Five candidates campaigning for one of six open Boulder City Council seats in November’s election homed in on their ideas for tackling the city’s perceived jobs-housing imbalance in a forum Thursday at the main library.
The forum was the third and final in a series hosted by advocacy group PLAN-Boulder County that featured 14 of the 15 candidates who qualified to appear on the ballot.
Thursday’s installment hosted incumbent Bob Yates, Benita Duran, Susan Peterson, Mark Wallach and Corina Julca.
Peterson suggested businesses looking at locating in Boulder check out neighboring towns to slow the growth of jobs in the city that, when combined with a lack of housing for workers, contributes to more road-congesting in-commuting.
“It seems like the only side of the equation we’re talking about is more housing,” Peterson said. “There’s another side: balanced job growth. And maybe even balancing some of that job growth to the regional partners around us. …Perhaps some satellite offices for (businesses) who are based in Boulder would help to reduce some of that in-commuting and some of the need for housing.”
Wallach mentioned statistics closely mirroring some included in a recent report by Colorado nonprofits on Boulder’s housing policies showing the city, under current zoning, has the capacity to add almost 55,000 new jobs and homes for 19,270 new residents.
“If you think things are crowded on U.S. 36 and 28th Street now at 4 o’clock, get ready, because more is coming” Wallach said, adding Boulder should work at getting local investors behind development projects rather than out-of-state financiers. “… We ought to be considering whether any higher (commercial linkage fee) rates are possible. Because we do have severe impacts coming, we need to mitigate them, and we need to add some housing.”
Boulder’s $30-per-square foot fee on new commercial development allocated to the city’s affordable housing fund was the second-highest in the country at the time city council last year raised it 150% from the previous $12 fee.
Julca agreed Boulder should consider going even higher with the charge for new commercial building, and also questioned whether University of Colorado Boulder could temper off-campus housing needs for students.
“Some people might say if you charge higher linkage fees, then people are not going to want to build here for offices,” Julca said. “Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe they will stop building offices. Maybe that’s what we need right now, because we are in a (housing) crisis, we have to do something.”
Yates claimed a project he as a member of the current council has already tasked Boulder staff with should help solve the problem. Officials are working on updating the land use tables for each of the city’s zoning districts with the intent of discouraging large office structures.
“Those use tables have not been updated for a really long time, and we’re not getting what we want,” Yates said. “… What we’re trying to achieve by changing those is effectively rezoning those properties so that we have fewer large office buildings and more opportunities for housing and neighborhood-serving retail, because I think that’s what we want in this community.”
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