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A Regulation Too F.A.R.
Boulder's growth management policies often generate secondary effects which confound original intent.
A leading example is rapid increases in home prices as more people compete for increasingly scarce seats at Boulder's table. Most of the price increases are attributable to scarce home sites, not to a limited supply of particular kinds of homes.
An old real estate wisdom holds that you can't change the land, but you can change the house. Oh, boy, can you ever change the house. Which leads to today's controversy over "pop tops" and "scrape-offs."
The price of many a home in Boulder would be the same complete with the house, or without the house as land only. The obvious case is a greenbelt site holding a badly built, badly designed, and badly maintained 60 year-old heap. Land value alone higher than including the existing house is the economic condition which leads to scrape-off.
Not so extreme, but common in Boulder, and in many parts of the County, is a lot which is underutilized. In this case, the typical house is tract built, has a badly dated design, deferred maintenance, and is only 30 years old. This general description fits the perhaps twenty thousand tract homes in Boulder County. An underutilized lot is ripe for rehab and pop top.
If the home-owning public had limited its activities to rehabilitation of existing homes, we would have few problems with each other. However, dramatic increases in land value have encouraged and enabled extraordinary increases in the size of some existing homes.
"Aspenization!" cry those who believe the housing stock is undergoing a grotesque distortion to the disadvantage of a balanced community.
In Boulder County cities there already exits a body of regulation limiting the size of houses. Zoning categories for various densities already determine most setback allowances and height restrictions. However, these regulations do not prohibit redevelopments which offend some (all, most, or a few) neighbors.
Regulatory trumpets blaring, government proposes to solve the problem by making total rehab square footage a rigid function of lot size. The proposed Floor Area Ratio rules are known as "FAR." Not coincidentally, FAR would dramatically limit the mass, or volume occupied by a house. Theoretically, these new limits would prevent Boulder from becoming a community of mansions, and therefore maintain affordability in Boulder; and would outlaw too-massive or too-obstructive eyesores.
Many of us financial Philistines fear FAR goes too far. Boulder's housing stock is aging rapidly: most of it was built between 1950 and 1973. Many Boulderites do not wish live as they did when Martin Acres was built: the rationale behind the pop top is the crowding felt by a family of four living in 950 square feet (three people above grade, and a teenager sentenced to life in a dark basement).
Most of Boulder's houses need an architectural facelift, and it is hard to justify (or accomplish) such a facelift without expanded square footage.
The primary incentives to rehab and maintain property are potential utility and investment value. As the FAR debate proceeds, you will need to make your own judgments about whether its restrictions are too tight, and remove incentive value, or are reasonable.
As you consider FAR formulae, consider two University Hill houses as examples, one a scrape-off, the other a pop top. The former, located at 720 Willowbrook, has gathered some criticism. One neighbor has referred to the finished product as resembling a "Victorian orphanage." It would have been prohibited by FAR. The second home, found at 1711 Bluebell, is to my eye a handsome contribution to its site and neighborhood, but it would also have been prohibited.
FAR is not a "health and safety" issue, nor a growth control one. We already have limits on the number of sites, the number of dwellings per site, and the number of unrelated people who can live in a dwelling. The issues addressed by FAR are fundamentally aesthetic ones.
You heard it here first: Martin Acres is not in danger of Aspenization. Neither are Stratford Park Condominiums.
However, there should be some not-so-FAR-out means to prevent Boulder from a future of inappropriate houses from greenbelt-to-greenbelt. Oddly enough, there is such a means already in operation in many Boulder neighborhoods.
It is known as the Architectural Control Committee (ACC) found within most single-family Homeowners Associations (HOA).
In my neighborhood, if someone wanted to built something ugly, whether it was all right within current regs, or under FAR, the ACC would vote it down. Also voted down would be poor choices in paint color, fences, landscaping (or its total absence), and a several page list of other offenses which one inventive, if tasteless neighbor could commit against another.
Instead of reaching for the rule book, and arrogating heavy-handed power to City bureaucrats, why not empower existing neighborhoods with enough self-government to control the aesthetics of housing?
Form a Mapleton Hill HOA, a Martin Acres HOA, and a few Table Mesa HOAs. Let neighbors elect neighbors to hash out that which is appropriate from that which is not. Small groups in well-defined geographical areas know best how and when to make exceptions. City-wide rule books leave no room for exception, nor for innovation.
The County's angst over building size, colors, and so on in the mountains could be solved in the same manner. Leave these issues to HOAs, as well.
A real revolutionary would empower HOAs to establish their own taxing districts. Can you imagine a Martin Acres HOA acquiring a few houses, scraping them off, and establishing its own pool, tennis, and recreation facilities -- just like the modern neighborhoods?
Too far too fast, maybe, but dream on about vesting power the smallest political unit: a group of neighbors.
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