Rebecca Herr relaxes in her rent-controlled subsidized apartment at Canyon Pointe Apartments in Boulder, Colorado on Feb. 27, 2024. last year in hopes of spurring more housing development they faced immediate blowback from municipalities intent on protecting their local control.From the mountains to the prairies, Colorado’s housing crisis is squeezing state residents in ways that make drastic choices an all-too-common part of their cost-of-living calculus.
Boulder’s experience with inclusionary housing provides a glimpse of how those mandates can play an important role in shaping a city’s housing market. But it also demonstrates the limitations of the approach when even market-rate construction does keep up with demand. Not all of those affordable homes were created under the inclusionary housing ordinance but the policy is a cornerstone of the city’s efforts.
Rebecca Herr lives in a Boulder Housing Partners building, the Canyon Pointe apartments for seniors on the western end of Walnut Street. The building was built in 1979 before the inclusionary housing ordinance. “The Boulder plague has spread, you know, and it’s awful,” Herr said of the state’s affordable housing crisis on a recent afternoon. She gestured at her apartment. “If they can invest in more of these properties, there’s a need now that I don’t think there’s been in previous years and it can help bring things into balance.
But Robin Kniech, the former three-term city councilwoman who was a driving force behind the legislation, didn’t agree then and doesn’t agree now. Kniech said the research she reviewed while working on the ordinance reinforced her view that including affordable units in projects was a manageable cost to developers.Robin Kniech works during the Denver City Council’s first in-person meeting since the COVID-19 shutdown on Monday, July 26, 2021.
Kniech points to the many other factors weighing on development in the post-COVID-19 world — persistently high interest rates, higher-than-ever construction costs and finite land. She and city planners predicted there would be a rush to seek permits ahead of the policy’s effective date followed by a lull. It will take time for the market to adjust and return to a normal cadence.
In accordance with the state law that opened the door for Denver’s EHA program, the city offers incentives to offset including affordable housing in projects. Those include reduced parking requirements, cheaper permits and exemption to affordable housing linkage fees on any commercial space in the project. But those savings aren’t enough to offset soaring construction costs and an extremely challenging financing market, Zucker said.