(You can listen to this column, read by the author, here.)
The Denver Gazette, unlike its older cousin, the Gazette in Colorado Springs, is a digital-only newspaper, allowing for interactional features, videos and, most importantly, online sudoku.
The Gazette also owns the rights to all the old Rocky Mountain News editions dating back to April 1859 (for those new to town, the “Rocky” was Colorado’s newspaper of record until 2009). It’s awesome the Denver Gazette runs a different historic front page from the Rocky every day. But more fun is getting past the front page to the old stories and ads.
A buddy of mine came across a couple old print issues and gave them to me. By chance I read the Rocky’s house editorial from April 1, 1964. And no, it wasn’t an April Fools joke.
The editorial board was bemoaning the University of Colorado Regents’ questionable decision to build affordable apartments for students when the private sector could build them at a far less expensive cost.
Then this jumped off the page: “Living costs are a major factor in determining ability of many students to stay in college. And $90.00 a month, as proposed for some new 2-bedroom apartments, is plenty high.”
“Plenty high”? Brand new 2-bedroom Boulder apartments for $90 a month was “plenty high”? Adjusted for inflation that $90 would be about $916 today. So, if housing costs just kept with inflation, $916 is, by default, “plenty high” today.
Except that new 2-bedroom college apartments in Boulder rent for well more than $3,000 today. We’re talking more than three times more than what housing costs should be.
This is obviously not just a Boulder problem. Housing costs all over the state are out of control. I love to pick on Boulder because the elitists there illustrate the housing paradox so sadistically.
As cities here try to “make housing affordable” by adding more density, to pack and stack people on top of each other, they only make it better for those of us who already own a home.
We live in a state which is nearly completely vacant, nothing but empty land. Much larger than the entire United Kingdom, some 98% of all Colorado’s land that could be developed has not been developed.
So, what do we do? We make it illegal to build where homes would be inexpensive to build. Most large cities in Colorado have urban growth boundaries. Boulder owns twice its municipal footprint in land outside the city borders. They call their growth boundary the “green belt” — nothing can be built on it. To get more housing they must pile people up on top of each other via additional dwelling units in the backyard or knocking down buildings for multi-level apartment complexes.
So, whoever bought a house early enough wins the housing Lotto. Poorer people, usually people of color, were not able to scrape up a down payment. They lose. Now in Colorado they will forever be renters, second-class citizens while those with homes see our assets appreciate.
Boulder neighborhoods are littered with Black Lives Matter yard signs. If Black lives did in fact matter, cities like Boulder would remove urban growth boundaries to allow for affordable homes, homes people of color and young people might actually purchase.
But if we allowed that building, our own home values would not continue to skyrocket and might even go down. That darn supply-and-demand thing.
Or put differently, growth control and urban growth boundaries are racist. And just ask the people in Boulder who are almost 100% all White, and they’ll tell you racism is — how do they put it — bad. Not so bad that they endanger their home values over it. But darn it all, so bad it just makes you want to, well, want to put up a yard sign, gosh-darnit.
Thus, the hypocrisy. So, their policy is lip service and regulations.
Subsidized housing should alleviate White guilt for denying the poor and the young a home they can own. Better to force them to rent apartments in the city center than taste the American dream with something a bit farther away. We can call what they can afford “sprawl” and vilify it. Of course, the home we’re in now was once “sprawl,” but screw them. We got ours.
Low-income, subsidized rentals are fine for them. Then we can blame their landlords for the high rent.
Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.
