2026-09-23 - Housing Advisory Board

00:05HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay, cool. Hello, I'm Karin Hoskin, Chair of the Housing Advisory Board. Welcome to our monthly meeting. Today is September 23rd, 2026.

00:18HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: We'll start with roll call. Lauren Schevets.

00:22Lauren Schevets: Fear.

00:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Zooming in, hi. Brendan Selby? Here. Sorry, I want to put an H in there, sorry. No worries. Chip, not here yet. David Garbud? Here. Philip Ogren? Here. Sheriff Feinberg?

00:39HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Did we hear… was she gonna try and zoom in? Okay. I thought she was no… yeah, thought she's no longer a member. She's gonna stay on as much as possible. Yeah.

00:50HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Until we have her.

00:52HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: next appointment session.

00:56HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And then Planning Board Liaison Matt Floor. Sure.

01:01HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And then we have some guests. I'll let you guys introduce yourselves when… when you're up, and we have some other guests in the house as well. Hello?

01:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Alright, so we'll start with the, agenda review.

01:18HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So we'll do approval of minutes from, July. Public participation matters from the board. We have, Proposition 123 update state bill overview with the guests.

01:31HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And then, I would like to add two items.

01:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: under matters from the board, one of them would be a decision item of combining the November and December meeting into one, and I'd propose that… well, yeah, so that's another item. And then, hi.

01:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Chip Hennessy is here. Welcome to the presence. And then also a recap of the August, affordable.

02:02HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: projects.

02:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: bike tour, and that would just be a feedback theater, so I'm gonna add those two things.

02:09HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Matters from the staff.

02:12HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Any final thoughts and suggestions? And then we will adjourn by 9 o'clock.

02:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Alright, so approval of minutes from…

02:25HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: July's meetings… meeting, excuse me. Was there any comments or corrections to be made?

02:33HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay, I'll make a motion to approve them.

02:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: What do you want to second that? I'll second. Great. All in favor?

02:43Lauren Schevets: Aye.

02:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Nobody opposed? So then the motion is approved.

02:49HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Tiffany, is there anybody, interested in public participation tonight?

02:55HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: We do have a few members of the public, I'm learning.

03:01HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Great, so if anybody who is online would like to, speak during this public participation, please raise your hand so Tiffany can

03:12HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: If you access…

03:19HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I don't see any hands currently raised. Okay.

03:22HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: New bird.

03:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: In-person community members are also welcome to speak.

03:32HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Alright, so…

03:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Then, we'll just launch right in. Matters from the board. So, Proposition 123, update state bill overview. Carl, you want to kick it off? Thank you, Chair. Good evening, board members. Carl Geiler with Planning and Development Services.

03:49HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I'm joined by Eliza Blood and Lisa Hood. We're all the team that's in PNDS that does the code updates to our Title IX land use regulations, so we're here tonight basically to give an update to the board on some

04:05HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: state bills that are, I have to do a sharing request before I pull up the…

04:11HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: There's been some state bills that relate to housing that we want to give you an update on, so…

04:19HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Let's put this up.

04:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay.

04:32HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, the purpose of tonight is basically to introduce some code changes that'll be coming through, including one tonight.

04:39HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Where, if HAB is inclined, can actually make a recommendation to City Council on Proposition 123. But, we're going to also talk about two other pieces of state legislation.

04:52HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: That'll be of interest. We've been pretty busy the last few years with some state bills that have passed on a number of issues. A lot of them are really housing issues.

05:02HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So you'll see, I won't go into all the detail, but there's the residential growth management bill, which basically made it, the bill states that you can't have a, you know, growth management, limitation on permits.

05:14HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: on residential, so we had to get rid of our RGMS system. Loosening rules on ADUs, we've had a number of ordinances over the past

05:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: few years, as well as loosening up rules on occupancy, how many people can live within dwelling units, a number of other, like, non-housing ones, wildland-urban interface, minimum parking requirements, natural medicine, and

05:37HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: small cell have been some of the recent updates that we've done over the last few years. So the three at the bottom are the ones that we're going to focus on tonight.

05:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: First is the State Affordable Housing Fund, which was actually a voter initiative. Those were all Title IX-related, though? Those were all Title IX-related, yeah.

05:57HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Which is Proposition 123, which you'll hear about tonight.

06:01HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: There's also housing and transit-oriented communities, or what we call the TOC bill, that relates to basically increasing density along transit corridors, and then there's the Housing Opportunities Made Easier Act, which passed actually this year, so we're still trying to wrap our brains around it, but it relates to

06:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Institutional-type sites where you can add housing, and it loosens up the rules for the housing on those sites.

06:27HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I think with a lot of the state bills that have passed in recent years, it's really been about loosening up technical requirements, like how many ADUs you can have on a property, or what… how many zones, or how many people can live in a unit.

06:42HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: These latest bills really kind of aim more at procedures and process. They're all about loosening up those procedures to make them go faster so that it's not a barrier to housing.

06:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So there are some icons that we have on the screen that relate to, allowing more residential through administrative review with no call-up or public hearing requirements, again, to kind of streamline the process.

07:07HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: replacing subjective standards with objective standards and getting quicker review timelines. So you'll see these icons on the different slides as they come up in the different bills in order to get more housing.

07:21HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So I'm going to pass it over to Lisa, who's going to talk about Proposition 1, 2, 3. Yeah.

07:26HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Hi everybody, so this is the one that's a bit further along than, the other two that are more of an introduction, but, so if you are inclined, we've had some changes, like, related to ADUs that we've brought to HAB before, and HAB has made a recommendation, and we pass it on to City Council. So this one is scheduled to go to City Council in October and November. So this is, as Carl said.

07:50HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Related to Proposition 123, which was passed by voters in 2022, it established a state affordable housing fund.

07:58HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And the, entities that are eligible for this funding are not just local governments, but nonprofits, community land trusts, and also developers.

08:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: There are a couple eligibility requirements to get this funding. The project has to be located in a jurisdiction that's made a affordable housing commitment, so that's a specific number of units that we've committed to, creating in the community, so increasing by 3% every year. So there's that commitment, and then, that's… that's been the only requirement for the last 3 years.

08:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But starting at the end of this year, or starting with next year, the next 3-year grant cycle, we… in order to be an eligible jurisdiction, we have to have a 90-day fast-track review process. So this is an expedited review process for affordable housing projects, where a decision is reached within 90 days of a complete outage.

08:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And so that's not just for the City of Boulder to get this funding, it's also for any project within the City of Boulder to get this funding. We have to have this fast-track review process.

09:11HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And then every 3 years, we have to also demonstrate that we've met our affordable housing, unit count that we committed to.

09:19HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, the code change, the ordinance, it was attached to your packet, but that we're…

09:26HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: bringing to Council in the next couple of months is related primarily just to the fast track review. So the requirements for what the state calls the affordable housing projects that need to get that fast track review are housing projects where at least half of units are affordable, and it's kind of a more general definition, so it means that folks living there are not spending more than 30% of their

09:51HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Monthly income. And then there's different area median incomes for rental and for sale, 60% and 120%.

09:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: We looked back over the last, 5 years of projects that have been approved, not necessarily constructed in the last 5 years, but, those… we… if we looked at that threshold, it would be about 5 projects that have gone through the approval process that would meet

10:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: That definition, so it's not, like, a ton of projects. If we use those numbers from the past, we're expecting to see about one or two of these projects per year that would go through the fast track review.

10:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Can I ask? The state law provides for a grace period for these requirements, and that's why… like, there's, like, a deadline coming up.

10:40HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, so… Now you have to meet the requirements? So they did a first 3-year cycle where, communities didn't have to have that 90-day, but for the next 3-year cycle, we would have to have that in place.

10:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Thanks for that clarification.

10:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, you might be wondering, since it's a 90-day review, what… how does that compare to what our actual reviews are? It varies a lot. So, there's a number of applications that would be, subject for… to the Fast Track review, and it goes from landmark alteration certificates taking only 9 days, variances, minor modifications.

11:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Don't take too long, but once you get into projects that, kind of more on the land use side, like use reviews, site reviews, and technical documents, which are the engineering reviews, you can see that our typical timelines in the last few years have been upwards of.

11:32HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: 200 days. So, we have a lot of time that we need to cut off the process.

11:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And so we've been spending the last year or so, looking at the opportunities to save time, and so that is what informed the ordinance that we're bringing to Council and have brought our… that was in your packet.

11:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The proposed changes that we have for these affordable housing projects relate to Planning Board. So, the first major change would be, removing planning board call-up, where Planning Board can call up an administrative decision and create a public hearing, and then they make the decision there.

12:11HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: As well as removing a automatic… or some applications have an automatic planning board hearing, so site review applications that have a height modification where they're requesting a higher, building, those automatically go to a hearing.

12:26HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And, we dug into the data and looked at when projects are called up, or when they have a call-up, or when they have an automatic planning board hearing, you can see that the timeline is significantly longer than an administrative approval, so that's why we saw that that was the biggest.

12:40HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Opportunity for time savings to make it feasible to meet that 90-day timeline.

12:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But it's not just planning board changes that we need to make, it's also administrative changes we, are working on tracking and how we're going to deal with how we… when we call an application complete, how can we extend the 90 days, because the state does allow for that.

13:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: All of those administrative details we're also working on over the next couple of months to make that 90-day deadline realistic.

13:12HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The reason why we think this will work, the changes to the planning board, is that we made some process simplification changes more generally, two years ago related to our use review applications. I won't go through each step, but this is the flowchart, but essentially we got rid of the call-ups and automatic planning board.

13:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: hearings, and,

13:33HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: this would be the same change to process that we'd be making for the affordable housing, and we saw some really great reductions in approval times, so just in the first year.

13:43HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Of making those changes, we reduced the approval times by 64% overall, and 85% in the, like, city's court of how long it takes the city to review something. So, we've seen it work in other circumstances, and we're hoping to apply that success to these affordable housing projects, to support and incentivize affordable housing in Boulder.

14:06HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And meet that commitment.

14:09HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And that's that for Prop 123. I can answer more questions as we get through everything else.

14:14HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Thanks, Lisa. And as I noted, if HAB wanted to make a recommendation on that ordinance, we can convey that to Council when we bring up the ordinance.

14:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, I'm going to talk about the Housing and Transit-Oriented Communities Bill, or the TOC bill.

14:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I'll preface this that this one is quite complicated, and we've been grappling with this for several years.

14:37HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, I'm gonna kind of walk you through the requirements and when… when you might expect to see, like, an ordinance on this. So, TOC bill in a nutshell, it was adopted in 20…

14:49HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: 24 applies to municipalities that have over 4,000 residents, or have more than… or… and have more than 75 acres of what are called transit areas.

