Why Is Boulder So Expensive? Housing, Zoning & the Next Aspen | Jill Adler Grano

[00:00:00] Well Jill, I'm excited to have you on, especially this time of year because we got some exciting things going on in Boulder and you're a big part of it. And I think we've known each other for a number of years but not really well. I mean we've known each other more I would say in passing. But I've certainly followed you, I suspect you follow me, and I suspect I'm gonna get to know you a lot better in the next hour and a half.

[00:00:22] Well Dan, thank you for having me on. I'm really so honored to be here. I know you have a really unique and vibrant audience and I just feel really lucky to be in front of them and talk to you. And I have this embarrassing memory from when I first met Cindy. It was at the kitchen and I was so nervous and I dressed up and I wore heels and I walk in and right as I get to her table I slip and I just hit the ground.

[00:00:49] So happy to have a chance to kind of redo that as well. So it's really important in this day and age, I mean really, really important that people talk to each other, that they listen, that they communicate. And you know in most everyday life that's not a big deal but when the discussion enters politics we've gotten to a point where when people have different points of views they often don't talk to each other. Right. Or maybe they talk at each other or maybe one of them talks and the other one doesn't.

[00:01:15] But I'm, you know, I think you and I are going to find some overlap in things that we have in common. And I'm pretty certain there's areas that we have very different perspectives at least going into this conversation. And I think for a lot of reasons but maybe that one more than any other is why I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Hopefully we can, not hopefully because I know we will, demonstrate to those listening in that you can have responsible, constructive, meaningful conversations with people even if you don't see eye to eye on all things politics. That's right. That's right.

[00:01:45] And it's important now more than ever. The tenor of this election, not just in Boulder but you know from across the country is so different than when I ran nine years ago. And public trust is at an all time low and I understand why. But it causes us to entrench into you know kind of our circles in many ways and we have to talk to each other.

[00:02:11] And I think you know future council members have to bring the community along. We need far more robust stakeholder engagement and community conversation or else we'll really lose our ability to do anything good. So yeah. Right. So before we get into that let's get into you. Yeah sure. Who you are and what you're all about and you may have both a private sector background and a political background here in Boulder. That's right. And I think maybe even involved with more than just Boulder. You know, do stuff with the state of Colorado as well. Yeah.

[00:02:40] So let's get into all of that. Tell us all about you. Oh gosh. Okay. Well, you know, I have been kind of a political nerd as long as I can remember. I, you know, I served on student council from third grade all the way through senior year. I studied government at the College of William & Mary. I moved here right after graduation. So I've been here about 22 years and jumped right in, you know, volunteering at Meals on Wheels and at the homeless shelter, serving on various boards and commissions.

[00:03:09] And I was working in real estate since about 2010. Before that I worked in our restaurant industry. And through real estate I got just more involved in housing kind of deeply. There was a mom at my son's school who was abused and was at the safe house and then called and was asking if I could help place her. And I found it so hard to find an affordable space for her.

[00:03:35] So actually ran a GoFundMe campaign and we raised $50,000 and bought her a mobile home. And then through that I learned about kind of all the injustices in our manufactured home communities and worked on tax liens and a lot of state legislation. And it's kind of spiraled from there. You know, I worked served on our board of zoning adjustments ran for city council, got elected. I was never looking for another job or, you know, trying to leave.

[00:04:01] I loved being on council, but our Congressman Joe Neguse called me personally when he was elected and asked if I would run his district outreach. So I did leave council a little early and worked with him. And that was a remarkable experience. And actually it's a way in which I've really grown and matured since the first time I ran is learning from him and the way that he does do such a good job of listening to different perspectives.

[00:04:26] And then I went to grad school after that and I've been studying Boulder and that I brought my thesis. I wrote a book essentially on the whole history of our housing and economic development. And it starts at colonization and it goes to the present. And I'm so bit of a history book. Yeah, I have a huge history buff. I actually would love to get into the history if you want to, because I know you're so interested in housing and that's an area we share. I mean, you know, housing, commerce, food systems, transportation.

[00:04:56] Those are just like the really core functions of any city, any thriving community. So the research I did has also really informed the way I look at Boulder and my reason for coming back and running for city council. You can see problems develop so much earlier than we experience them.

[00:05:20] And we often talk about, you know, the problems as if they're sort of just this past council's fault, right? And there are problems with our city that are more recent, but a lot of them start a long time ago. I mean, one of the really fascinating things that I found was the inaugural issue of the Boulder Weekly was in August of 1994. And the cover article was, is the middle class being squeezed out of Boulder, the need for more missing middle housing in Boulder?

[00:05:50] That was 30 years ago. And we're still having that exact same conversation today. So I think we're going to agree on what a lot of our challenges are. My guess is where we're going to disagree a bit is the solutions to those problems, are they wise or unwise? Do they produce the desired effect or do they contribute in many ways to the problems?

[00:06:17] And I don't claim to have all knowledge of that, but I certainly have put my own fair amount of thought into it and have lots of concerns. So, but let's start with areas that I think we agree on. I love Boulder. I do too. You love Boulder. That's one big one. And it's a huge one. I mean, because a lot of people love Boulder, but I think you and I both take that further in that we don't just love it in kind of a way where we admire it or we enjoy our life here.

