HOME PRICES have ballooned across Boulder County, with a median price of more than $1 million in the City of Boulder.
afford monthly mortgage rates in an area where median home prices are rising. Longmont, for example, has a list of more than a dozen families seeking down payment assistance, but the City has seen an 8.1% increase in home values over the last year. In Boulder, the median home prices is over $1.5 million, according to Information and Real Estate Services, LLC. Despite aggressive goals to increase the percentage of low-, moderate- and middle-income affordable housing stock throughout Boulder County, today, only about 5.8% of all housing in Boulder County is considered affordable, as defined by a household spending no more than 30% of income on rent or mortgage, according to the Boulder County Regional Housing Partnership. Although countywide collaboration for affordable housing began in the early 2000s, it was the 2013 flood that solidified the Regional Housing Partnership, as different jurisdictions came together to strategize how to best use emergency funding. Over the course of two years, the countywide coalition was able to produce about 1,000 units of housing, either rehabilitating damaged properties or securing new opportunities for people, which eventually led to the Partnership’s formal establishment in 2017. Policymakers from across these jurisdictions (the cities of Boulder, Longmont, Lafayette and Louisville, along with the mountain towns of Lyons, Nederland and Jamestown, as well as Erie and Superior, and Boulder County) collaborate, share information and resources, and advocate in an effort to preserve and create diverse housing options across the region. But it is not a formal entity with any sort of regulatory authority. Still, the Partnership established a countywide goal of preserving 12% of the housing inventory as permanently affordable by 2035. Longmont is currently at about 6%, and 8.4% of units in Boulder are permanently affordable. Boulder City Council has been disBOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
cussing increasing housing costs since the 1970s, but many of the programs still in place today didn’t begin evolving until the late 1990s when rental prices and property values began to rise significantly. In 2000, Boulder adopted its comprehensive housing strategy, which is what the City has built its affordable programming on in the decades since. That same year, the City adopted its 10% goal at a time when less than 3.2% of housing was deemed affordable. The vast majority of Boulder’s current affordable housing stock comes in the form of rental units — only 799 of the total 3,767 total affordable units in the city are owned by individuals. In 2019, the City upped its goal to 15%, with the mandate that 1,000 of those homes be preserved for middleincome earners. And the goal is adjusted annually to account for market-rate development, which increases by roughly 1% a year. “It’s an ever-growing target, which makes it challenging to accomplish,” says Jay Sugnet, senior planner with the City of Boulder, who has been working on housing issues since 2013. In 2020, the City added 277 affordable units, the second largest increase since reporting began in 2000. 2015 holds the record at 356, while the average development rate over the last 20 years is 123 units annually. “It’s definitely not a lot,” says Charlotte Pitts, chair of Boulder’s Housing Advisory Board, especially when considering the need. For example, when Boulder Housing Partners (the City’s housing authority) opened an interest list I
for 79 units last fall, 393 people signed up. In Longmont, the waitlist for affordable rentals is currently more than 100 households — the amount the City expects to serve this year — according to Kathy Fedler, Housing and Community Investment division manager for the City, although several hundred households usually apply. When it comes to affordable for-sale properties, Longmont doesn’t currently have a waitlist because there are no homes to offer. Longmont has also been focusing its efforts on affordable housing since before the turn of the century, establishing its housing fund in 1995. Currently, it has close to 2,500 deed-restricted homes in the City, the majority of which are also rentals (2,288 rental; 144 purchased). The City’s goal is to have 5,400 affordable homes by 2035, with plans for almost 500 over the next three years. But the ability to reach affordable housing goals countywide, under the current system, really comes down to one thing: funding.
Where does the money come from?
“There’s absolutely nothing that’s inexpensive about affordable housing,” says Norrie Boyd, interim director for Boulder County Housing Authority (BCHA). “And yet the value there is that you have permanent affordable housing for people who literally couldn’t afford to live in the community otherwise. So I never doubt that it’s worth it.” APRIL 15, 2021
Federal funding for affordable housing has been decreasing for years, leaving more and more of the monetary burden of building and preserving affordability to state and local governments. (Although, President Biden’s American Jobs Plan earmarks $213 billion “to produce, preserve, and retrofit more than two million affordable and sustainable places to live.”) Currently, local jurisdictions in the Regional Housing Partnership, along with the housing development community, invest approximately $15 million in affordable housing across the region. But in order to reach the countywide 12% affordability goal by 2035, an additional $40 million is needed annually from local sources, according to Kristin Hyser, deputy director of Boulder’s Housing and Human Services and a member of the Regional Housing Partnership steering committee. These local funds are then leveraged for federal dollars — for example, Sugnet says Boulder can take every $1 it receives in local funds and leverage anywhere from $2-$4 in federal funds to increase affordable options within the City. The largest source of federal funding comes in the form of low-income housing tax credits, an incentive for affordable housing written into the tax code through public-private partnerships with investors. Locally, there’s a concerted effort to increase affordable housing funding through several different policy initiatives. In 2017, Boulder County voters extended the 0.5% Worthy Cause sales tax, which funds local human services nonprofits, including affordable housing developers like BHP and BCHA, through grants. There’s talk of a countywide ballot measure to increase local funding for affordable housing either through property tax increases or an additional sales tax in the next year or two. A similar effort in 2020 was put off by the coronavirus pandemic and the specifics of any future measure are still waiting on discussion and approval from County Commissioners, see HOUSING Page 11
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