15:00HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The purpose of the bill is to increase the number of housing units to address the housing crisis that we have.

15:07HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: nationwide, really, and acutely here in Boulder, and along transit corridors to optimize transit use. So that kind of rudimentary map on there is something that came from the early sessions of the TOC bill, where it maps out bus routes that

15:25HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: the state would note our eligible routes. As you can see that there's quite a few in Boulder, and if you compare this map to other parts of the metro area, you'll notice that Boulder and Denver are

15:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Pretty acutely, like, impacted, whereas a lot of the suburbs aren't, because they don't have bus frequency that reaches the criteria.

15:48HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: for this. So because we have so many bus routes that have, certain frequency, and it's based on the RTD optimization plan, so it doesn't necessarily reflect reality, but a lot of our bus routes qualify. It's also a snapshot from, like, 2019, too.

16:06HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, I'm just gonna walk you through this in a step-by-step, just to kind of help you understand. So, the first thing is to determine the transit area. So that's basically the area that's within the blue lines.

16:18HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: In Boulder, so it's anywhere within a quarter mile of a qualifying bus route. So then you calculate what is the acreage within that blue area. That's the transit area.

16:29HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And then you multiply that transit area by an average of 40 dwelling units per acre, which is quite high for Boulder. And it basically gives you a number, and that number is called the Housing Opportunity Goal.

16:44HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So it's basically this aspirational number of housing units that basically the zoning that exists in Boulder would need to reach

16:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Through the zoning that we have.

16:56HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And that number's quite high, which I'll get to.

16:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And then what you have to do is you have to designate transit centers, which are, like, basically nodes within the transit area, which are basically qualifying zones that are at least 15 dwelling units per acre. So it's already requiring a pretty high

17:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: density for Boller to even qualify, or to even count the number of units. Like, any zones that are less than 15 billion units per acre, you can't include in the calculation.

17:27HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So that's what we've been really working on over the last few years. Can you repeat the last three sentences? So, transit centers are areas within the transit area where they have to meet some minimum qualifications, and it… Right now. Yeah, well…

17:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Ultimately, goodbye 2027. I see.

17:48HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So it… you can't be below 15 dwelling units per acre, so the issue with that is that it… it basically rules out most of the lower density areas, and even medium density areas of the city. So we can only really include, like, zoning districts that allow more than that 15 dwelling units per acre. And once they qualify for that.

18:08HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: You can add those numbers to meet that housing opportunity goal.

18:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So I'll kind of keep adding information on as we go along.

18:18HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So basically, once you figure out the zones that qualify, you calculate the number. The next step is to show compliance to the state, and if we don't comply, we would have to rezone, basically, based on the state bill language.

18:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Bring an ordinance through that, you know, basically would change the zoning to allow

18:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: More housing units to qualify.

18:42HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The, the transit centers come out of the formula, or there's, they're, they're,

18:49HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Decided on by committee or something.

18:52HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I think staff looks at, like, what are the zones that can qualify, and we may have to map them, or it might be just existing zones. We don't necessarily have to map them.

19:03HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But in this case.

19:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: You can see the transit area, again, is that larger area within the blue line, so that's purely just to calculate the housing opportunity goal, or what we've been calling the HAG.

19:15HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Transit centers are those areas within the transit area that are shown in color. So those are zones that we've identified now that are more than 15 dwelling units per acre.

19:28HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The one thing that the bill says is that when you count the number of units that are possible in that zoning district.

19:36HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: You can also count beyond the blue line for an additional

19:41HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Quarter mile, so it gives some flexibility to add units.

19:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It also stipulates how you calculate the number of units, like, it specifies a minimum unit size, because that could be easily gained, so it uses the American Housing Survey as a benchmark.

19:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: What gets even more complicated is that it says that in order to count the units, not only do you have to be at least 15 dwelling units per acre, they have to be allowed by right.

20:11HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: They can't be through discretionary review unless they're over 5 acres in size.

20:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So this is, like, the data crunch that we're in the middle of right now, where we're allowed to count all the units on properties that are over 5 acres, but anything under 5 acres, we can only count the ones that are by right.

20:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, so, if you multiply all acreage within that blue perimeter by 40, that's a really…

20:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: large number of units. Exactly. So…

20:41HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Our housing opportunity goal is $123,000. So… Is there new units, or total? It's potential. It's potential, and again, it's… Yeah, it doesn't specify that you have to build them, it's just aspirational, and you have to aim for it, and your zoning can't stand in the way of that hypothetical possibility. There's a lot of…

21:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Other market conditions and things on properties that are gonna, you know, probably cut those numbers down, but…

21:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: when you plug those numbers in, they're… the form… formula that they have at this state is very detailed. Like, you gotta put in what are… what's the open space requirement for that zone? What are the setbacks? What are the height requirements? What are the thresholds for discretionary review? And that's all… the number keeps…

21:28HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: fluctuating as we, like, put all the data in. So…

21:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I haven't done the math in my head yet, but this doesn't seem like the number you get by multiplying 40 times the number of acres inside the blue line.

21:44HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I think our calculation is it is. Okay, alright. It does exempt out properties, like, you know.

21:52HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Flood-compromise properties, like high hazard zones or cemeteries, public land, like the university, gets pulled out.

22:00HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, there's a… there's a bunch of exempt parcels in that list that feed to this number. So, is the idea that zoning would be…

22:09HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: increase to allow for density to meet that number? Yeah, if you don't… if you don't meet that number, like, the expectation of the bill is to… Zoning in that blue perimeter would not allow you to get… Yeah, our current calculations are we're not meeting it. And… Yeah, it could be evident.

22:27HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: There's so many knobs to turn on this to figure out how we're meeting it or not.

22:32HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The number keeps going up and down, depending on… with all these factors that we put into it. We're… I would say our latest snapshot is we're fairly close.

22:41HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But we are probably gonna have to make some zoning changes to get there.

22:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And we've been working with the Department of Local Affairs, which is the part of the state that works with local governments.

22:52HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: they've been great about doing courtesy reviews, and they've actually… we've actually done a preliminary report, and they generated, like, a 10-page report back to us, kind of highlighting areas of concern where we may not be meeting it, like, very detail-oriented. So we've been working on addressing a lot of those points, and we plan on

23:11HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Meeting with them in the next few weeks.

23:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But just to talk a little bit about this report, we have to do a final report to the state by the end of this year. So we're basically… we don't have to comply

23:26HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: by the end of this year, we just have to report on our level of compliance. So, at the moment, it's looking like we wouldn't meet it. Let's say we hypothetically did find a way to meet it, if we worked on the numbers and

23:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: worked out all the kinks and we met it, we wouldn't have to do anything else. We would be considered, we'd submit it to DOLA, and if they agreed, we would become a certified transit-oriented community. Odds are, that's not going to be the case, so we will have to look at some changes. You're saying if you did the numbers.

23:56HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And it came out to $42,000 instead of $123,000.

24:01HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And then you're like, oh, well, I guess that's not the right number anyways, but…

24:05HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: You're just saying if the number of units inside the blue line

24:11HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It exists in the world today.

24:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Met the number you come up with for the hog, then you're done.

24:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Only in the transit centers.

24:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So it can't be all of the units. Like, again, anything that's less than 15 dwelling units per acre, like, gets cut out. What does it mean to be a certified TOC? It just means that you meet the bill, and you're done.

24:33HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It's only, like, it doesn't require, like, repeated compliance. It's just… it's… once you, like, meet it, you're done.

24:41HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: As long as you don't change your zoning back.

24:44HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And it's not just existing units, it's the potential of. It's just potential.

24:49HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But it's a high potential, obviously, like, just the one thing I didn't note is that, you know, 123,000, like, our current total count of units in the city is, like, 48,000, so that puts it in perspective.

25:01HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: We have made a lot of…

25:03HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: progress with some of the ordinances we've brought through, like the zoning for affordable housing and the family-friendly vibrant neighborhoods, actually brought us much closer to this number, so it's good that we did that. How well-equipped is the state to actually implement this on all the different municipalities and

25:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: They've greatly increased their staffing. I can't speak to, like, how effective they would be at enforcing this, but…

25:31HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I'm just wondering if, like, the practical implication of this legislation is that a developer wants to put in a big con or apartment building in Boulder.

25:40HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: City says, no, it's too dense, we don't want that. I say, okay, I'll file a lawsuit, you're in violation of state statute. I think that's what we'd be looking at. Oh, good. Yeah.

25:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So I just wanted to… what's that? Lauren. Oh.

25:56Lauren Schevets: I just… I just have a quick question.

25:59Lauren Schevets: Are you anticipating that there will be any revisions to this, with the new administration coming in?

26:08Lauren Schevets: Because this is obviously a very extreme scenario for Boulder.

26:14HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Hard to say, we're not anticipating it. It sounds like it's pretty well cooked.

26:19HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Are you talking about, like, city council in Boulder, or the.

26:22Lauren Schevets: Oh, sorry, with the new governor.

26:26HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, and we're not anticipating change.

26:28Lauren Schevets: Okay, interesting. Thank you.

26:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Our interpretation of the politics.

26:32HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I mean, it's a law on the books, so in order for it to change.

26:37HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: you would need a majority of legislators and the governor to sign off on it, so…

26:42HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I think this is the law of the land until there's a big deal.

26:46Lauren Schevets: Sure, but a lot of this was initiated by the Polis administration.

26:51Lauren Schevets: Right.

26:52HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, that's right.

26:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So lastly on this slide, there are other pieces of the TOC that go beyond just zoning. In the report that we submit to the state by the end of the year, we do have to list affordability strategies

27:09HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: that the city is doing or plans to do. It basically says you have to have at least two standard and one long-term. So, on the sidebar, you'll see that there's a number of things that… we're doing a bunch of things, obviously, a lot more than a lot of communities, so I think we would easily qualify on these affordability strategies, like our inclusionary housing ordinance, our density bonus.

27:31HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: program. There's a whole number of things that we already do.

27:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I mean, I looked at the map you had, and like.

27:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: the areas… there's not really vacant land in those areas to be developed. I think of, like, the intent of this legislation. You drive around Metro Denver, and they have these train stations.

27:49HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: In the middle of nowhere. And I feel like that's where the impact would be. The municipality can't preclude construction there. In theory, I guess someone could want to put in a big apartment building, but if they have to buy up a bunch of single-family homes to do that, I mean, that's probably not an economic reality that would ever come to fruition. Yeah.

28:08HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Well, part of the reason that that doesn't happen is because the zoning prohibits building something other than single-family homes. So when you upzone.

28:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: it does create potential for developers that want to, say, buy a warehouse that otherwise, you know… But you still have to overcome… the zoning allows it, you still have to overcome the fact that you've got a bunch of single-family homes that are each worth $1.5 million. Are they gonna be… is the economic reality there for the developer to put it in? There's a lot of one-acre lots on the north side of that map.

28:40HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: No, I think they're inside the blue, going up to 204. I mean, have we seen that in Boulder, where developers

28:52HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: would want to buy single-family home lots and turn it into higher density housing, if they could. There's some examples, obviously, but yeah, obviously a single-family house does go for a lot.

29:05HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It's hard to overcome that. Right.

29:07HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Can you remind me what if HAG met means? That's… that's if the zoning… Yeah, if we exceed that… if our calculations exceed that $123,000, and we submit a report to the state, and they agree with the calculations, they… they would just deem us a certified TOC. So…

29:27HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I can imagine it means two things, that the number of housing units meets or exceeds the HAG goal, or the zoning allows for

29:37HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: the potential to meet that goal, which one is it? It's the latter. It doesn't… they said that we don't have to put transit centers. Like, if our current zoning allows enough buy-right and one's over 5 acres that get to that total, we're good.

29:57HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I guess this would allow… it would require, perhaps, the City of Boulder to change its zoning regs to

30:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: where there's commercial real estate to allow for the development of residential? Is that… Well, we… a lot of our commercial zones, we already allow residential.

30:12HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: A good example, though, if I may, would be, like, ground floor retail. Like, that's something that's in the way of the Hawk, is requiring ground floor retail

30:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: reduces the amount of housing units that can be built on certain size properties, and correct me if I'm wrong. No, totally right, and it's on the next slide. So really quick,

30:33HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: We have to also talk about two displacement mitigation strategies, so we're working on that with Housing and Human Services.

30:40HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: We also have to, you know, demonstrate to the state that there's been community engagement on the housing changes we've been doing, and just these bills, which we've had a thing on our website and been talking about it for a while now since this has been in play.

30:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, this slide basically just talks about what are we looking at as far as zoning changes, and it kind of changes by the day based on all the knobs being turned on the data, but some of the lowest hanging fruit are we have a call-up process now for form-based code reviews.

31:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Form-based code reviews, like, a best practice is really to, like, have black and white standards

31:18HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: have them reviewed, have a lot of details, but not have public hearings on them. Like, a lot of other communities that do form-based codes, don't have a public hearing process or have involvement by a planning board.

31:31HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, we had originally brought the form-based code forward without that call-up provision, because it's not a discretionary review, but at the time we did that 10 years ago, the Council and Planning Board at the time didn't want to, let that part be taken out.

31:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But that would be something, if we removed it, could add a good number of units to the total, because it gets that subjectivity out of it.

31:55HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: like you said, the reducing or removing the ground floor restrictions on residential and business zones could be removed, and that could add to the total yield. If we still don't get there, we're gonna have to start looking at some other zoning changes, like

32:11HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Changing the threshold for site review is going to be the next thing, where we might have to bump it up to 5 acres.

32:18HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: have everything be by right under 5 acres in certain zones, so we can count those units. So that's… those are all the details that we're currently looking at. Gotta get the report in by the end of the year. We still have all of next year, to make these updates.

32:33HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: According to the bill. What was the policy rationale behind the ground floor requirements and new residential developments? That came into play about, I think, 8 years ago. There was concerns about… there was a number of properties in

32:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Business zones, like, along, like, Pearl Street East.

32:52HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: in over, like, the Boulder Valley Regional Center, where a lot of the commercial is, and a lot of the neighborhood centers where some of the commercial was being scraped and just built back as totally residential, so there were concerns that we were going to eradicate some of the neighborhood center retail uses.

33:11HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So they… It's also part of the narrative of 15-minute neighborhoods. We have commercial and residential mixed in together, so I think… I think maybe it was overreach on that, perhaps. Yeah, so that's something that… It just seems like when you drive around, there's a lot of empty…

33:27HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: like, ground floor commercial space, a lot of these new developments, so… Yeah. To the extent that was, like, the intention, I don't know if the economic interest was there.

33:39HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Sorry to rehash this, this is kind of hurting my brain a little, but the blue area that you, showed.

33:48HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: You took the number of acres.

33:50HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Multiplied by 40.

33:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Roughly speaking, subtracted out some parcels, like the CU stuff, but you ended up with an acreage, you multiplied that by 40.

34:01HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: We got 123,000.

34:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, if you just did a blanket 40 units per acre, Zoning policy, you'd be done.

34:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I… I,

34:19HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I can't remember what the highest density levels of zoning are in Boulder, but… but 40 acres looks pretty intense. Like, I'm… I'm trying to think… what's, like, Boller Junction? Is that… is that, more like 80 to…

34:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: 200 or something? Yeah, I would say it's in that ballpark, and that's probably one of the more dense areas of the cities. Like, I know that, like, Diagonal Plaza is a good example of, like, something that I think it was, like, 53…

34:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: dwelling units per acre up there, but honestly, like, just trying to think… A lot of, like, the high density you see in Boulder is, like, probably around, like, 24 dwelling units per acre, you know, for perspective.

34:56HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay, so we're gonna switch gears to the third piece of state legislation, so Eliza's gonna walk through the HOME Act.

35:07HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Good evening, everybody. I'm here to speak with you about the Housing Opportunities Made Easier Act. The HOME Act was passed in March of 2026. This act was formerly known as the Yigby Act, that some of you may be familiar with.

35:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And the purpose of the Home Act is to increase affordable housing on underutilized land by increasing zoning flexibility and streamlining approvals for qualifying developments.

35:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: In this case, the term underutilized land is referring to land that has not historically been used for residential purposes in the past.

35:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And subject jurisdictions must begin to fulfill the expectations of this bill by December 31st, 2027, with the goal of reaching full compliance with the bill by June 30th, 2028.

35:57HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: These deadlines provide time to plan and implement the necessary code amendments needed to be in compliance with this Act.

36:06HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So the Home Act defines land that is subject to these standards as qualifying properties. Qualifying properties are no larger than 5 acres, and they're owned by one of the following entities listed on the screen here, including schools and school districts, state colleges and universities, boards of cooperative services.

36:26HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Housing authorities, local or regional transportation authorities.

36:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Or housing nonprofits, and nonprofits with housing affiliation.

36:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: In addition to the qualifying property criteria, the Home Act identifies several exemptions that determine where these development provisions do not apply.

36:44HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: One example of an exemption is for properties that have large-scale industrial operations present. In Boulder, this could include properties located in the industrial manufacturing and general industrial zoning districts of the city.

37:00HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And the rest of these exemptions can be found in Attachment B of your packets.

37:06HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The bill's eligibility requirements and exemptions define where housing stock can be built, limiting the bill's application to only some parts of the city.

37:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Another important aspect of this bill is that it advocates for quicker development timelines by subjecting qualifying housing projects to administrative approval or administrative review.

37:28HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Administrative review requires staff to make decisions based solely on objective criteria, rather than undergoing site review processes, which require a planning board or city council call up for public hearing.

37:43HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: By subjecting projects to administrative review, these projects become less expensive and do not take as long to reach final approval.

37:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The Home Act establishes standards for building height maximums, density, and site design standards for future housing projects on qualifying properties.

38:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: In terms of regulating building height, local governments cannot deny a housing project based on building height if the development does not exceed 3 stories, 38 feet in height.

38:15HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: or the height of similar neighboring residential developments, whichever allows the greatest building height in said project. Additionally, density or the number of dwelling units in a development can't be restricted in these new housing projects.

38:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And lastly, the site design standards, known as Foreman Bulk Standards in Boulder, should match that of other neighboring multi-unit developments in the jurisdiction.

38:41HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The key takeaway from this information is that the Home Act requires qualifying developments to be reviewed under standards that are comparable to other neighboring multi-unit developments located in the jurisdiction.

38:57HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Qualifying properties are also meant to support childcare and recreational, social, or educational services.

39:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: If zoning allows or conditionally allows on-site childcare and recreational, social, or educational service uses, those same uses must be allowed as part of a residential development on a qualifying property.

39:19HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: We are interpreting this idea of recreational, social, or educational services to include the following use types that currently exist in Title IX. These are listed on the slide here. They range from things like community services to art studios or workshops to community gardens.

39:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And while the bill expands opportunities for community-serving uses on qualifying properties, further analysis is needed to determine which existing use classifications and permissions align with the bill's intent.

39:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Lastly, I'll briefly walk through where the HOME Act may apply in Boulder, and I'll cover some of the revisions to Title IX that we anticipate making.

40:03HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So the map shown on this slide here is where we expect some of the qualifying properties to exist in Boulder. As you can see, the Home Act is only relevant for certain areas of the city.

40:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And I'll add that this map is still under development. We're continuing to do further analyses to make this as true of a picture as we can. At the bottom right-hand corner of this slide, you'll see some of the Title IX updates we foresee making.

40:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: To be in compliance with the Home Act. These updates include revisions to procedures, use permissions, height and intensity standards, and key definitions.

40:44HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Because the bill has a longer implementation timeline, these code revisions do not need to be finalized at this moment, which allows us more time to continue analyses and continue to refine the work we've been doing.

41:00HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And I'll now turn it back to Carl to talk to you about the Planning Board and City Council feedback we received for these three bills. Thank you.

41:09HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Thanks, Eliza.

41:11HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So I'll just move into the conclusion.

41:15HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Planning board saw this.

41:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: in August.

41:18HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: They looked at all the three pieces of state legislation. With Proposition 123, they've heard it, and also reviewed the ordinance. They've recommended unanimous.

41:29HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: approval to City Council on that Prop 123 ordinance. The board did express some concern about, pulling away some of their discretion and, had some concerns about transparency without having,

41:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: public hearings on projects, but they, you know, there is still an appeal process, so there's still a public notice element to them, so they recognize that. So that led to their recommendation of approval.

41:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The TOC bill, they generally supported the TOC bill. They wanted us to work with the state as much as we can to, like, get to compliance, but if we did need to make some zoning updates, they did support, pulling out the follow-up process from form-based code and tightening up some of the design standards.

42:18HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: In the form-based code.

42:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Similarly, with the Home Act, they recognize their limited discretion over how specific the Home Act is, and, you know, advised us to move forward with an ordinance.

42:31HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Council has provided feedback on this as well earlier this month. They supported the concept of Prop 123. They did explore or ask us questions about whether the eligibility could be expanded by lowering the percentage.

42:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: That's something we could look at in the future, but they generally support it with us moving forward with the 50%.

42:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: level of affordability in the current definition to meet Propa 2-3, just to get it started, since we have to generally be in compliance by the beginning of next year.

43:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: With the TOC, they supported moving forward, they were supportive of removing the call-up

43:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: provision from form-based code. They also showed support for removing that residential ground floor restriction in the business zones.

43:19HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: General support came from them on the HOME Act as well. They did express some concerns about how those changes might affect areas of the city, like the Hill, and other areas of the city. So that's something that we'll keep looking at.

43:33HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So as far as next steps, we're going to be bringing the Proposition 123 code change to Council on first rating on October 15th. That'll be on consent. The public hearing is scheduled for November 19th.

43:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The TOC changes, we're still working on the data, as I noted. We were working on the report and need to submit that by the end of the year. And like I said, we'll have all of next year to work on any kind of ordinance to bring the city into compliance with that.

44:03HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: As Eliza noted, the HOME Act gives us some time. It basically puts a hard stop by June 2028, but they want you to be making progress by the beginning of 20… the beginning of 2028, so that's kind of where we are on the three, and these are the questions that we have for you.

44:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Tonight, if you had any questions, feedback.

44:27HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And like I said, HAB, if it's so inclined, can provide a recommendation on the Prop 123 ordinance.

44:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I have a question. Can you talk about when this legislation was under review at the State Capitol? I know Boller lobbies. What position did Boulder take with respect to these three bills?

44:50HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I don't know that there was any specific feedback, any position on the HOME Act, to my…

44:57HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: my recollection. There was general support of the concept of the TOC bill, I think, when it went to the Intergovernmental Affairs Committee. I don't think they took a position on Prop 123 because it was a voter initiative.

45:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I mean, it seems like this TOC bill is gonna have a more profound impact on Boulder than probably other communities in the state.

45:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I'm sure that was probably factored into the analysis of the legislature.

45:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It's the status of discussions about,

45:39HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I was interested that the Council was interested in expanding the eligibility for the Fast Track review, but, like, is there a broader discussion that's happening about

45:49HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: applying it beyond the affordability projects. Just changing the review processes for everyone.

45:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, I think, I mean, as… especially internally, we've just been focused on these process improvements, and so it's bringing up… it's kind of forcing the issue of thinking of how could we streamline these reviews

46:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And especially on the administrative side, like, what is taking so much time? So it's kind of forcing us to put a magnifying glass on, like, our review process.

46:19HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So I wouldn't be surprised if it goes well, but, we apply some of those process changes to other types of reviews. Would that be something that, like, you all would propose to the Council, or is there, like, a, you know, is the Council driving? Is there interest in the Council for that as well?

46:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, there's been a number of, projects that we've done over the last couple years, especially, that have been process improvement, or streamlining, or simplification. We had, an ordinance in 2024 that Council directed us to make process simplification changes.

46:55HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So they've definitely… almost everything that we bring, it's…

46:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It has something to do with process simplification, so… I can't remember if you gave any examples of what those simplifications look like. So, the, example that I gave of cutting out call-ups and public hearings for use reviews, that was one of them.

47:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And so that was… we had a previous approval time of, like, 200 days, and it's down to… I forget, it's on the slide, 30 or 40 days. Another example I might add is, with ADUs, there used to be a separate administrative review process that was required before permit, and we got rid of that. So now it's just you submit a permit. If you meet the requirements, you get approval.

47:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I had a question about the Prop 123 changes.

47:44HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I…

47:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: appreciate that you're trying to, eliminate the call-up to planning board, but it seems like… and this is me just using my imagination, it's not like a real… it's like a… like a… maybe it's not a legitimate concern, but,

48:02HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I can imagine if city staff

48:05HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Decided that the easiest way to give someone a 90-day answer is to deny the application.

48:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Would be kind of a… a…

48:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: brutal response to the applicant, and I just wonder if the applicant would have the ability or the right to request a call-up for Planning Board? It seems like there's, like, eliminating that

48:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: eliminate some protection for the developer. So we would preserve an appeal process, so if they were denied or had some condition or something that they wanted to appeal, they could appeal it, and then it would go to the planning board for approval. I see, so yeah. And same with neighbors, so neighbors could appeal a project, and then it would kick up into a public

48:49HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: what's the criteria for the appeal? Like, what does it take to succeed in an appeal? You have to have two interested people.

48:58HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: To appeal. Oh, but no, to actually… but to successfully appeal, like, what is that? Oh, well, that's just to apply for an appeal. Then it would just go to Planning Board, and then we use the same criteria that we would take anything other type of application. They just make the decision there. Who's making that publicly known? Is it a, de novo standard.

49:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And look at it fresh. Two neighbors want to send it to… Yeah, so, I mean, like, how does the appeal… how does the exception not swallow the roof?

49:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: What is that? Oh, I mean, like, the appeal… like, does the appeal process… I mean, does it… does exempting the appeal process from the 90-day window, like.

49:44HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: create the ability to, like, to just do an end run around the purpose of this fast track review, if the appeal could extend

49:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: For a long time. Yeah, so the history has been that appeals are not very common. It's really uncommon for things to be appealed. Boller actually has a lot of administrative approvals already, but it's something that we'll have to keep our eye on and see how it's going. And, you know, we're… we talked with Planning Board a lot about, like, being nimble and, iterating these changes over time and seeing

50:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: how it goes. My brain got a little twisted around based on something you said, but, it seems like the…

50:26HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: the appeal…

50:28HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: if you get denied, if your application gets denied, you're the developer, you're gonna appeal it, and then it goes to Planning Board. That seems like a nice safeguard. But… but you were saying, I think… I think you were, like, doing the other thing, like, if… if it gets approved, and neighbors don't like it, they're gonna appeal.

50:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And is that… is it the same? Yeah, it does… it's actually cut… sorry. If there's a call-up item, it takes four planning board members in order to send it to a CAG review. It only takes two community members. It's two… well, it's two planning board members and two community members. Like, either one is two.

51:07HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, okay, the call-up? I thought we had to have a majority for that one. I've definitely heard that from one of my colleagues. Household needs a majority for call-up, but Planning Board, you just need two members. What do I know? I think that's a good question, because, like, the purpose of…

51:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: this legislation is to attack anti-growth practices, right? I mean, that's… that's clear to me from all this. So, you talking about 123?

51:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Right, I mean, all these bills are trying to attack local governments from restraining growth. Restrict their ability to restrict growth, I guess. So, if… if the concern here is that

51:49HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: staff.

51:50HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Is denying applica- or is granting applications. It's a community who doesn't like that.

51:56HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I guess it gets kicked up to appeal, and they…

51:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: There's still… the anti-growth people can still weigh in.

52:03HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And they do.

52:05HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: They really, really do. Well, and it's… I mean, at a high level, it's my… at least my experience, it's not the city staff that's trying to restrict growth, it's community members.

52:19HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But I guess, through this process, there is a somewhat higher burden on community members to restrict growth.

52:27HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Because now they have to go through an appeal process to get a public hearing, as opposed to before, where they could show up as a matter of right. Is that correct?

52:37HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: For these 90-day fast-track properties.

52:43HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, repeat the last sentence. Yeah, so if BHP wants to do a new development, and the development qualifies under this 90-day category.

52:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It's probably more likely than not that it gets approved in an administrative review than in a planning board review.

52:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And then the burden, if someone's a member of the public, and they want to propose the project, they now have a higher burden that they need to find some friends and kick it up for an appeal.

53:11HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Well, and I mean, maybe you could enlighten us when people speak up in opposition to projects in the planning board.

53:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Is it often a kind of a one person who's upset, or is it a coalition? I mean, in…

53:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, I think I can say this without mentioning the…

53:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: actual processes, because some of them are being called up again. In the past month, like, there were two meetings that had around 70 people coming to speak against them.

53:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, if those people…

53:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: didn't know that there was already going to be a discretionary review through Planning Board, yes, I would imagine that they would have done everything within their power to make one.

53:56HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, there were… That's a lot… I mean, they all get their 3 minutes.

54:01HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, I mean, that… I guess in those situations, nothing about this really changes, other than the procedural mechanism of having to bump it up to an appeal, but I could see situations where there's a project and it's really just the one person who lives across the street who's upset about it.

54:19HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I don't know. Are appeals ever denied?

54:22HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Honestly, we'd… I mean, I haven't seen… They're pretty rare. Yeah, there's been some examples of where they've been denied, but again, it's all their decision is based on the criteria and the code, as they would

54:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: any project. Yeah, so an appeal… I assume an appeal has to… they have to do at least a little lift to say, this is where we think in the code that the project is in violation. I mean, it's not a requirement, like, we encourage it, like, if somebody appeals it, we're like, we might want to point out where you think it doesn't meet the code.

54:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But it's not a… It just seems like… I'm just worried about, like.

54:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Loopholes that just keep everything the same.

55:03HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: You know, like, if, like, the only impractical effect is now you have to have an appeal. Two people, they don't even have to, like, say what's wrong with the project, they just say, okay, okay, and now, and now it goes to the planning board, and there's delays in the project. Sorry, go ahead, go ahead. I was just gonna say, an appeal process is a really typical part of any development review, but cities have different

55:28HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: limits on who can appeal. So there are, like, Longmont has 3 or 4 different circumstances where, like, only the applicant can appeal this type of application, or you need to be someone that came to the hearing

55:40HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: and… or got a legal notice or something, so there are… other cities do limit it more. Boulder, it used to only be one person who could appeal, and they… we bumped it up to two, so we made it slightly harder, but Boulder has a very open appeal

55:58HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: process right now. I mean, in theory, this could make Planning Board operate quick… more quickly if they have less

56:06HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: you know, initial hearings is a matter of right. Well, you have to understand that they're trauma-bonded to the dais, and, you know, freedom on a Tuesday night would confuse and destroy them.

56:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Why not have the appeal process require

56:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: some kind of showing. Like, you need to show that you didn't comply with the process, you need to show that it is inconsistent with

56:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: a regulation, or an ordinance, something, something. Like, rather than just, I don't like it, like, especially if the overall, you know, purpose of

56:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: these laws is pushing away from subjective standards towards objective standards, requiring some kind of showing

56:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Would seem to be… helpful in that regard. Yeah, there's definitely other communities that do that.

56:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: That's something we would consider in the future. I realize that, like, maybe we're not, maybe not right now, but, well, maybe we could right now. I mean, we are here, we're hoping for your recommendation to pass along to City Council, and I will say, like, at Planning Board, we talked about appeals. At City Council, we talked about appeals. You guys are identifying an issue that everybody else has talked about as well.

57:19HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: There is a little kind of, like, wait and see that we've been talking about to see how many projects are we gonna actually have, how is it gonna go? We're gonna have to tweak anyway, so I think that's why we landed, and we just… just changed that appeal process from 1 to 2 just 2 years ago, so…

57:36HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: There wasn't an appetite at Council or Planning Board to change the pre-appeal process now, but the concern has been raised by everyone. Yeah, you made a good point.

57:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: In one of your early slides, you said there were, like, 6 projects that would have even qualified in the last few years, so this isn't, like, a heavy, high-volume

57:57HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Scenario of, you know…

58:02HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: If you do expand it to the 25% threshold, then I assume there's a lot more projects that fit into that category. It would be about double, yeah.

58:15HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But also, if you test… I mean, a couple point is testing, if it's a small number, if you just test it on this program, then maybe that would be a template for a broader

58:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: change to the appeal process. Yeah. Because it's hard, like, it's…

58:28HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: it cuts both ways. If there's a really low number, then, like, there's not really a big adverse impact to experimenting a little bit with something different and something smaller like this.

58:39HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I was gonna say, how does this… how is the state going to monitor compliance in the future if, you know, with the appeals and all the ways around the 90-day thing.

58:51HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Is the state going to look at it in 2 years and say the average is actually 140 days because of all these other, you know, mechanisms? Yeah, that's a really good question. They don't actually have a reporting requirement, like Carl talked about reporting, where we aren't required to say, like, oh, these applications took 140 days.

59:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: anything like that. We are just required to meet the number of affordable housing units that we committed to. So, I think…

59:18HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: in some way, like, if we're taking too long, then not enough affordable housing will be built to meet that commitment, but that's really the only accountability. But I think internally, like, as our staff, we are committed to supporting

59:32HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: the affordable housing and making sure that we're meeting that 90-day, and making the procedural changes that we need to do in order to, you know… I mean, it seems like it outlines a theoretical path to 90 days, but just in practice.

59:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It may actually work out to be more than that, because of all these other

59:51HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: you know, ways it could go. Yeah, and we have worked… we've worked on a couple projects as pilots in the last year, just to see how it would go. And there's some things that you would never think of, like, you know, ditch…

1:00:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: issues that we didn't know were gonna add months to the process that are totally outside of the city control. Or Excel, maybe. Yeah, so there's things like that. So, yeah, well, I… we are committed to monitoring, and again, it's not that many projects, so it's easier for us to monitor how it's going over time.

1:00:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And adjust as needed to try to meet that.

1:00:27HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, and then, you know, generally speaking, the enforcement mechanism for this sort of thing is if you're a private person who's been injured, you think, because the government

1:00:37HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: in its quasi-judicial capacity did something wrong. You file a lawsuit under Rule 106, and you ask a judge to review it.

1:00:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And I think that's… that's how you enforce this. These laws, if Boller is applying a law and you think that violates state law, you take it up with a judge.

1:00:56HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: As opposed to, like, some executive agency cracking down on the city.

1:01:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Something I want to touch on that you were mentioning, though, is, moving from more subjective to objective code. Like, that… that… you nailed it. And I think that making good form-based code is sometimes a bigger challenge than people realize. And it does go back to

1:01:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: in a room like this, people are obviously all very interested in housing and whatnot, and I think that right now there is a…

1:01:28HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: political wind in Council and Planning Board. But the reality is that there are many, many, many, many people in Boulder who don't like things that are being built, and don't want to see what they consider to be ugly buildings, or blocky buildings, or buildings with too much glazing, or too little glazing, and…

1:01:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: You have to have all of this built into it, albeit, you know, exceptions for inclusive rehousing, open space, you know, being able to preserve a spruce tree, things that people do actually care about.

1:01:58HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So making it all…

1:02:01HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: correct me once again if I'm wrong, making it all perfectly objective, tight law is very difficult, and that's why we've been talking a lot about Title IX reform, even here.

1:02:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, I mean, I don't think… I mean, perfectly objective, I think, is not attainable, but, like, right now, the appeal appears to happen is entirely subjective, and so there is…

1:02:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: There are middle ground ways that you can say that you at least have to point out…

1:02:25HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: You know, if you're gonna have an appeal, you have to

1:02:28HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: point out what's wrong, like, basically. Like, show what the flaw, either procedural or substantive, like, what are you claiming was done wrong, rather than just, I don't like it. For what it's worth, I think we should be moving away from a lot of discretionary review as well, and there's a lot of language that does prescribe it, and leaves a lot of room for appeals. I'm just kind of…

1:02:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Fleshing that out, you know?

1:02:50HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But it's also, you know, the subjective nature of these, like, quasi-judicial political boards, like council and planning, are to allow the community to weigh in on things. There's places in the world, like in China, for example.

1:03:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It's all objective, determined by bureaucrats, you don't have to worry about elections, you don't have to worry about public hearings, and things get built very fast. But in America, you know, we… it's a trade-off, which is that

1:03:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: People want to have a say and participate in the process, and that…

1:03:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: slows things down, and it makes it more expensive, but something as Americans we value, which is our ability to

1:03:27HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: be involved with the process, so I think you have to look at it from both angles.

1:03:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Lauren? Lauren, did you have some… something you wanted to say?

1:03:37Lauren Schevets: Oh, I was just thinking about the opportunity to expand the fast-tracking program, and just mention that I would be supportive of that.

1:03:46Lauren Schevets: I do just have a thought or a question. If we reduce the threshold down to 25%,

1:03:55Lauren Schevets: Do we think that that would encourage more developers to build their IH requirements on-site?

1:04:03Lauren Schevets: And how would that impact the…

1:04:06Lauren Schevets: the cash-in-low program, I mean, you probably don't have that all figured out, but just thinking out loud.

1:04:15HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, I think we,

1:04:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Well, we determined that if it was down to 25%, it would still only be, like, 10 projects.

1:04:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: about our… it would be 2 projects per year instead of 1 project per year. We would have seen 10 projects over the last 5 years. So it's… it's not,

1:04:37HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Wouldn't…

1:04:38Lauren Schevets: Yeah, but if… I guess my thought is, if you're cutting…

1:04:42Lauren Schevets: you know, 6 months to a year off of the entitlement and permitting process, that might be worth it to a developer to… to put their units on site, and you might see a change in that. Just… just a thought.

1:04:56HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, no, I think that's a… that's a great thought, and it goes back to, like, we kind of have to see how this is gonna go. Is it going to incentivize? Planning board was asking the same question, like, if we make these changes and we incentivize affordable housing, maybe it won't be one to two projects per year, maybe it'll be

1:05:12HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: 10 or something, but we don't really know what

1:05:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The, process change, like, how much that will influence,

1:05:22HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: the creation of more affordable housing projects, but having the fast track review allows projects to, be eligible for that state affordable housing funding, too, so that they… it all… it all is supportive in multiple ways. Can you remind us which…

1:05:39HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: committee, was it City Council or Planning Board that was asking you about 25% and what the… It was Council. Council, and were they…

1:05:48HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: supportive of it, or they just were asking about it? It… they… initially, it was the mayor that brought it up, and then, they kind of landed on, well, maybe let's just see how this goes with the state minimum. Like Carl said, we're… we're on a deadline, and let's see…

1:06:05HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Am I correct that this proposed ordinance, 8781, does nothing more than bring the City of Boulder into compliance with state law?

1:06:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Well, it allows… it's not… that one's… the Proposition 123 is a little bit different, because it's not,

1:06:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: In order to receive the money. Exactly. It keeps us eligible for the funding for stable. But it does nothing more than that. No.

1:06:33HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Nope.

1:06:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So the question is, really, do we want Boller to be eligible for the money or not?

1:06:39HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, I mean, to me, it's… it's an easy vote in the affirmative, and I'm happy to vote. And it doesn't sound like it changes that. I guess the question is, like, whether we would recommend, given that there is…

1:06:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: apparently some board interests in expanding, whether… I mean, I think…

1:06:58HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: They would need to pass the ordinance as is in order to meet the deadline, not, like, they're not going to change the ordinance, but, like, whether we'd want to signal that we would be supportive of

1:07:08HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: and expanded, like, expanding this beyond, you know, 25% or even just outside of the affordable housing context, they should seriously consider that. That would be my…

1:07:21HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: preference at this point is, like, yes, support this, but also

1:07:25HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: You know, to the extent we would support something more like this in the future.

1:07:31HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Is 25% the number that's in the inclusionary housing?

1:07:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Ordinance? Yeah, okay. What I'm hearing from staff is that they kind of want to…

1:07:40HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Maybe learn from this, if and when this goes into effect, before scaling it up more.

1:07:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Is that right? Yeah, I think we'd have to look at our staffing capacity, too, because, like, this is going to be, you know, a challenge just for our current staffing to expedite, so if we, like, broaden the scope, that's a big consideration. I was… I was not going to ask about this, because I sort of thought I had gotten an answer from a previous question, but,

1:08:07HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: This is a… this is a way that projects kind of skip the line, I suppose, and so staffing, you know, staffing's working on the things that are working. A 50% project comes in, it's like, oh, you have 90 days, and now you're… so it could push off work. Yes.

1:08:25HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: for other… other developers waiting for their application green light.

1:08:31HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But the reason I didn't ask it is because you were like, well, it's only 5 projects in 5 years, so maybe…

1:08:36HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Well, I mean, when we say that, we're talking about a large project with multiple units, but that still translates that it could be a project that has 40 building permits associated with it, and that would all be subject to this timeline. Interesting. I see your point.

1:08:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Well, generally, I support the City of Boulder coming into compliance with the law. No, and I say that because our city passes a lot of laws that are not legal and are unconstitutional, and then our city spends a lot of money fighting in court, not always successfully, over them, and I don't always think that's a good use of

1:09:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: taxpayer money to fight over illegal laws, so if the purpose of this is to maintain eligibility for funds, and that's what we want, I think that's a good thing. It's an efficient way for government to operate.

1:09:32HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I assume… oh, sorry. We've kind of… we've kind of been on 123 the whole time. I wonder if we should just…

1:09:40HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Make a motion to support the changes.

1:09:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Or is the idea, like, we talk about all three bullets first?

1:09:50HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: You can do it however you want, but yeah, if you want to make a motion on Prop 123 beforehand, that's… That's the time sensitive, yeah, yeah. Is… is… it says annotated 8781. Is 8781 the new ordinance that you're proposing?

1:10:06HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So I think… Which is the fifth, I think the motion would be…

1:10:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Housing Advisory Board recommends City Council pass Ordinance 871.

1:10:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Do you want to officially make that motion?

1:10:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Do we want to discuss it before, or do we vote on it right away?