[00:06:46] We also take it two or three steps further and we want to do things that help the betterment of Boulder. So I think that's another thing we have in common, that we're not passive observers of the beauty of Boulder and all the positive attributes of Boulder. And we're not just, you know, ones who throw stones at Boulder when we don't like certain parts of it. We're active. We're trying to do something to contribute to the betterment of Boulder and the Boulder community. So that's one. Let's see.

[00:07:15] Another one is that we've been here in Boulder a long time, so we're not newbies. And I think at least in my case, and I assume in your case, you're planning on being here a long time as well. That's right. You might be a bit more into politics than I'm in. I'm pretty deeply immersed right now, but that's not because that's what I see myself wanting to be spending time on. But I haven't spent time, but it's driven by kind of some deep concerns. But let me cover another one, which I think we would agree on.

[00:07:43] The non-student population in Boulder is in decline. Yeah. And I view that as a not good thing. I assume you view that as not good. Absolutely. So we agree on that. You're a former real estate. There's a huge amount of vacancy in Boulder. Yeah. We're up to, I think, you know, I just quoted the number 26%, you know, up a lot from just a handful of years ago. That includes both kind of Pearl Street area.

[00:08:12] It includes the really nice office parks on the east side of Boulder. So I think we both think that's not good for there to be a lot of vacant real estate. That's right. Okay. So we agree on that. We see schools are shutting down in Boulder. Mm-hmm. And, you know, that's an artifact of less families in Boulder. But I assume we, you know, agree that that's not a great thing. No. We'd love to see our skills. That's right. Filled up with a lot of youngsters learning a lot of things and loving being in Boulder.

[00:08:42] But what we're observing instead is that our schools are, you know, are shutting down. So we agree that that's not a good thing. We'd love to see that change. And let's see. There was one other one that was just crossing my mind that I think we would agree on. Well, affordability in Boulder. In some ways, you know, when you're in an area like Boulder, it's never, you know, it's never going to be inexpensive.

[00:09:08] But it probably is more expensive, less affordable than it needs to be. And I think you definitely would agree with that. So lots of areas of agreement. And, you know, let me think about it. Well, do you have any that you have? Oh, and we're both in the real estate business, but this is new for me. You've been in real estate business for a while, but I'm about ready to be in the real estate business in Boulder. Are you? In a pretty significant way. How?

[00:09:35] We are about to close on the purchase of Pearl West. Oh, my gosh. Wow. It's the nicest commercial real estate property in Boulder. I think that's undeniable. It's a it's multifaceted. And we have, you know, Corita in the one corner. We have a lot of really nice retail, both restaurants and and shops on the bottom level. And then some really interesting tech and professional services in the building. But but the building is also got a lot of empty space, too. Yeah.

[00:10:06] So at least looking forward in time, we both are vested in real estate here in Boulder beyond just residential real estate. Yeah. Oh, that's great. Well, congratulations on that. I actually bet we have a lot more agreement than than you think, too. I mean, economic vitality and the need to support our business community is huge. A city that relies on sales tax revenue to fill potholes and provide core services needs a robust economy.

[00:10:31] The the need to simplify our land use code is I think I would imagine something that you agree with. We have. So far, yes, yes, yes. Intentionally layered on. We've created one of the most complex land use codes in the country, actually, and so much so that it requires the city to hire consultants just to get through its own code. I mean, it's really remarkable. Especially because the city, which we may not agree on. The city has lots of employees. The city has a lot of employees.

[00:11:01] Yet it contracts a lot of stuff out to other people that do work that is otherwise city work. That's right. No, I that's another area of agreement. In fact, I've been very clear about I think we need to really look at our consultant budget and how much we contract out. I actually think that that's an area of almost immediate savings. I support the independent financial auditor, too. But I think that right there we could save a lot.

[00:11:26] You know, I think, you know, Boulder's in this interesting phase because I would argue that we never were very good at budgeting. And we always sort of operated outside of our means. But money was rolling in. It was the it was glory years for so long. And then I mean, they're asking us to prove like a like a huge set of a bond. Yeah. For 300. How much is it?

[00:11:56] 400 million dollars. 400 million with really that didn't happen overnight. That happened over lots and lots of years of spending way beyond your means. That's right. We have been spending way beyond our means for a long time. But it was hard to kind of tell because the money was flowing. Right. So I'm sure many of us can relate to that. Like if I'm having a great year in real estate, I spend more freely and I'm a little looser with the way that I track my budget. And then like it stopped. The music stopped. Right.

[00:12:25] But it didn't stop recently. It stopped a long time ago. It did. So in business, when that happens, you realize it because, you know, if you want to stay in business, you realize it early and you make adjustments early. So, yeah, that happens at times, but it doesn't happen like for 10 years. We're going to overspend, overspend, overspend. While it's really clear that, you know, that revenues is not growing.

[00:12:49] I mean, our revenue, revenue meaning our tax revenue in Boulder has grown at a much smaller rate than inflation. Yeah. So we've been not generating the revenue and yet our spending has grown at way above the rate of inflation. Way above. Yep. It's a problem. For lots and lots of years.

