|
|
A Vote For Affordable Housing
If passed, Ballot Issue 201 would raise a maximum of $3,100,000 per year for affordable housing through 2009, when the tax would expire.
While there are many reasons to oppose 201, the few arguments in favor are the stronger ones, and 201 deserves your vote.
I've been a consistent critic of Boulder's affordable housing strategies, so I'll try not to overdo a re-recitation of 201's negative features.
Boulder's housing stock by its nature tends to support an affordable price structure. Roughly half of Boulder's dwellings are "attached" apartments, condominiums and townhouses which cannot be "pop-topped" into something expensive or extravagant. There will continue to be a limit to how much a high-income individual or family will pay to live in attached quarters.
Of the other, detached-home half of the housing stock, roughly half is the "tract home" variety, inevitably rectilinear, smack in the center of a grid-layout lot, and again limited in pop-top and price potential.
All of us in Boulder -- even "the rich" -- live more compactly than we would in a community less blessed with economic success. If affordable translates as compact, or dated housing, the condition causes no great harm and brings no justification for government intervention or taxation.
However, times have changed: specifically, the last eighteen months have introduced a market phenomenon unprecedented in the Boulder Valley. Class-warfare specialists have decried Boulder's "Aspenization," which is as nasty and mistaken as ever (Stratford Park condos will not ever rent for a grand a night at Christmas). However, in a housing-market eye-blink, Boulder is PaloAltoizing.
Boulder housing prices have risen perhaps 40% since early 1999 -- and that on top of a 60% rise in the first half of the 1990's. Splendid new, high-paying jobs by the tens of thousands in and near Boulder have jacked Boulder prices beyond any reasonable affordability by workers whose incomes lag behind pay in the high-flying sectors.
Two teachers, as partners, each making mid-20's, with a little family help could reasonably afford to buy a tract home in Boulder until this year; but not any more, and probably never again. Today, a thousand square feet on a slab with a carport trades at $250,000 -- a $60,000 price increase in only eighteen months.
The change in the condo market is an even bigger surprise. A single-income household headed by a teacher or firefighter or nurse or therapist could reasonably afford a two-bedroom, thousand-square-foot condo... until last winter. Today, even these modest and cramped quarters at $170,000-plus are beyond the means of an income-lagging family.
In the past I have criticized the City housing types for "mission creep": their wish to subsidize housing for middle-income earners, up to 110 and 120 percent of median income. A family with an income that high (north of $65,000) can still buy good housing in Boulder, and the City cannot justify intervention by subsidy. Issue 201 is specific as to new programs: "...for the purpose of benefiting those earning less than sixty percent of the area median income."
If 201 proposes to help families making $33,000 per year, or less, count me in.
The City's affordable housing effort has a bunch of other problems which will bear watching, but none of them will be made worse by the passage of 201.
I fear that the money may not be used well; that is, every possible dime should be invested in acquisition or construction of housing, as opposed to blown on staff, consultants, and studies. In this concern there is nothing personal about Boulder's performance: I don't trust any government housing office to get the most possible bang for the buck.
Another trouble spot: as the gap widens between the high and increasing cost of market housing versus the low and capped cost of the "permanently affordable" stock, the City will be in the rationing business. We may soon have hundreds... thousands of applicants for individual units as they become available.
I assume the City will be forced to go to a lottery with some kind of point system for applicants, but how will the points be awarded? Teacher, firefighter, health care provider... sure; but weighted over or under the points for a single parent, a disabled person, or an older one? A gender weighting? Will there be efforts to adjust Boulder's ethnic or racial "diversity"? Mayor Toor offers favoritism to long-time Boulderites as a desirable feature of the City's program, while I would have thought the benefits of fresh blood would counterbalance squatters' rights.
Enough of that impolite sniping.
Vote for 201 because times have changed, and it's the right thing to do.
|