1:10:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I think technically someone's supposed to make a motion, someone's supposed to second, and then we're supposed to debate. You… but I mean, some… you can discuss of a court, too. I mean, it's the discretion of the chair. Yeah, I mean, my…

1:10:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: My suggestion would be to add, or my…

1:10:39HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Proposal would be to add something about, like, that we support

1:10:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: we support looking into expanding the expedited review process in the future. Like, not necessarily, like, we support… we have to implement it, but just, like, encouraging the Council in their inclination to look at expanding it. Like, we support looking into that, whether it can be broadened in the future.

1:11:05Lauren Schevets: I like that, Brendan.

1:11:08HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So now you just have to turn that into a mushroom. Gosh.

1:11:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: keep it short for Tiffany. To come up with some language. She likes that. I know that we, support the ordinance, and also, support

1:11:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Looking into expansion of the expedited review process.

1:11:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: in the future.

1:11:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Second.

1:11:40HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: You have to state the ordinance number.

1:11:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Do we… how much… how specific does that? I can write up. Housing Advisory Board recommends City Council adopt Ordinance 87… or City Adopt Council Pass.

1:11:57HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Ordinance 8781.

1:12:00HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Housing Advisory Board further recommends City Council consider increasing

1:12:08HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: what do we call it? Or expanding the… consider expanding the expedited review process. Expanding expedited review threshold…

1:12:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: In the future.

1:12:19HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Sounds good.

1:12:25HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Did you want to second, then again? I second. I second. I second. Tiffany, did you get that? Do you want to read it back to us?

1:12:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Hab supports Ordinance 8781 also recommends City Council consider expanding the expedited review process in future aviations.

1:12:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Second. Future work.

1:12:50HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Ideations? Oh, iterations?

1:12:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: All in favor?

1:12:58Lauren Schevets: Bye.

1:13:00HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: None opposed? Then the motion passes.

1:13:06HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Carl, can you tell us again the timing of the other two, the TOC and the home?

1:13:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The deadline specified in the TOC bill is December 31st, 2027. Okay. So we have all next year to figure things out and do an ordinance.

1:13:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay.

1:13:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Can you remind me why home doesn't have,

1:13:28HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: church properties. And is there a separate bill for that?

1:13:33HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: There isn't. I'm not sure, like, why the church element was removed. I think it might be, like.

1:13:42HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: there's language in the HOME Act that says that if

1:13:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: There's a property where there's an institution is working with affordable housing agency.

1:13:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: that that would qualify, and I think that might encompass, like, religious institutions.

1:14:01HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: like, BHP could contract with… with a church property, and that would qualify that property.

1:14:08HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So it's not explicitly stated, but I think that's a path. I think some churches act as homeless shelters.

1:14:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Maybe if you're trying to incorporate that? Well, I'm just having a little deja vu here, because I thought there was…

1:14:25HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: A presentation within the last 5 years about how

1:14:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: kind of everything that you said about the HOME Act.

1:14:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But it was, like, for church properties. Yeah, it didn't pass. That was the gigby. So it didn't pass, so they kind of re, you know, worked it, and it became this Home Act.

1:14:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And then, does BVSD have any staff or any dedicated resources to explore how… turning some of their properties into housing?

1:14:55HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Have you met any such people? There's one particular person that we've coordinated with at BDST for many years, who coordinates with planning, but I don't know if that person, you know, is charged with that, or if there's other people, I'm not sure.

1:15:14HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I mean, obviously, like, you know, school district wants to get money, extra money, and it's a path. They have some sweet properties.

1:15:22HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Can I ask a question about the Home Act? So the developments on these properties, they don't have to be affordable by any means, it's just any… Just housing. Yes. And it's the assumption that the entities listed are going to be promoting affordable housing, so that's why they didn't call it out specifically.

1:15:41HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I think that's the hope. Yeah, it was called out in the legislative declaration of the bill, so the intent of the Home Act is to produce affordable housing, but there isn't a place in the bill where they define what affordable means. And then our…

1:15:57HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Are local governments a qualified entity listed in the bill?

1:16:02HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: No. I don't think so. No.

1:16:07HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: We got some properties, yeah.

1:16:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: There's absolutely stop.

1:16:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I'm curious to see, like, you know, I feel like the political conversation in Colorado over the last 15 years has been, there's such a housing shortage, we need more housing, it's too expensive to build.

1:16:28HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But I think right now, we're seeing, like, rents kind of bottom out, and population growth is kind of going flat, and I'm wondering if that's still going to be the appetite in 5-10 years?

1:16:40HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I don't know if anyone has thoughts here. I mean, if it's not, that means that we did our job right.

1:16:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, I mean, possibly.

1:16:56HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I haven't… I haven't heard anyone complain that there's too much happening, so… So, there's some people who think that,

1:17:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I mean, once again, I just like making nuanced points. There's some people that think that housing has become

1:17:12HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So… such a… so incentivized that we can't have anything else. That's something… some people believe that.

1:17:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Like, in that we're going to… like, a good example would be, like, we're bulldozing small businesses to put in housing. Yeah. You know, like… I mean, a big change that definitely has happened is, like, in the last 20 years, the amount of

1:17:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: commerce we do has shifted from stores to Amazon and the likes, and that technological innovation has to reduce the demand for

1:17:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: you know, large commercial spaces, so… I mean, that's just like a… I think a…

1:17:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: a feature of modern America.

1:17:57HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, I remember the question I had about the TOC, issue. So, the… the…

1:18:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Thing that you're putting forward first is a… a rollback of the form-based code, or… or what… it was a…

1:18:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It would be removing the call-up, so basically it would just be an administrative review that gets, you know, approved by staff if it meets the requirements. That's,

1:18:25HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: How does that affect, number of units?

1:18:29HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It just means that…

1:18:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: You can then, on all the sites that are in form-based code, you can count all those units.

1:18:37HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Whereas if there's a discretionary element, and it's a property under 5 acres, you can't include them.

1:18:44HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I didn't understand that, I'm sorry. Because they would be allowed to be built based on the form-based code, so you can include that as part of the number.

1:18:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay. And then how… how… do you have any sort of estimate of how much closer that gets you to meeting the hog?

1:19:03HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: We do… it's… again, it fluctuates every time I meet with the folks that are helping us with this. It's in the thousands, so it's not insubstantial, but it might have to be a combination of code changes to get us there.

1:19:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Are we… I mean, to… to this point earlier, it's like, are we… with these two laws, are we looking to do, like.

1:19:31HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The minimum that is required to comply with them, or are we looking to use them as an opportunity to, like.

1:19:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: think more broadly about… I mean, I obviously can't think about everything at once, necessarily, but, like, to think more broadly about some aspects.

1:19:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Of the code that these address.

1:19:49HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I think in the short term of meeting the deadlines, we're looking at just meeting the minimums, largely. The TOC one's so aggressive that just to ever meet it at all is going to be a major accomplishment. It seems to me like the minimum of meeting the TOC will have a drastic impact on the zoning code for the City of Boulder.

1:20:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, we don't have a choice, you know.

1:20:14HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Well, what if you stay out of compliance decade after decade? What's the… what's the downside?

1:20:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I think developers would have good reason to sue the city if they were denying, you know, denying you a permit based on code, and you're saying, hey, you're not in compliance, judge, find that the code violates state law.

1:20:33HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, that's exactly it, because, like, originally, when the TOC was being developed, they actually did have a hook in there that if you didn't need it, you wouldn't get certain transportation funding, but that got a lot of opposition at the state level, and it got pulled out, but it would be that… that, you know, threat of lawsuit.

1:20:52HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It just seems like, you've got some real innovation to tackle to get to that 123.

1:20:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Number.

1:21:01HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, I'll just say it's been a bit of a rollercoaster ride, because, like, there's so many factors that come into this, and, you know, there's good news and bad news every time we're looking at the data. It's like, oh, we can count this.

1:21:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But we can't count this now, because we didn't take this into account. That's… Do you feel like coming into compliance with these… I mean, like, the city of Boulder, compared to probably 99% of municipalities in Colorado, is, like, the best equipped to deal with this, because it has such a large, well-resourced staff.

1:21:32HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But I just wonder, some of these smaller communities, like, do they even have the resources to, like, deal with this legislation?

1:21:40HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I don't know the answer to that, but my suspicion is that they don't. We definitely are, you know, more capable of

1:21:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: of doing these type of things, and I feel sorry for some of those communities. Because sometimes when I look at legislation, I think to myself, like, as a practical matter, are people going to even follow this law because they've… it's so complicated? Or are they just going to wait until… see if they get sued? Yeah, there is an active lawsuit now by a

1:22:05HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: some communities that are suing the state about this, so I think some communities are sitting back to wait and see where that goes.

1:22:14HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Also, to Carl's point, Boulder and Denver are the ones that have so many transit routes, so it's not as complicated for a lot of other places. Other places are like, we have this one stop that this applies to, but for us, it's a lot of the city.

1:22:28HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I just want to make a blanket statement that I… based on what I've learned about the TOC, I'm super excited about it. I've often said that I think Boller would be much better if we had twice as many people and half as many cars.

1:22:42HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And, so the notion that we're gonna set a goal of 123,

1:22:48HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I'm all for it. I don't think they'll ever get built, but well, and I think to Philip's point, it's… it's not just government regulation that stops building, it's also economic forces. Like, you know, developers still need to buy this land, and

1:23:01HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: have an economic justification for it, and as a result, we're not going to see Boulder balloon to a million people overnight. And I don't know, I think that's… that's something that, for those who are concerned, maybe, that this could result in too much development in Boulder, I think

1:23:18HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: There's enough, like, free market safeguards to probably prevent that from happening.

1:23:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I have a question, along the…

1:23:27HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I'm thinking of a couple areas in town.

1:23:31HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Might be.

1:23:32HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: How much is the new BBCP land designations along some of the transit corridors gonna allow for rezoning? They would also bring it into the TOC, because, you know, there's a bunch of areas there that now do have the potential to be rezoned to R5 or, you know, MU5.

1:23:51HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, I think we've looked into that, and obviously it's going to take a lot of work effort over the next few years to figure out how we're going to implement the plan. The plan certainly opens the door to allowing more units than the prior plan.

1:24:06HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So, but that's something that is going to take longer than it takes to meet these deadlines, so I would expect that that's kind of why I said these bills are kind of like, we'll probably just meet the minimum, but it doesn't mean we're not going to go beyond it by implementing the BVCP at some point.

1:24:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Are there any, like, proposed… transit projects, like…

1:24:31HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Colorado Connector or something else that would impact

1:24:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: the size of the blue area, or where the blue area is. It won't change. Like, they basically told us that it's a snapshot in time in, like, 2019, and the mapping, and unless there's a new bill that comes along, there's no…

1:24:48HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: future, you know, requirements that if it's something… if a bus route gets added, that you have to redo it, it doesn't do that. Okay, so the state law came with maps for every qualifying municipality. Yeah, rudimentary ones that we then did much more detailed, yeah.