[00:13:08] We kind of had this, you know, I don't know, for some reason, I want to use the word sugar high, but this, this, this COVID money infusion, ARPA funds and things like that, that masked over our budget problems for a long time. And now that's all dried up too. That's only if people aren't paying attention. I mean, why wouldn't they be able to realize that? I mean, business, if you could use that excuse in business, you'd be fired. No, it's no excuse. We should have realized it. Absolutely. We should have realized it.

[00:13:38] And moving forward, we need to learn from this, this time. I mean, we need to be checking back in on major projects and initiatives. We made so many bad decisions at Alpine Balsam, for example, all along the way from the purchase price to begin with all the way through. And had there been more in-depth regular check-ins and time to evaluate the decision making, I think we could have ended up saving taxpayers a lot of money and with a different land use over there.

[00:14:08] Yeah. And you probably saw, I just wrote a newsletter and there's been a lot in the news on that. Let's take a step back and talk about like, you know, if revenue is down in a business world, what can we do to make revenue not be down? Or did something we do cause revenue to be down? Yeah. Now, a lot of managers in business, the first thing they look for is excuses. It wasn't my fault. It happened to us. There's nothing we could have done about it.

[00:14:38] But those managers don't survive long in business, even if there's some truth in what they're saying. The answer is, okay, but what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do to drive revenue? Or what have you done to drive? Well, we released this new product. We thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. And it flopped. Or we had a bad advertising campaign. Or we're not giving good service to our customers. You know, there's lots of reasons in the business world where it just didn't happen to you. You probably caused it to happen.

[00:15:07] And I think that's what gets overlooked in the city of Boulder. When I look at the combination of the office parks having high vacancy, the sales tax revenue going down, the number of families becoming smaller, in fact, population, not including students, going down outright. And, you know, and our retail businesses not having as much revenue as they deserve to have.

[00:15:37] There's certain interconnected factors there that you can't just say, well, it's because of COVID and people start working from home. Yeah. It's because it's really expensive to do business in Boulder. That's right. Which means people who might be filling up those office places are going somewhere else. Yeah. They're going to Longmont or they're going to Louisville. And, you know, our city, instead of like saying, what can we do about that? What can we do to attract those businesses? Because with them, then there's reasons why families want to be in Boulder.

[00:16:05] It's still somewhat expensive, but they got jobs in Boulder and nice paying jobs. And all of a sudden, there's more kids in the schools. Well, but we need more housing. Well, if we crowd out the housing and make it really impossible to build housing or even worse, we take a natural place for housing like we had at Bolsom and say, you know what? We're not going to use it for housing. We're going to use it for our own big new headquarters, despite the fact that we have plenty of office buildings in Boulder.

[00:16:35] And this is going to be a little bit controversial. And then we're going to use it for affordable housing. Well, you take a step back and say, wait a minute here. What did we just do? We built extraordinarily expensive affordable housing on really prime real estate. And the people who otherwise would have lived on that property, had it been housing really nice development, they would have been there to not just pay taxes, which would help the city grow revenue instead of shrink revenue, but they also would have spent more money on businesses.

[00:17:03] So we kind of got the worst in many ways of all worlds, even the people who we want to have the benefit of affordable housing. A lot less of them got the benefit because we've spent so much money for housing that we could have gotten four units for everyone, maybe six units for everyone.

[00:17:18] If we had been really motivated to say, you know what, we need to be thoughtful in where we're going to locate it and how we're going to do it, not pick the most expensive piece of development opportunity in Boulder and just dump, you know, a ton of taxpayer money in that, including taking money out of reserves that are supposed to be for affordable housing and over, you know, overfund that relative to number of units.

[00:17:41] And the hidden factor of, and we don't have families in there who are going to have kids in the schools and going to be paying toward the small shops. All that stuff is interrelated, but what I don't see any action from our city government is acknowledging that. Yeah. Because you can't fix a problem that you deny is even there. So they don't even see that like, well, that's, you know, that's not our job. You know, that's, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's like your job is not to interfere with all those.

[00:18:09] It's when you're interfering with it by maybe a combination of good intention policies, but, you know, they're all connected. And now you said these happened a long time ago, year after year after year, the cumulative effect of governing the city from that mindset, even if they're good people with good intentions, is producing a horrible outcome. It is. And that's, you know, that's where I think we're going to have some interesting conversations. Yeah, it is. I mean, gosh, you covered on so much here. I don't even know where to begin. And I mean, it's because it's interrelated.

[00:18:39] It is. The real point is these things aren't independent things. It's not like, it's not like office buildings are vacant. And that happened to us. And that's why there's less families because, you know, families typically are in a place where, you know, there's long-term employment opportunities. All these are interrelated to one another. And I think there's a root cause, not solely the fault. There are circumstances like COVID.

[00:19:08] But I think they all come into really, you know, really a set of policies, a set of philosophies. Again, well-intentioned. I'm not, you know, questioning people's intentions. But if you judge it by the outcome, you got to say, what do we do to ourselves? That's right. Yeah. I mean, gosh, I'm tempted to jump in on Alpine Balsam because there's just so much we could pick apart there. And I'm happy to do that.

