Diverging views on the city’s affordable housing obligations for commercial development emerged at a Friday candidate forum featuring four of 15 Boulder City Council candidates at the main library branch.
The forum, sponsored by the PLAN-Boulder County advocacy group, included incumbent Aaron Brockett, Brian Dolan, Junie Joseph and Gala Orba, and was the first of three scheduled by PLAN, with the following two next week featuring most of the remaining candidates.
They are each gunning for one of the six contested seats in the Nov. 5 election.
Brockett contended Boulder’s newly established $30-per-square-foot affordable housing dedication requirement for commercial developers is too high, but relented that some sort of fee is necessary.
“I’m very glad we do linkage fees,” Brockett said, “but I feel like the current number is too high because I think it ends up suppressing commercial development to the point where we actually get less money for affordable housing, and makes the expenses so high that you make commercial space only affordable to the largest, biggest, wealthiest businesses and not so much the small businesses.”
Dolan said, “I like linkage fees for what they do, but I think that ultimately linkage fees are passed (on), and like Aaron said, they hurt small business. They don’t hurt the big guns. They may discourage them from coming, but they hurt small businesses, we may need to find a way to supplement that a little bit for small businesses.”
Orba was open to examining changes to the linkage fee amount if elected, but is in favor of keeping the payments to Boulder a requirement for commercial building. She added she favors closing down “corporate stores” for one day out of the week to drive traffic to smaller businesses.
“I would like to talk to council about the dollar amount,” Orba said. “The formula could be tweaked depending on the business. I’m a huge proponent of small business. If I had my way, all the corporate stores on Pearl Street would be closed on Sundays, and we would have ‘small business Sundays,’ and not just Pearl, but through the whole city.”
Joseph’s stance on the fee’s amount was less clear. She recommended linkage fee funding put toward housing should also support transportation programs between homes and workplaces, and that parking minimums for development could be updated to boost transit’s attractiveness.
“It’s very important that we create the opportunity to live here in Boulder,” Joseph said. “With so many people commuting into Boulder every day, that’s not good for our climate. I believe that also plays into our transportation policies, so I think it’s important we link transportation and housing together.”
A variety of ideas for attacking Boulder’s high cost of housing were shared.
Orba is campaigning on forcing University of Colorado to house undergrad students on campus for longer under the assumption that could help soften Boulder’s competitive and pricey housing market.
“I do not believe there is a link between affordability and density,” Orba said.
Joseph called density “very nuanced,” arguing for “transit-oriented housing.”
“If we don’t have housing for the people who commute in, we have to deal with climate issues,” Joseph said. “We have to have balance.”
Dolan agreed with Orba that increased density doesn’t necessarily lead to greater affordability.
“Supply-side economics does not work,” Dolan said, citing a Colorado Real Estate Journal report that said rents near CU rose 39% between the third and fourth quarters of 2018 because of an influx of new dwelling units. “We’re not a simple market.”
Brockett said allowing for more dense construction alone does not lead to affordability, but that “they are tied together.”
“We have to make sure our regulations accomplish affordability with any density we have,” Brockett said, arguing, like Joseph, for infill development near transportation corridors. “It has to also be linked to transportation and land use. We don’t want to stick a four-story building in the middle of a single-family residential neighborhood where you can’t walk, bike or bus anywhere.”
PLAN is holding two more candidate forums at the library, 1001 Arapahoe Ave., from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday. Nikki McCord, Mark McIntyre, Adam Swetlik and Andy Celani are set to participate in Tuesday’s; and Benita Duran, Corina Julca, Susan Peterson, Mark Wallach and Bob Yates are scheduled for Thursday’s.
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