1:25:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Any other comments or questions for these guys? Well, I have a comment, which is, I would love to just… you guys must be, listening to all the chatter about, completely rewriting Title IX,

1:25:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And I… I wish we had an hour to… to, you know, get your opinion on what you're think… what you're hearing, what your… what your sensibilities are, if it's stressing you out, or if it's exciting you, or…

1:25:36HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It's a mix of those things, certainly. Well, I think back to what we were previously talking about, compliance, do you feel like city staff's resources

1:25:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: are being drained by constant changes to legislation, and that it's being redirected from actually focusing on implementing law, you know, moving… I mean, it certainly has taken up a lot of our time to work on the state bills, like, beyond, like, what we… we've never had to deal with this

1:26:01HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: until, you know, 3 years ago. You know, the state didn't get involved in local land use, like, we had our own initiatives that were set by council, so now we've been dealing with council initiatives and state initiatives, so it certainly has had an impact. I mean, obviously this year.

1:26:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: there was only one bill compared to, like, prior years where there were multiple bills. I don't know what that means for any future administration.

1:26:26HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: You know, but…

1:26:27HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And I'm not saying, like, don't change laws, but, like, we've got 3, you know, very qualified staff people here tonight who worked on a presentation for us, and

1:26:36HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: They're doing all this because the law is changed. Disappointed you, you cut him off right as he started answering my question. Well, I think it's… if he wants to keep talking, I'll let him, but it's like, every time we… Every time we change things, it's like they're not doing their jobs. They're… I mean, they are doing their jobs, but they're focusing a lot more attention on

1:26:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: this discussion about changing everything, and is that slowing down permitting processes because we're constantly trying to rewrite the laws? I don't know, that's… I think that's a fair question we should be asking ourselves at a high level.

1:27:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I'm also interested in answering your question. We are, you know, we are anticipating, you know, moving into a reality where the next council will prioritize a Title IX, what we're calling a refresh. There is interest in implementing the comp plan, but again, the expectation that we're trying to make really clear to people is that, you know, there's a lot of folks that are like.

1:27:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: we have this bold new plan that just got adopted, update everything and match it, and that's just not how planning is done. It's gonna take

1:27:43HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: probably years. You know, it's a 20-year plan, so I think every year we're gonna have to, like, scope things out, talk to the council at the time, prioritize them, figure out what our work plan is, what our capacity is, and move forward and kind of just, you know, do the chewable bites.

1:28:00HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: as we move forward to implement it. There's no way that we have the ability to just

1:28:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: you know, rewrite everything and match everything that's in the plan in a short amount of time. But, you know, we are actively talking about what that scope looks like, so we can be prepared to talk to Council.

1:28:18HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And I think, like I said, when we start formulating that scope a little bit more, and we find out after the election what the council looks like, and what they are starting to prioritize, we can come back to HAB and get your input on how we move forward.

1:28:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: We're also big zoning nerds, so we're pretty excited about any project changes we make, so… Cool.

1:28:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Any other questions?

1:28:48HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I mean, you can't ask city staff to, like, weigh in on the political…

1:28:52HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: decision, you know? But I think your question is… Yes, I can, and I just did. Yeah, you can ask them whatever you want, but you gotta… you gotta be mindful of the positions they're in.

1:29:05HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Alright, anything else for these guys?

1:29:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Thank you, really. Anything else for us. No, thanks for your time. Yeah, thank you so much. So, appreciate it. Thank you.

1:29:19HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I appreciate you included some prompt questions in your memo, too. Thank you. Anytime. Ellie looked at it this afternoon, but thank you.

1:29:28HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay, are we ready to move on?

1:29:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Alright, next item on the agenda…

1:29:42HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So this is talking about our…

1:29:44HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Typically, our monthly HAB meetings are on the fourth Wednesday of every month. Often, we combine November and December, and do it on a different day.

1:29:58HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Most commonly, the pattern has been the third… thanks, you guys. Thank you. The third…

1:30:12HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Wednesday.

1:30:14HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: of November. So, I guess, what I'd like to do is make a motion to,

1:30:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Permanently, not just for 2026, but going forward so we don't have to keep happening.

1:30:29HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: discussion every year, because we end up settling on essentially the same thing.

1:30:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But make a motion to combine November and December, and rather it being the fourth Wednesday of the month, it would be the third Wednesday of November. Does anybody have any questions about that? You're looking at… No, it already was, so you're moving into the week. I think those sites… there's some times, though, Karin, where third Wednesday…

1:30:58HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: For Thursday. Tiffany, can you confirm that?

1:31:00HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Thanksgiving's always the fourth Thursday of the month. Yeah, it's always the fourth…

1:31:05HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Thursday, yeah. Yeah, that doesn't mean that Wednesday before is the fourth Wednesday of the week. It doesn't, but it moves, you know, it moves, it fluctuates, like, if it's a full week or not. I think I was wrong, you're right. It would never be the case. It's always the third Wednesday of November, we should be good.

1:31:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, that's true, that's great. That's the things I always look for. Supported.

1:31:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Sounds great, yeah. I don't get to vote on these things. I have an obligation that day, but… I don't understand the reasoning. Seems like you could have the third Wednesday followed by the fourth Thursday, but is that not true?

1:31:43HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, I think… wait, maybe… I think that is…

1:31:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I guess you're right. If the first day of November is a Thursday, then the third Wednesday is… the Wednesday of the week before Thanksgiving. Well, how about if we… how about if we set it like that, and once every 7 years? How about 8 days before Thanksgiving?

1:32:07HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Actually, that motion would save that. But it wouldn't as far as scheduling the space, and Tiffany, and… Huh? Wednesday before… The 8 days before that? The 8 days before Thanksgiving. It's the same thing.

1:32:28HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It's the Wednesday of the week before things. One more discussion point on this. My memory of how we've consolidated is, like, the first Wednesday of December.

1:32:37HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So…

1:32:39HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I was not clear, it's been different ones. Yeah, I think, depending on vacations and… Jay reached out to me in the last couple of years, at least, it was…

1:32:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I'm fine with either, it's just that the gap between meetings becomes a lot bigger if you… It is like a 2-plus month, or almost 3-plus.

1:33:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: two-month gap, you know what I mean?

1:33:06HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So I think it makes sense to almost bridge the gap, and if we're going to consolidate in November, December, do it in early December.

1:33:14HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The counterpoint to that is there's a lot of social stuff going on in December, the holidays, but…

1:33:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And remember, such boring.

1:33:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Nice setup.

1:33:26HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay, so… I'm good for you there. Okay.

1:33:33HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I'm gonna offer up the November. Here's my question. Should it be the…

1:33:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: third Wednesday of the month, or…

1:33:41HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: 8 days before Thanksgiving. Eight days before Thanksgiving.

1:33:46HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Tiffany, are you gonna kill us? No, it's fine. Okay. Might kill me, might kill my brain. Okay, so I'll, make a motion to combine the November and December

1:34:01HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Meeting. Annually.

1:34:05HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: to be. B.

1:34:07HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: 8 days before Thanksgiving.

1:34:11HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Second that motion. Thank you.

1:34:14HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: All in favor?

1:34:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Aye.

1:34:17Lauren Schevets: Bye.

1:34:18HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay, great. None opposed? Motion approved.

1:34:22HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: 8 days before Thanksgiving.

1:34:25HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Is that an option on my calendar? Custom thing? I don't know.

1:34:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: True.

1:34:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But is third Wednesday an option thing on the calendar? Is that a thing? I don't use the calendar, because I'm an insane calendar. Yeah, you can do that, but I don't know about the 8 days before the…

1:34:44HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It is a… do we… are there a lot of holidays that are, like, the fourth Thursday? Like, who thought that? I don't keep a calendar, but it's like, I have so many meetings and appointments. Mother's Day is always on a Sunday, right? Mother's Day? Yeah, Labor Day. The Labor Day is a Monday. Memorial Day, so yeah. Election Day. Election Day is the first Tuesday after the first Monday.

1:35:06HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: In November. Okay, so… Okay, you can do… Yeah, next item.

1:35:12HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: That is just a recap of our August Affordable Housing Bike Tour.

1:35:21HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So those of you that did not join us, you missed a really lovely ride in the torrential rain. It was so fun, though, but it…

1:35:32HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Word.

1:35:33HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So we ended up… there was…

1:35:37HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: 6 locations on the schedule, we ended up doing 4. So, just a quick recap, we did, Grace Commons, which is, under construction with

1:35:51HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: They should be getting their, occupancy stuff this month? Was it this month, or October? Soon, very soon.

1:35:58HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: This is a project that's 30 affordable units, studios, 1 bedrooms, a cafe, and, like, workforce space on the ground level. And on the fourth rooftop deck level, it's like an event center, and the units are…

1:36:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: 50 to 70% AMI. There's also community space for the residents. Community space for the residents.

1:36:26HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Aside from the event space. Yeah, yeah.

1:36:31HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Super cool, though. Also, unique, because the property was

1:36:36HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. Owned by Grace Commons Church.

1:36:41HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And they donated the… do they still have rights to the land? Are they still… do they still have their hands on it? I don't know about the rights question, but they still have,

1:36:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: they're still involved with the operations of the Workforce Center, so there's some established and continued relationship with Grace Commons.

1:37:05HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Cool project. They're gonna have a party next month if they can pull it off. They're gonna have a party.

1:37:11HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It should be pretty great. It's an amazing location when you're downtown. It blocks.

1:37:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: block from the Walnut Street station.

1:37:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay, so then our second stop was Golden West,

1:37:26HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Where, I heard from BHP about 62 affordable units that are all for seniors, specifically. And, we just heard a lot about… a lot of, like, community programming and stuff that they've really created, and it's…

1:37:42HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: super successful.

1:37:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Then, we rode through some puddles over to Rally Flats.

1:37:50HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And that's 100 portable units, studio 1 bedroom, 2 bedroom, that's also a VHP project, and, that one's, up to 60% AMI.

1:38:02HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And then the, fourth stop was at Bluebird, which is permanently supportive housing.

1:38:08HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: 40 units, with services for folks, exiting homelessness.

1:38:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Anybody else want to chime in about that?

1:38:21HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Oh, that's pretty cool.

1:38:22HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I love that there was no overlap between that tour and the one I did, like, 3 years ago. It's just amazing how much… how many cool projects are going… have gone in. It's really neat to go on a whole new tour. I would totally… I would totally agree with that. That was the thing that really struck me when

1:38:41HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: When Jay was organizing the tour a few years ago, and when you were organizing the tour this year, that there was

1:38:51HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Like, a good fair amount of projects to choose from.