[00:19:35] Like, the private sector was laughing at us when we spent $40 million on that property. Even had it been all market-rate housing, the environmental containment required on that property and the amount of units that the density allows would have been pretty tough to justify a $40 million price tag to begin with. I don't think— Why did it pay $40 million if the market would only have paid—if the market would have paid less than that, why did it— Much less, I think. Yeah. Okay. I want to focus on what you just said. Uh-huh.

[00:20:05] Two words. Yeah. I think. Well, because it was never— Why wouldn't we know? It was never a public—there was no competitive bidding process. Yeah, that's right. Oh, the city didn't even bother to say, what would the market pay for this? We're just going to take taxpayer money and decide to allocate it toward that without even seeing what the market—because maybe the market would have paid $60 million. Yeah. Maybe the market would have paid $10 million if it could chase why we paid $40 million. Right.

[00:20:34] We really wanted the city to buy that at that time. It was 2015. We were kind of at— I don't remember putting up for a community vote. I think they made the decision themselves. They did, but there were—well, but there were community groups that were very vocal about it. Community groups. Yeah. That's different. Because community groups is something you could filter and listen to what you want to hear. Yeah, it's totally true. Which is, I think, part of the Boulder mistake is that I know they have no interest whatsoever in anything I might have an opinion on, and people like me.

[00:21:03] I mean, they're—you know, the city governance has been very, very set in its thinking for a long time, and they've been getting voted in. So it's not—you know, as long as you believe that the voting process is appropriate, they've been getting voted in. And so it's no fault of theirs. They're getting voted in, and they're doing what their voters, you know, want them to do. But on that particular issue, I think it's an overstatement, I think, to say that that's what the community wanted.

[00:21:29] Because if that was the case, they would have—you know, they would say, hey, we want to spend $40 million and eventually $350 million. We're going to spend $350 million. You want us to put an office building and keep a parking lot there and use the rest of this, you know, in a way that doesn't contribute to the— Yeah. There was not robust community outreach, so that's totally a fair point. That's accurate. There was a very vocal group of community members, and it was kind of the height of—or not the height, but it was a very intense period of anti-growth and anti-development.

[00:21:57] At 2015, things have changed a lot. The kind of broader perspective on the need for housing and kind of willingness to accept growth is a little different now than it was then. And also, because I haven't—from the city itself, I haven't seen that difference. So when you say it's different now, where from the city's perspective, city council or city itself, where would we see signs that they're doing what they can to spur growth?

[00:22:27] Because I haven't seen that. Yeah, well, I mean, in the last decade, we have built more than we have in previous decades. We've built almost 4,000 units in the last decade. In the last decade, we have upzoned low-density areas along transit. We have allowed for ADUs. We've allowed for more density. We changed our high-density rules from having a unit cap to an FAR cap. Yeah, all that's—you're right. All that's true. Yeah. And all that's a positive sign, so thank you for sharing that.

[00:22:57] But back then, because I ran for council the first time in 2017, and it was—there was only Planned Boulder and Better Boulder. It was not—Open Boulder was just forming, but it was like a group of mountain bikers. It was really all about that. And I'll tell you, actually, just real quick. I mean, this year, I am so honored to have endorsements from across the political spectrum. So I have endorsement from Open Boulder, from Better Boulder, from Progressives, from Sierra Club, across the political spectrum.

[00:23:26] And that's based on the fact that I really do agree with the challenges in our budget, in our public outreach, in our fiscal responsibility, in some of the decisions we've been making. And I want to work on that. But backing up, you know, when I ran the first time, it was sort of Planned Boulder and Better Boulder. And the whole conversation was growth or no growth. And this decision to buy Alpine Balsam came a couple years before that.

[00:23:56] And it was very—like people, you know, and I say people, you're right. There wasn't broad community outreach. But very vocal neighborhood groups just didn't want to see a private developer buy it. And so we overspent to begin with. And then we, you know, all along the way made decisions that made it more expensive, that weren't smart. I don't think it should be city offices.

[00:24:21] But there was—at any point after that closed that we would have tried to sell it, we were going to lose money. And so I think instead of taking a loss, we just kind of kept digging the hole deeper. It's not unlike the train, to be honest. You know, like we have now spent so much per rider for this train. But it's sort of like it's been—people have been working on it for so long.

[00:24:47] And we've spent so many hundreds of millions of dollars that no one wants to abandon it. You know, so the bag just kind of like keeps getting passed. Yeah, we—I made it—I was part of a group that made a similar mistake in Boulder, overinvesting in a piece of real estate, a really nice piece of real estate. It's—you know where the Glenwood Apartments is? Uh-huh, I do. So I was, at first, in a pretty passive way, I joined in with a group to fund a redevelopment on that property.

[00:25:16] And we spent X, and the next thing you know, X became X and another 10 percent and another 20 percent or 30 percent. And that was maybe four or five years ago this got started. It seemed like a good idea at the time, I guess, because we decided to do it. But we kept studying the numbers. We kept putting together the plans. We kept—we were appreciative of the zoning changes that Boulder made because it allowed us to build more on the site.

[00:25:43] But the more we did the math, the more we realized we'd be throwing potentially a lot of good money after a relatively small amount of bad money if we went forward with the project. So if you go by the Glenwood site right now, you'll see it looks exactly the same as it did five years ago, which is not pretty, not good. Yeah. And it's a beautiful piece of land that could house a lot more people in Boulder. But the math doesn't work. Right. And the math doesn't work because it can't work.

