single-family homes to have ADUs, both internal and external. That would allow three units on every lot — two ADUs plus the main unit — though with the proposed 900-square-foot size limit, this could look like a duplex plus another house. And even with a constraint of, say, a maximum of five unrelated people, it would effectively turn every lot into a small condo development, since ownership could be through an LLC whose members change with whoever is living there. Interestin...

The idea of putting a 55-foot building on the southwest corner of Broadway and University Avenue in Boulder is a terrible idea, plain and simple. It will destroy one of Boulder’s iconic views and make that area just another overdeveloped, unpleasant, unattractive place in our city, where unpleasant, unattractive overdevelopment is becoming the norm. Drive, bike, or walk up from downtown, or just look from across the intersection, and see if you don’t agree. The city finally commissioned a study to evaluate the economic benefits of a proposed hotel at that location. It compared the Hill hotel versus office/commercial and affordable housing development. Conceptually this makes sense — compare scenarios and see which one does the best. But the chosen scenarios were not comparable. Each of the non-hotel development scenarios only looks at redevelopment of the 20,000-square-foot Pleasant Street parking lot. In contrast, the Hill hotel would take up that lot plus the whole rest of the ar...

This spring, I wrote an op-ed entitled ”  Parking garage on the Hill — boon or boondoggle? ” I have learned more about this, and it’s become clear that this proposal is a far worse deal than I had envisioned. The following is based on readily available data, but everything is still fluid and so may change. The notion that a proposed 201-space underground garage is going to solve the Hill’s parking needs is simply not true. A new hotel above the garage will displace 88 existing spaces (62 in the Pleasant Street University Hill General Improvement District lot, plus 26 other spaces) leaving a net gain of 113 new spaces. But the hotel could use all these up. Here’s how: Assuming only half the hotel patrons drive and a 20 percent vacancy rate on the 189 rooms, that’s 75 cars, leaving 38 net new spaces. The hotel employees (about 38 per shift) and restaurant and shop employees (maybe another 42, depending on what actually gets built on site), even if only half drive, will use up...

The Boulder city government is proposing to promote the development of a new “boutique” hotel on the southwest corner of Broadway and University by building a two-story parking garage underneath it. Apparently the overall objective is to solve the Hill’s continuing problems, identified as lack of parking, lack of year-round business, and lack of an “anchor.” Here’s what I’ve found out to date: Currently, the site has 62 public parking spaces plus 26 private spaces, all of which will be eliminated. The underground lot will have 204 spaces. Three spaces are reserved for the University Hill General Improvement District, and 32 for the hotel. So there will be 169 left for the public, a net gain of 81 spaces. (If hotel patrons occupying the 173 rooms bring more than 32 cars, this net gain is reduced.) The public cost for the garage, including some sidewalk area improvements, is $20 million for construction, plus the $2 million UHGID Pleasant Street lot, which is being donated. So the ...