Yes, prices are “up there”—but the city has a 40-year history of trying to help

Residents of Wild Sage co-housing community (pictured above), located within North Boulder’s Holiday Neighborhood, own their living quarters and share some facilities. More than 20 percent of the units are permanently affordable. Photo courtesy Wonderland Hill Development Company

"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” said the writer Charles Dudley Warner in 1897. In Boulder, everyone seems to talk about affordable housing, but budget-minded house hunters and renters may wonder in frustration if anyone does anything about it.

Although it’s true that not everyone who wants to live in Boulder can afford to, the city has a 40-year history of making affordable housing a reality, and is approaching its goal of setting aside 10 percent of local housing as “permanently affordable.” What is meant by this term is not “public housing”—cheaply built shelter for the poor—but rents and homeownership with restrictions to keep them forever available to a range of wage earners otherwise priced out of the market.

“It’s not just about housing as a matter of shelter,” says John Pollak, co-director of the city’s Department of Housing and Human Services. “If we want a real community, then we want the guy who works in the kitchen at the Med where I eat dinner, and the childcare workers, and the people who take care of my parents in a facility, and the staff who take care of me after I’ve had my appendectomy to all be able to live here. [Those are] the people who are on the front lines of making this community livable.”

Yet these people are often priced out of owning homes in Boulder. The median price in Boulder these days is $540,000 for a detached house, and $242,000 for an attached dwelling such as a town home or a condominium. A look at the classified ads in the San Francisco Bay area, one of the priciest real estate markets in the nation, shows that rental prices there are comparable to Boulder’s.

Wild Sage co-housing community. Photo courtesy Wonderland Hill Development Company

$41,700: “Low Income” in Boulder

To help metropolitan areas identify citizens too poor to afford typical house prices, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issues annual area statistics, including one called the Area Median Income. The AMI helps the city of Boulder determine who is eligible for its homebuyer assistance programs, and how big a mortgage each applicant can afford.

HUD defines low income as 68.5 percent of Boulder County’s AMI. A single person could make as much as $41,700 to qualify for this category; a three-person household, up to $53,650. In the moderate-income category of 78.5 percent of the AMI, a single person’s maximum earnings could be $47,731; a three-person household no more than $61,470. And for middle-income earnings of 108.5 percent of the AMI, a single-person household could make as much as $65,968, with a three-person household, capped at $84,955.

Among the people vital to Boulder’s community who are currently priced out of the homeowners’ market are teachers just starting their careers in the Boulder Valley School District. “Starting salary for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree is $31,503,” says Bill Lopez, UniServ director with the Boulder Valley Education Association, the bargaining agent for licensed BVSD staff. “There’s a big difference between a teacher who was able to buy a house in Boulder 20 to 30 years ago and what today’s new teachers can afford. Surrounding communities are where most of our folks live.”

The problem of decent, affordable housing is nothing new to Boulder, but has only comparatively recently spilled out of the area of rentals. Former community activist Mark Fearer, who now works for the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center administration, spent years working for tenants’ rights after coming to Boulder in 1981. In an article he wrote for Boulder Weekly in 1996, Fearer mentioned CU President George Norlin scolding local landlords in 1922 for burdening students with high rates, as was common in most college towns. By 1969, Boulder students fed up with high rents and substandard housing had organized the third tenants’ union in the United States.

Rent Control? Forget It

Fearer was the director of the Boulder Tenants Union from 1981 to 1986 (it folded in 1987). He credits the group with bringing better housing-code enforcement and tenants’ rights, though it failed to win anything like rent control. Landlords banded together and successfully fought an attempt to get rent control on the city ballot in 1981, even pushing through a statewide ban against any further attempts. “We were trying to do something about rents on a local level,” Fearer recalls, “and it so scared landlords statewide that they got the legislature to enact a sort of nuclear strike.”

However, citizen activism and the new government welfare policies of the “Great Society” of the 1960s had another impact on Boulder’s rental scene—they created the Boulder Housing Authority, which originated through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Because the Boulder Housing Authority also received grant money from the city to buy, develop and maintain rental housing, the city decided in 2004 that the agency should blunt any perception of a conflict of interest by changing its name to Boulder Housing Partners.