[00:26:09] It's because it can't work under the current city's, you know, policies and regulations and added costs and years and years of delay trying to get anything done in through the city. But it could work if the city, you know, said, we really want to get these units built because these are units that are going to be affordable for a lot of people who are, you know, we don't need to subsidize in the form of affordable housing, but it's going to be the kind of people who, you know, who are, you know,

[00:26:37] at a certain kind of income level that will be able to, you know, use those. And with more supply, it'll keep other pricing down. You know, the city could probably come to us and say, let's roll up our sleeves and let's figure out what it would take for this group to go forward with your money, not our money, not the city's money, not the taxpayer's money. But we as a city will benefit if you do this because we'll have a lot more people in the city

[00:27:02] who will be able to work in the city without commuting and will be able to pay into our tax revenue, will be able to spend money on shops. Why don't we work together and make this happen? Instead, it's like, oh, you know, we can't because we've got all these regulations, we can't change them, and you've got to contribute to this fund to help build these things. And then we're all worse off because that old, decrepit property still sits there. Yeah.

[00:27:26] And that gets, you know, back to the other point of it's so expensive to do business here. It's so expensive to live here. It's so expensive to build here. And that was intentional. And that's one of the things. Do you mind if I get a little into the history? Oh, I would love for you to. No, and I want you to show what you got there. And how do people get a copy of that? Yeah, I'll give this to you. But how would people, if someone's listening to this, say, how do you want to see that?

[00:27:56] Oh, I have it on my website. You can just, you know, click on the link. That's about your website. Jill for counsel. Jill for counsel, good. And by the way, I'm going to be endorsing people, and I very well might endorse you too. But, you know, I'm very open-minded because I want to work with people who are in the city. You know, and I'm right now on a pretty active campaign saying we need to make changes. But that doesn't mean every person needs to be changed out.

[00:28:20] In my opinion, it means that we need to change our mindset and our approach and our ability to collaborate with one another and to focus and to lead with leadership. Because right now I think everyone in the city seems to want to be a victim of the system. It's true. I can't do anything different. And, yeah, I'm on the city council. Yeah, I'm the mayor. You know, I'm the city manager. But I can't do this because of the city council.

[00:28:44] The city council can't do this because we're just a city council other than things that are, I think, you know, well-intentioned but damaging to the city. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I would really like to work on cracking that nut because I do not think it needs to be as hard and complicated as it is. We have a real culture of no. And I'll tell you what, from my limited time on council, I was able – I was very effective in getting things moved forward.

[00:29:11] When you have proper stakeholder engagement and bring the right groups together, it doesn't have to be as hard as, you know, people will tell you it is. Well, I think the city council and the city has been really good at pushing things forward. It's just, in my opinion, it's been a lot of the wrong things because I think the reason we have a lot of vacancies, that's very difficult to build, that's very expensive to build, that takes too long to build,

[00:29:37] that we bought that building and, you know, when we threw bad money after good money and worse money after bad money. It's not because they couldn't get things done. It's that they were getting things done. It's just the wrong things. So I think we have to differentiate between it's easy to get things done in the city. What you're getting done is making it more expensive and more difficult. Yeah. And spending money on things that don't really help, you know, bring people into the city, keep people in the city, fill up the office buildings, you know.

[00:30:04] So if it's, you know, raising taxes and spending money on I don't know what because we're not in a – our problem isn't that we don't spend enough money. This city spends a lot of money. So it's not the quantity of money that's being spent. So I don't think it's that the city has trouble getting stuff done. I think it would have trouble getting stuff done that, you know, is different than what it is in its comfort zone. Those are things we need to do. Right.

[00:30:28] But it is like, you know, there is fairly unanimous agreement on council about the need to reform Title IX and to simplify our code. And people have been talking about it. What's Title IX? The land use code that – where most of the kind of layers of discretionary review live and the code that most needs to be kind of cleaned up to make it easier, faster to both, you know,

[00:30:55] build residential property and start a small business. And – but it – we've had trouble translating it from talk to action. And my concern is that once we do finally sort of, you know, press go on the action, but that it's going to take forever and ever and we're going to end up – It doesn't have to. I know. That's – that's – it doesn't have to. And I think that's the trick moving forward. But – but I guess where I wanted to get into history is that – to say that this was very intentional.

[00:31:24] So the divide in Boulder between do we want this to be a sort of sleepy, suburban, kind of single family – Well, let me make it worse. Yeah. And this is not what I want, despite how it might come across. If the aspiration of the city council is to turn Boulder into a new Aspen, it's doing a really good job. It's doing a really good job. I don't want this to be a new Aspen.

