I recently met an urban planner from Boulder, Colorado, who now lives in Barcelona. We got to talking about affordable housing, the way people in this line of work always do, and I told her what I think Boulder actually needs: a 70 percent drop in the price of a house. A million dollars down to three hundred thousand. Nothing short of that puts a Boulder address back within reach of the people who teach in its schools and cook in its restaurants.
She did not argue with the number. She argued with the only way I know to get there, which is to build taller.
The 35 foot problem
Boulder caps buildings at 35 feet. Voters wrote that limit into the city charter in 1971, and it has held ever since. Thirty-five feet is three floors if you are careful with your ceiling heights, and three floors is the worst place a builder can land. You pay for the land, the excavation, the elevator, the fire stairs, the sprinkler riser, the architect, the lawyers, the years of review, and then you spread that cost across a dozen apartments. The math does not work. So nobody builds apartments, and what does get built is a single expensive house, or a duplex of expensive houses, on a lot that could have held twenty homes.
At 55 feet you can get five floors, and the numbers start to close. At 65 feet you get six, and the same elevator shaft, the same foundation, the same stair core serves half again as many households. That is where a developer can make a normal profit on ordinary rents instead of chasing luxury ones. Sixty-five feet is not Hong Kong. Sixty-five feet is Gracia, in Barcelona, where my planner friend now walks to buy bread. It is Philadelphia rowhouse blocks with a floor or two added. It is six storeys of brick with shops underneath and laundry hanging off the back.
Her objection, and the hole in it
She was against it because she wants to see the Flatirons. That is a real thing to want. Those slabs of red sandstone tilt up out of the plain at the west edge of town, and from certain streets they fill the sky. I would not want a wall between me and that either.
Here is what stopped me. She left. She left Boulder because she could not afford a house there. She is four thousand miles away, in a city where the buildings on her street run six and seven floors, and she cannot see the Flatirons at all. The view was protected. The viewer was not.
That is the trade Boulder has been making for fifty years without saying it out loud. The city kept the sightlines and exported the people. Every year the price of admission goes up, and the people who lose the auction move to Longmont, or Lafayette, or Barcelona. The Flatirons are still there. Fewer and fewer Coloradans can afford to stand in front of them.
The original sin
I understand where the fear comes from, and it has an address. It is 1035 Pearl Street, the Colorado Building, eleven storeys of dull mid-century office block dropped into downtown Boulder in the 1950s. It is not a good building. It is tall and flat and grey and it does not care about the street it stands on. Boulder looked at it, decided that was what height meant, and in 1971 voted to make sure it never happened again.
One bad building bought the city a fifty-year allergy to anything above three floors. That is the thing I keep turning over. The lesson Boulder took was about height. The actual lesson was about design.
What I am not going to pretend
If Boulder legalized 55 feet tomorrow, or 65 feet by right, some of what got built would be ugly. Probably a lot of it. I am not going to stand here and promise six storeys of hand-laid brick with good proportions and a decent cornice. Developers in America mostly build the cheapest envelope the code allows, in whatever cladding is on sale that year, and they have earned the suspicion they get. When people in Boulder say they do not trust a developer with six floors, they are not being irrational. They have seen what showed up on the last site.
So the honest version of the argument is this. Boulder can have three floors and a view that most of its workers will only visit on weekends, or it can have six floors, a few hundred homes a year, and some buildings it will not love. I would take the second one. A mediocre building with forty apartments in it houses forty households. A beautiful empty lot houses nobody.
Design review can do real work here if the city writes it down in advance: how much glass at street level, where the entrances go, what the top of the building does, how deep the setback runs. Rules like that are worth arguing about, and a builder can price them. What a builder cannot price is a discretionary hearing three years out where the answer might be no.
There is a growing idea in Boulder and everywhere else that none of this will ever come from the private market, and that the only affordable housing we will get is the kind the government builds itself. I have a lot of sympathy for that and it is a subject for another article. But the public builder runs into the same 35 feet as everyone else. Whoever swings the hammer, the charter still says three floors, and three floors still does not pencil.
The red line is 35 feet. It exists in the charter and it exists in people's heads, and the second one is harder to move. My friend crossed it by leaving. She lives at six storeys now, and she likes her street.