BHP manages the Section 8 voucher program and more than 1,200 diverse properties—units that range from $50 a month to $1,200 a month, depending on family size, income, and program. But it also works with nonprofit organizations and the city of Boulder to buy and develop properties old and new, and aims to ensure an equitable community by working against the stereotype of affordable housing as little more than “housing projects.”

In 1980, the city’s Department of Housing and Human Services began entering into contracts with developers, requiring the inclusion of dwellings of modest size in new developments that would only be sold to buyers of low to moderate income. The restricted units were never to be rented out or sold as rental properties; they could only be owner-occupied. In addition, the houses could not be increased in size.

“It was thought that would be enough to ensure these units would stay affordable,” says Jeff Yegian, homeownership program manager for the city’s Division of Housing. But no cap was put on what the units could be resold for, nor to what income level of buyer. In 1990, the median home price in Boulder was $150,000. Ten years later, it was $353,000, the Daily Camera reported. Echoing this appreciation, some of the affordable units were resold for big profits, a few allegedly by at least one real estate agent who “flipped” them back into the high-priced market.

	The Northfield Commons development will have affordable eight-plex condo units (shown here), as well as four-plex townhomes.
	Residential development in the Transit Village area near 30th and Pearl streets won’t begin before late 2008. Check out some of the design possibilities at www.boulder transitvillage.net. Photos of drawings courtesy Northfield Commons (above) and Boulder Transit Village Area Plan (left)

The 20-Percent Solution

Boulder learned from its mistakes. Programs were tweaked, policies revised, and the Inclusionary Zoning program was implemented in 2000, requiring that 20 percent of new developments be units affordable for low- and moderate-income buyers. “Permanently affordable” now means just that: While participating homeowners can still benefit from the appreciation of their homes, there is a cap on resale prices and on the income and assets of would-be buyers. All units continue to be designed for integration with the neighborhood, and range from one-bedroom condominiums to multiple-bedroom houses. (A list of available housing for sale and information about the various homebuyer programs can be viewed on the city of Boulder Division of Housing website, www.boulderaffordablehousing.com.)

Developers who don’t want to provide permanently affordable units in new projects under Boulder’s Inclusionary Zoning Ordinance have options. They can provide land, permanently affordable units at alternate sites, or “cash in lieu” contributions that go into the housing-funds pot. Cash in lieu contributions vary according to the size and type of the planned project and are adjusted yearly. On average, these contributions range from $100,000 to $150,000 per required affordable unit, according to Cindy Pieropan, housing planner for policy, planning and development for the city of Boulder.

Some developers are fully involved in providing new permanently affordable units, as part of a commitment to the public interest. Jim Leach, president of Boulder-based Wonderland Hill Development Company, has been active in developing a number of projects in Boulder, including the Wild Sage and Silver Sage co-housing communities. Wonderland’s projects often include more than the required 20 percent as permanently affordable units, and they blend in seamlessly with those that sell for the market rate.

“Our commitment has always been to build affordable housing in an integrated fashion as opposed to building it cheap and isolated,” Leach says. That means that while the interiors of the permanently affordable units might be a bit smaller, and their appliances and cosmetic finishes such as flooring might be lower-priced, the look of these units differs little from their market-priced neighbors, he says. Leach credits “a very progressive housing authority” for helping achieve neighborhood designs that meet community needs while winning national awards.

Housing co-director Pollak can point to a significant milestone toward the city’s goal of making 10 percent (approximately 4,500 homes) of Boulder’s housing permanently affordable. At present, it has about 2,700 units qualify, with more “in the pipeline.”

Mark Fearer says that while Boulder is still an expensive place to live, the city’s affordable-housing policies and programs have put it “ahead of everybody else in Colorado, maybe in the whole of the Southwest.”

Perhaps he ought to know. In 2005, “after being a tenant all [his] adult life,” Fearer finally became the owner of one of the 138 permanently affordable homes offered for sale when the Wild Sage co-housing community was built.

Charmaine Ortega Getz, a freelance writer, lives in downtown Boulder.