[00:31:53] I want there to be a vibrant, you know, business and tech community here. Yeah. I don't want this to be one that depends on a lot of people coming in for a few months a year, enjoying kind of Colorado and then going back to Texas or going back to wherever they're otherwise from. I want this to be kind of, you know, what I think a lot of us have signed up to. I like that we're a university town, that we have, you know, NIST is here, the research institutions, that we have a history of a ton of entrepreneurial activity, that we have really nice business parks

[00:32:21] that, you know, people want to live here, but they also want to innovate here. We got Sundance coming into town. You know, we should not aspire to be the next Aspen. And worse, we shouldn't make us the next Aspen, despite that we're not aspiring to be. And I don't think the city council has designs on us like being another Aspen. I don't think that's their intent, but that's what their actions are leading to. That's where we're headed. And in fact, that's well known kind of in elite circles, you know, across the country and even globally.

[00:32:50] I mean, the Rob report did an article in 2023 that says, forget Aspen, luxury homeowners are snatching up properties in Boulder instead. I mean, we are, it is, it's a thing. There is very much an Aspenization of Boulder. And actually, I like that Aspenization. Yeah. Did you just come up with that? That actually, oh God, I'm all over the place.

[00:33:13] I would like to get back to the sort of history, but the, it ties into, we have built almost 4,000 units of housing over the last decade. And yet our population, non-student population has declined. So what does that tell you? One, a lot of the housing that's being built on city land is for students. And two, vacancy is keeping pace with construction.

[00:33:39] And, you know, I would love to see a reform of our medium mixed, medium density zones, mixed density zones, and business zones where we have a kind of cap on the number of units per acre that basically equals luxury townhomes and condos. There's a reason that's all you see get built downtown. So if you're thinking along Folsom, along Pearl, now at 25th and Spruce, and half of them are vacant. Half of them are second homes.

[00:34:08] And I am not demonizing second homeowners at all, but there is a way to have a built form that people live in. And our code really, you know, capital is very dispassionate, right? Capital is going to chase the highest rate of return. And they're going to look at within each land use code, what, where's the maximum value? And right now in those downtown zones, maximum value for residential is luxury townhomes and condos.

[00:34:36] And I don't know, do you know Ross Holbrook? I don't know his name. Super cool guy. He has a company here. He tried to be the first in the last almost two decades to build something other than luxury townhomes and condos at 22nd and Pearl. They were kind of efficiency apartments. It took four years to get through, you know, city council and planning board. And it was called up over and over and over. And it just became impossible to carry. And so they never got built.

[00:35:06] Oh yeah, because that adds, I mean, the hidden cost in building is that you have to buy something and hold it for a long, long time. And it's interest rates, rates of return are cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. And either that means something doesn't get built, which makes everything else more expensive, supply and demand. Or if it gets built, it has to be priced really high or else, you know, whoever built it's going to lose money and the world will get around and no one will ever build again. Yeah.

[00:35:30] So the city doesn't realize that that's, you know, one of many big contributors to unnecessary costs. But if there's unnecessary costs, you know, fast forward 10 years, 15 years, and you have the problems we have today. That's right. That's right. And so on the, like, history piece is that this has been a divide since day one. This is not a modern divide.

[00:35:54] So early, early on, we, almost as soon as businesses started popping up at all, there was an intense battle in the city over whether we wanted business. And actually, Olmsted, who wrote the improvement of Boulder. Well, let me ask you a question. Yeah. And I want you to be honest and forthright. Sure. Do you want businesses in Boulder? And I'm not talking about just small businesses in Pearl Street, which I definitely want those too.

[00:36:23] But do you want to see the office parks fill up in and around Boulder? I do. Yeah. Okay. I do. So do we think if we did that, if we put our minds to it, that we could, you know, significant influence that? Now, it causes us to have to make bold decisions. But do we think we as a city could do things that instead of giving businesses lots of reasons not to be here, to give them, to remove some of those barriers?

[00:36:53] And then let me, I'm going to ask a run-on question because I want to point out how related. And do you think if we did that, the kind of like housing that would, the response from the housing market would be such that they want to make housing more attractive to people who work in those businesses would seem to be common sense. So, you know, what do you think we can do? Instead of focusing on more regulation to try to do more, you know, city of Boulder design

[00:37:20] about what should and shouldn't be built, if we park that for a while and say, let's get out of the business of thinking we know what needs to be built. And let's figure out how do we get, you know, the market to respond to what we'd like to see respond to. We don't want to be another Aspen. One thing that sets us apart from being another Aspen is we're not just kind of a resort town. We want there to be a vibrant business community. So what would you advocate for to say, you know what, we've got to do our fair share as

[00:37:46] leaders of the city to get those business parks full? Mm-hmm. Okay. So the, there, I'll focus on the business because that's the focus of your question, but you also touched on housing and that's, that's more complicated because we are undoing a hundred years of, of intentionally constraining supply. And so it's not quite on the housing end as easy as just, you know, allow more density

[00:38:15] because, and we, I'd like, I'd like to go into that in a minute. We do need to allow more density, but it needs, we need to be really specific and sophisticated about how we're looking at housing. On the business end, for me, it, it starts with the regulatory environment. It is incredibly difficult to start a business here. And I know you asked about office parks. I mean, this does apply to both big office parks, but, but small business owners in particular.

