I recently met an urban planner from Boulder, Colorado, who relocated to Barcelona. We were discussing affordable housing. My thesis is Boulder needs to drop housing prices by 70% to become affordable again ($1,000,000 down to $300,000), and the only way to do that realistically is to build taller. It's not financially viable to build multi-unit apartment buildings if they have to be under 35 feet. We need 55 feet at a minimum, and 65 feet is ideal. 65 feet has efficiencies of scale so that a developer can make a profit. 65 feet is not a Hong Kong skyscraper. 65 feet is what you see in the gentle density of Barcelona or Philadelphia. She was against this idea, because she wants to see the Flatiron Mountains. The irony is that she left Boulder because she can't afford a house there, so she can't see the Flatirons anyway. There is a simple way to solve this problem, but it involves crossing an imaginary red line in people's minds.
Mid-rise density in Gracia, Barcelona, is a beautiful thing, but the Colorado Building in downtown Boulder is simply ugly. How do we get around the original sin of that 10-story, ugly 1950s building that made everyone in Boulder, Colorado, allergic to mid-rise density? If Boulder did legalize building 55 feet by right or up to 65 feet by right, then we would likely see a lot of ugly buildings get built. Real estate developers have lost the trust of the public. There's a growing idea that the only way affordable housing will ever be built is if we have the government build it. That's a subject of another article.