The Boulder City Council has expressed its support for a number of potential zoning changes that could allow denser housing to be built in some residential areas.
At a study session Thursday evening, council members had a lengthy discussion about additional changes to Boulder’s zoning laws beyond the Zoning for Affordable Housing ordinance update that the council approved last October. At a public hearing for that ordinance in September, council members asked staff to explore seven other possible zoning changes that interested them.
The changes approved last year — which included loosening requirements for building townhouses, duplexes and triplexes in certain zones — were intended to remove zoning barriers to building more affordable and modest-size housing in Boulder. But the additional ideas council members floated included finding ways to add more housing in some residential zones while still working within the density limits outlined in the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan. With the BVCP set to be updated in 2025, those density limits could also be revisited in the not-too-distant future.
On Thursday, Karl Guiler, a senior policy adviser for Boulder, laid out the seven additional zoning changes council members suggested last fall as well as city staffers’ analysis and recommendations on each item. Guiler asked council members to give city staff direction on which options they want to pursue and whether they agree that the options align with the BVCP.
“Obviously, everyone looks at this a little bit different. The (Comprehensive) Plan is not as strict as, say, the land use code. Everyone has a slightly different interpretation of what is consistent with it,” he said.
The first three suggestions were about finding ways to add more housing in mixed, medium and low density residential areas. Each level of density is defined by a maximum number of housing units per acre — for example, low density residential areas allow two to six housing units per acre, while high density areas permit more than 14 units per acre. But because of the differing natures of these residential zones, city staff recommended different approaches for increasing density in each zone.
Mixed density zones tend to be found in older neighborhoods near downtown Boulder, including parts of Whittier, Goss Grove and University Hill. These areas were originally built with single-family homes. In the 1960s they were rezoned for high density residential, but in the 1990s they were rezoned again for low density residential. Some of these areas have a mix of single-family homes and multi-family residential developments.
In mixed density areas, staffers recommended cutting the required lot area per housing unit in half — from 6,000 to 3,000 square feet — which would allow duplexes on some lots . But staff also recommended requiring the same floor area ratio for multi-family buildings as for single-family homes to “help preserve the neighborhood character and scale,” according to a city memo.
Council members generally aligned with the staff recommendations and supported increasing density in these zones, but several, including Mayor Aaron Brockett and Councilmembers Lauren Folkerts and Ryan Schuchard, expressed interest in an even lower required lot area per unit. Folkerts said she’d like to explore a per-unit lot area of 1,500 square feet while capping the number of units that can be built on site to comply with BVCP density standards.
There were two City Council suggestions from last fall that city staffers did not recommend pursuing. One of those suggestions would have exempted projects that offered 100% “missing middle” housing — such as duplexes, triplexes or townhouses — from the city’s site review process if no land use modifications were needed. Initially, staff had recommended this exemption, but one council member last fall had expressed concern about whether middle housing would be accessible to people with disabilities.
Guiler told the Daily Camera ahead of Thursday’s meeting that staffers changed their position after researching the issue more thoroughly. They found many middle housing units would have no accessibility requirements. Based on the possible accessibility issues, as well as other zoning changes that have been made that incentivize middle housing, staffers no longer supported the site review exemption for middle housing projects.
As an alternative, Guiler said, staffers pitched the suggestion to the council of exempting 100% permanently affordable housing projects from site review instead. Council members agreed on Thursday to abandon the site review exemption for middle housing but instead pursue exempting permanently affordable projects.
The ongoing evolution of Boulder’s residential zoning policy has been labeled the Zoning for Affordable Housing project, but several council members questioned whether that name fit. They said that while the zoning ordinance the City Council passed in October attempted to address housing affordability, they don’t feel the changes currently being considered directly relate to affordability, and renaming it to something else could help avoid confusion.
Instead of directly creating deed-restricted affordable housing, Councilmember Matt Benjamin said, “We’re just lowering the barrier of entry and creating more diverse sets of housing to attract different sets of people. … So that just might help with setting expectations. We have a lot of folks writing to us about, ‘Where’s the affordability?’”.
The lack of specific provisions for affordability was a point of contention that led some council members to question, or even not support, some of the possible zoning changes.
“To have seven recommendations and zero of them actually meaningfully affect affordability when the title of this item is ‘Zoning for Affordability’ just feels disingenuous,” Councilmember Taishya Adams
Said Councilmember Mark Wallach, “We’re zoning for density. We’re not zoning for any other value should be important to us. … We’re just saying to developers, you can now do more things and sell them at very high price.”
As a next step, city staff will begin public engagement on the potential zoning changes in the coming months. Guiler said during the meeting that his team will aim to draft a new ordinance to bring back before council later this year.