[00:38:42] I mean, there are just story, there's story after story about the ridiculous hoops that we make people jump through. I do want to not go down the small business because small businesses feed off of like large businesses in many ways, but there's more large businesses here. There's a lot more business activity or to small businesses. I think, you know, a root cause of a lot of the challenges we face is the vacancies in

[00:39:09] those really beautiful office parks, you know, that exist. So if we want to eliminate those, well, do you want to eliminate those vacancies? I think you said yes, but if you do, what would your thought process be on how to go about doing that? Like, why don't, I mean, why wouldn't a business love being in Boulder as opposed to some suburbia like an Arvada or a Lafayette or, you know, or Longmont, you know, you think, man, if I

[00:39:37] could be in Boulder, you know, I'd pay extra to be in Boulder even, you know, within reason, you know, but I'd really love being Boulder, you know, plus the businesses already exist, business parks exist there and I think I get good rent deals on top of it. You know, what would we do to, you know, to say, well, why isn't that happening? Yeah. Okay. So for bigger businesses and offices, I still do believe that regulatory reform, reform is necessary. I think some of the path I was going down was going to talk a little bit more about small

[00:40:05] businesses and the challenges there, but there are regulatory reforms that we need to fill office spaces too. Just for example, we treat temporary use as the same as permanent use. So if a business wants to even kind of try Boulder out for a while, they have to go through all of the same hoops that they would if they were establishing a permanent business. We don't allow adaptive reuse. You know, the reality is that we may not get all of the spaces that are commercial filled

[00:40:35] in today's day and age and adaptive reuse so that they can become something else is something that we should allow. Something else like what? Like housing, for example. We don't allow that conversion. But don't we want the businesses to be here? We do. We do. But there are some buildings, you know, downtown where... Why aren't the businesses choosing to be here? Why don't we start there? Like what's... From their... Do we know... Do we know why they aren't here when there's all these beautiful offices in beautiful Boulder?

[00:41:05] You know, do we know why they're like, I can't be in Boulder. I'm in Boulder. I'm going to move out of Boulder. So the things that we hear from them are cost of doing business here and employees don't live, can't live here. And then specifically downtown, parking can be a challenge. Now, we do have spaces available in our garages at almost all times. We underutilize our garages. But nevertheless, those are the three things that, you know, we hear very often.

[00:41:31] Although that third one doesn't apply to all those beautiful office buildings in East Boulder, the parking lot. No. Yeah. So that's downtown. So getting back to, you know, I think that regulatory reform make it easier to do business here, cheaper to do business here, adaptive reuse. How would we make it cheaper to do business here for, like, let's say there's a cool quantum tech company like Inflection, who used to be in Boulder and now is enjoying being in Louisville

[00:41:59] and Louisville is enjoying Inflection, being in Louisville, even though they were born here at CU and they had a really nice office building here and there were a ton of vacancies all around where their office building was, yet they moved into Louisville. And all of those jobs and all of those families moved with it. Maybe they didn't all move, but they're commuting out of the city if they happen to still be here. What would we have done? Well, one, do we care as a city? Do we care? Let me give you, like, a quick aside story.

[00:42:28] So as you know, I ran Zale and we started Zale from a really small building on Pearl Street. We moved back into Boulder because I wanted to be in Boulder and we were filled up to 29th Street Mall. We had five or six offices there. The Zale signs are still there. The people are long gone. They're like a Bruce Springsteen song. You know, they're all gone. And you know what never happened? The city never even noticed. They never came to me and said, hey, Dan, you're in the news. You're leaving Zale. A new company just bought it and there's a new CEO.

[00:42:57] Oh, you know, what's going to take to keep all these, like, really well-paid employees, a lot of them younger, right into the 9th Street Mall because they bring life to that mall and they spend money in our city. You know, can we, you know, can we get together with you and figure out what can we do to retain Zale? They didn't even know. In fact, most of the people are like, good, those tech people are leaving town. And now, you know, where they're at, they're in Denver. Yeah. And they're considering not even being in Colorado because, you know, even Colorado doesn't show the same appreciation.

[00:43:27] But I look at, you know, the hundreds of people we had there and the families that were around those people and the money they were spending in Boulder and the life they brought to the mall. And now I go to that same 29th Street Mall, a little mall, and all you see is those buildings never got refilled. And then that brand new building they built there, which is beautiful. I think it looks beautiful. No one's ever been in it. And I never hear the city talk about that. I never hear the city, like, we've got a crisis here.

[00:43:54] We got a crisis because whatever we're doing is not getting the companies to use office space that already exists. What are we doing? What can we do to attract them here to Boulder? Because we need them. Our small businesses need them. Our tax revenue needs them. You know, we can't keep raising taxes because you keep raising tax rate because we can't attract taxpayers here. All we do is create a bigger barrier to those businesses who want to be in Boulder or even be able to be in Boulder. Right.

[00:44:24] So, you know, to your story about when Zale left and nobody noticed, it's because we've never really even had much of an office of economic vitality. We had a tiny little office that Molly Winter, God bless her, held together, you know, by the strength of who she is. And she hasn't been with us for a while, though. And there was a period where we didn't have any form of office of economic vitality. We did just sort of reinstate it. We renamed it. But it's a really small team.

[00:44:52] And if you look at, like, what Denver and other cities do, I mean, they have in the city people dedicated to being liaisons to the business community. You know, the chamber works really hard to do that. Downtown Boulder Partnership works really hard to do that. But we don't have that at the city level. And in part because people used to just want to be here. We had a vibrant business economy. They still want to be here, by the way. They just have been driven away. They've been driven away.