1:38:57HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yes, and that's a good thing. I think even in the route we went on, we had to just cut several out, because it's just not enough time. I'm contemplating a South Boller tour for the next time. Sign me up.

1:39:11HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Let's not do it in the rain. Come on. It rarely ever rains. It does, you just have to get wet. I don't own an umbrella or a rain jacket. It rarely ever rains.

1:39:25HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: That was pretty great, though.

1:39:30HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: This one funny moment that we witnessed was that sidewalk at Rally Flats at the corner, where there's nice bike parking, there's a bike path right across the way, but then the structure of the curb

1:39:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Just…

1:39:48HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: completely disincentivizes getting a… huffing on your bike and rolling off the property. It's kind of absurd. And I just… I kind of wonder what happened there? Was that a fumble on someone's part, or was there code in the way, and…

1:40:02HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: There's code in the way, what could be done about it? I don't know. Oh, gosh, I don't know, but I do think the design was… the intention was for the bike path to go straight through.

1:40:12HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: the building pathway. There was some… Traffic…

1:40:18HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I feel like somebody… they… They mentioned something at the beginning. They said something about it. Is it because of the parking lots? Because of the parking lots.

1:40:27HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: not Rally Flats, but the ones around there, that strip mall across the street, and then the… it was… That's too bad. There was a reason, which didn't…

1:40:38HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Totally makes sense.

1:40:41HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The curb stuff's wild. The curb stuff completely eludes me.

1:40:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, once I was on a bike path in Boulder, and it had, like, a dip to go into the street, and I was walking, and I kept walking, and then I almost got hit by a car.

1:40:57HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And I realized I wasn't in a designated crosswalk, even though, like, the curve made it seem like it was. And I was like, whose idea was this?

1:41:09HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay. And they all have to be elevated, not… not, no, it was even the, like, with the rumple strips, you know what I mean? Like, and I was… so I assumed it was… and then I realized there's no, like, signs or anything up there. I was like, do they want people crossing here or not?

1:41:26HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Laura, did you have anything to add about the bike tour?

1:41:31Lauren Schevets: No, I was, actually really happy that we did it after… afterwards, despite all the rain. I think the most impactful for me was going into Bluebird,

1:41:42Lauren Schevets: seeing how hard it's actually utilized, hearing from Catherine about

1:41:48Lauren Schevets: services and their services budget. For 40 units, they spend over $500,000 annually on

1:41:55Lauren Schevets: resident services, so that's over $12,000 a unit annually. And so that was pretty impactful.

1:42:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yep.

1:42:06HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Agreed.

1:42:12HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay.

1:42:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Next up, Holly.

1:42:15HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: matters from the staff? Yeah, matters. Jay told me I need to be more prepared, so I'm more prepared. What do you got? I wanted to mention that Prop 123

1:42:25HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: To be compliant with… or to be eligible funding, expedited review, and then the unit count, we made a commitment 3 years ago to produce 655 affordable units in the 3 years.

1:42:39HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And we are on track to, like, by the skin of our teeth, we will do it, but we are on track to do it. And just… that number is…

1:42:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: you know, we work in a regional partnership. That number is more than double of any of our regional partners, including Walmart, to just put it in context for

1:42:58HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: What was expected of the city.

1:43:00HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: In terms of affordable units. One question about that. Is that all, like, new housing, or does that maybe include units that were

1:43:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: not affordable before and are now. Yes, it includes all of the above, and there's, you know, of course it has to be complex, so there's various rules around it, but typically it requires some kind of deed restriction and some kind of funding to go into preserving… Do you know what number of that is just new housing?

1:43:29HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: units? Somebody does, I don't know off the top of my head.

1:43:34HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Do we have to do it again in 3 years after this? Yes, but there's a… they've changed the calculation, and we're assuming that our number will be lower, which is helpful, given the market, and yeah, so…

1:43:48HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: But, so, celebration. And then the other thing I want to just mention,

1:43:53HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Hhs, we purchased a parcel of land off of Belmont. I don't know if Jay ever mentioned this to you.

1:44:00HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: The goal is to put, 18 to 20 affordable townhomes from the modular factory on this parcel, and we are officially started.

1:44:12HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: We've hired an entitlement… an architect firm to do the entitle… take us through the entitlement process. We're hiring… in the process of hiring

1:44:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Contractors to demo the…

1:44:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: the building that's on the site. So we're hoping to start placing units, aggressive goal of next summer. What's the address? 5150 Belmont. Right by the disc golf course? It's right by the disc golf course, yeah. Which side of the disc golf course? The…

1:44:41HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: East-East side. Directly south of the bike park. Yeah, right. Okay, cool. Yeah.

1:44:47Lauren Schevets: Are those…

1:44:48HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Where's the…

1:44:50Lauren Schevets: Holly, are those modular units gonna be placed as single-family detached homes, or are you gonna… are you gonna look at attaching them?

1:44:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, the idea is to do attached, and we haven't decided the duplex or the exact configuration, but it will be attached. Those weren't I saw look like townhomes, kind of?

1:45:12Lauren Schevets: Cool.

1:45:14HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And who runs that? Is that for sale? Is that for rent? It's for sale. There'll be ownership through Habitat, since it's a modular factory spitting the units out. It'll be, affordable units through Habitat. And the city…

1:45:31HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: buys the land and donates it? No, we're running the whole development process.

1:45:39HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: like it or not, we're doing it. And who… do people pay the city to acquire the land? No, we've… we acquired… we purchased the land. So the city's gonna own the land, and people just own the unit, or something? Yeah, I mean, the… the…

1:45:57HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: the future owners will buy, so they'll be full-out owners of the property, and it'll be HOA… yeah, it'll be… They'll buy the land from the city. Yeah.

1:46:08HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: How many units? How many acres? It's, like, under, an acre? I don't…

1:46:14HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I've written it down several times, I can't remember, and why can't we get 40 units? Well, we're using modular, yeah, so there's limitations on the design. And so the modular factory has the capacity

1:46:32HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: To continue with Ponderosa, and… Yeah, we're working it into our… the pipeline, the plans for how, you know, lining up the projects that the factory will serve.

1:46:49HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Is this the first time the city has, like, bought land and then plans to sell it?

1:46:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I mean, Ponderosa,

1:46:58HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: is probably the first one, but it's much more complicated than what we're doing here, and yes, I think this is the first time that…

1:47:06HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Who's taking us on. I mean, there's the problem that,

1:47:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Not a lot of developers want to do for sale.

1:47:14HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Condos, or towns in the city, or really anywhere.

1:47:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So we're gonna do it. We'll tell you how it goes.

1:47:23HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It's gonna be awesome. Yeah.

1:47:25HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: It's gonna be awesome. Yeah, I'm trying to think, like, you know, a lot of people talk about litigation.

1:47:32HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: As a risk to developing condos, but…

1:47:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: you know, the government has certain immunities and stuff, so I'd have to… I'd walk that through, but…

1:47:45HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Exciting.

1:47:47HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay, anything else, Paula?

1:47:52HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: What did you mention?

1:47:54HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Is Jay no longer with us? Are you… Well, he's, like, still around. He's going to a better place? He's going to a better place, which is at his home for Wednesday night. Yeah, but are you… are you now… Yeah, you guys are stuck with me. Are you the… the deputy, the act…

1:48:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: the arm of the city manager now?

1:48:16HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Is that what I am? Nobody told me that part, but I guess so. Or what's the role? I think so. Yeah. For HHS, yeah.

1:48:29HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay. Any…

1:48:32HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Anything else from anybody tonight? That's all I have on the agenda. I'm so glad, that worked out great for me. I actually missed the… I missed that planning board meeting. I was in Burning Man, so… So, actually, like, I'm glad to have gotten caught up.

1:48:49HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Yeah, it was super interesting. Yeah. I knew a lot about it already, but…

1:48:55HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: One thing I just want to throw out there, I think we should do some sort of Sundance-oriented meeting, either before or after Sundance, probably after, to get maybe community input on how it's impacted housing. I think that's… I'm not saying we have to set up something right now, but…

1:49:13HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: that's something we should think about. There's a lot of conversations out there, and I think it's… it's an appropriate conversation for us to have.

1:49:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: And you think that post? It might make sense. I think it is, because it's, what, it's Jan… this January, right? Yeah, so I think it makes sense maybe a couple months out that…

1:49:33HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: from that, maybe in February or March, and see if we can…

1:49:39HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I don't know, through staff or through the public, just get a sense of what issues, what opportunities it's created, all that.

1:49:48HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay.

1:49:51HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Seems like there's some buzz about that, everything being stopped. Are we still planning at, like, how far are we planning?

1:49:59HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Meeting content.

1:50:00HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: What do you got? I was just curiously. Oh, you have a list. Yeah. I mean, I…

1:50:08HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: just, like, a general point is, like, I would be interested in, like.

1:50:12HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Exploring, like, some of, like, the fault lines, where, like, people really disagree about what you should be doing, whether it's, like, like, bringing in…

1:50:20HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: People who might disagree, not necessarily in the same meeting, but maybe in the same meeting, like.

1:50:25HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: developers versus non-developers, like, what, you know, people who think it's too hard to build in Boller, like, or people who have, kind of, concrete suggestions for things that we should do.

1:50:37HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: to try and, like… because I feel like that's where the, kind of, growth zone is, is, like, where people are actually…

1:50:44HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Arguing about things, respectfully.

1:50:48HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: So I don't… that's a very broad point, but…

1:50:52HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Anyone has thoughts on that? I feel like when we've had members of the public show up, it's usually when there's some sort of proposed ordinance advancing, and someone's not happy about it. Like, there's some… something about, like.

1:51:09HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: some environmental rags for pumps, I think, a year or two ago, and some people showed up.

1:51:17HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: I mean, I would be… and maybe, you know, you might want to do this.

1:51:22HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Is there some kind of, like, builder or builder's group of, like, what is it like to try and build in Boller from, like, a builder's or builder's perspective? Like, that would be…

1:51:31HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: really interesting, because I feel like that would be a very practical

1:51:35HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Kind of perspective on what it looks like, like, you know.

1:51:40HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: We hear from staff, and that's great, but also, like, people are interacting with the city. That's their experience.

1:51:58HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Anything else?

1:52:04HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Okay. Well, I'll make a motion to adjourn.

1:52:09HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Second.

1:52:10HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: All in favor?

1:52:13Lauren Schevets: Bye. Bye.

1:52:15HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Opposed? All right, motion's passed. Good night, thanks for coming.

1:52:22HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: That is awesome.

1:52:24HAB Monthly Meeting 09.23.26: Sounds like.