Council election: vote for this bloc of five
Bob Wells | Oct 17, 2019
Now’s the time for a tactical move of voting for the five-person “responsible growth” faction whose signs you’ve seen in yards around town. Why? Because otherwise investors and developers will capture a Boulder City Council majority, in which case I predict you won’t like the construction boom — and the population growth — that would follow.
So…these are the five names: Adam Swetlik, Corina Julca, Brian Dolan, Susan Peterson and Mark Wallach.
I’m not totally enamored of all five, but it’s about tactics. I want to see a slow-growth Council majority that can say a polite “no thanks” when powerful private-equity and hedge-fund investors come knockin’ with their schemes to build more “market rate” multi-family condominiums and apartments and even (what we really don’t need) office buildings. If none of this sounds to you like affordable housing, you are right.
Boulder’s very much in their gunsights as a place promising extraordinary profits, not just in the Wild West of Boulder’s newly opened Opportunity Zone but also “along transportation corridors” and (most disturbing of all) in neighborhoods heretofore zoned for single-family homes.
Now that mail-in ballots have arrived, I’d say: vote for the bloc of five to help rein in the investors and developers, and to see if we can preserve a bit of the mood, beauty and yes-even-quirky character of a town many of us have loved for a long, long time.
(NO BALLOT? Newcomers can still register to vote and pick up a ballot at the County Clerk’s office, 1750 33rd St., until Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5. Details.)
It is disconcerting and disappointing to see so many women in this race identifying themselves on yard signs only, or most obviously, with their first names. The sign reads:”Susan”(large letters) (very small letter last name) for City Council” “Corina for Boulder” — no last name in evidence. What’s up with that? Is this a race for Junior Class secretary or Homecoming Queen? It’s demeaning to women in my view, encouraging people to vote for a “girl” named Susie rather than a candidate with serious ideas and gravitas.
Both Bob Wells and Lynn Segal are correct. See also Leora Frankel’s assessment of this election. Dark money is here and increasingly running the city in insidious ways not just in the big tall ugly buildings that have no place here. We need to hold current Council members accountable for bad votes. Carefully consider how incumbents voted before reelecting them. Listen carefully to what candidates are really saying. Vote carefully. This election will impact Boulder far longer than today or tomorrow.
It’s interesting that although they understand the difference between demolition, “gutting” and remodeling and the spectrum of distinctions between, they choose not to study and entertain how this may affect affordability and how they could be party to how restoration takes place and consequently the level of affordability of a given space.
Also it’s very concerning that in figuring the square footage cost of the construction of an ELU (Efficiency lLving Unit which is 475 sf. or less and typically a condominium) the HOA fee is not figured in. The real efficiency, that of the profit realized by the developer for this smaller sized unit, has the effect of emboldening the production of such units. Especially in the OZ, which is already on steroids. Although Corina and others publicly lament the loss of the older apartment such as Eastpointe (now the high-end Park Mosaic), the other consideration is the generalized increase in higher end residential, which drives up the price of land, which drives up structure cost on all properties manifest from the top, all the way down to mobile homes where the lot rents rise compelling the renter to be pressured into a more expensive structure, such as that of manufactured housing. It wasn’t just the natural attrition of death or the fear of the undocumented Mexican residents that left Ponderosa mobile home park before the new program out there, it was the higher expense.