[00:45:21] And so now, though, we need to get businesses back. It is, you know, a commercial space in. What kind of businesses? And I'm just saying that because I want to make sure. Because I think one of the mindsets of Boulder that needs to change is when it says businesses, you know, it doesn't really mean businesses. It means businesses in the form of, you know, retail places in Boulder, which is a subset, an important subset of businesses.

[00:45:48] But I think the mindset of we need businesses that hire people who, you know, are part of, like, the go-forward economy. Because that's an essential part of the ecosystem here. Or it's not the only ecosystem here by any stretch of imagination. But if we want Boulder to not be an Aspen, you know, that's an important thing that, you know, it makes up the difference. That we have vibrant, growing businesses who are, you know, let's face it, tech forward is where, you know, the future has been.

[00:46:16] And the future will continue to be. So, you know, if I think the city of Boulder, including you as the candidates that's likely to get elected, says we need to reflect a little bit on that. We need to reflect on what can we do, what must we do, you know, in order to, you know, do everything we can to attract business here. Because you know what? At a minimum, it's more tax revenue for us. As I say, you don't want more tax revenue. But much more important than that, with those spring families. Right.

[00:46:44] And with those spring retail spending for our restaurants and our shops. I agree. They create employment for the people of Boulder. And, you know, we can reverse the tide of vacancies going up and then needing to tax people more and then driving more people out of the city and the population of Boulder going down. My guess is in that report, you don't touch on that at all. But that, to me, is as much of a component of a problem as anything else. It's not, yes, we need to reduce regulation. But there's a lot more than we need to do on that.

[00:47:14] We need to kind of really reflect on what it is that is causing beautiful Boulder to drive away the tech businesses that often are born here. And then they need to leave here because we give them every reason to leave and very few reasons to stay. Yeah. And this is all about our housing and our land use. And it does intersect with businesses tremendously. There's kind of a parallel of economic development. But, you know, getting back to what to do. So, as I said, regulatory office of economic development that's much more robust and empowered.

[00:47:45] Housing is huge. That is one of the top things that employers say for the reasons that they've left is that their employees don't live here. You can go 15 minutes down the street to Longmont and you find 65 percent cheaper commercial rent. People that actually live there, there's virtually no in-commuting, very, very little. And a much easier regulatory environment to navigate through and a city government that welcomes them with open arms. Right.

[00:48:12] So, those are all things that we need here, too. And so, those are the things that I would focus on. You know, like I said, regulatory office of economic development, robust housing. I think that's just even starting there would be huge. Yeah. Yes. And let's talk about that.

[00:48:39] The Office of Economic Development, which a broader way of saying that is let's have a mindset of trying to attract and retain the kind of businesses that we described. Yeah. That needs to come from leadership, right? Because if you just hire an office of economic development, they're going to do whatever they do. But if it's not a major priority of the leadership of Boulder, you know, an office is just going to be, you know, a cost, another way of spending money.

[00:49:11] The city council in its current formation, in my opinion, is so far removed from spending any second of any of their times saying, you know, let's put, let's stop all this other stuff we're doing for a little while. And let's focus on an area that's of vital importance that we spend no time on. How are we going to get these office buildings in East Boulder filled up or at least, you know, from 25%, 30%, 40% vacancy down to a respectful vacancy?

[00:49:39] What do we need to do to track those businesses in here and make sure the ones that are here, we're in touch with them, we're meeting with them to make sure we don't get surprised by Adam Computing, which is a fast-growing company, that they're not going to leave because they don't, you know, they're looking and saying, well, we could save a lot of money if we just move 10 miles away. So does the city council, does, do they, you know, is that anywhere close to a priority of theirs right now?

[00:50:07] Um, I, I honestly don't know. I have not seen it on the priority list necessarily, but I don't want to speak for current council members. I mean, I know that, that many current council members care deeply about the business community. And, um, you know, I think that everybody on council, really this election in particular, like the community is being very clear.

[00:50:34] Um, the, of, uh, I think that the, there is community distrust and dissatisfaction and unrest unlike I've ever seen. And, um, well, because of a lot of things that we've talked about, there have been some bad decisions made. And then we do keep asking for more. So, you know, I, I, I've been very clear and vocal that I don't more money, right? Like I don't support the bond measure.

[00:51:01] And if you think about going back to kind of our conversation about the private sector versus public, you know, there's $170 million in there for a new police building for which we have not even identified the land it would go on. Can you imagine as a businessman going to an equity partner and saying, give me money. I want to build a building. I don't know where the land is. I don't have architectural drawings. I have no plan for what it's going to look like, but give me the money anyway and just trust me. And, oh, but trust me, but, uh, but here's all these areas in which I haven't earned your.

[00:51:31] I know I screwed up this last month. We spent $350 million on this little office building that we have. But trust me, we'll get it right next time. And the community is mad. At least they're being a little more honest. They're mad about that. They're really mad about that. And my wife, Cindy, is, uh, you know, is the chair of the police foundation. And, you know, we've gotten to know Chief Redford, who I really like, uh, you know, very well.

[00:51:53] And, you know, we want to be as supportive to all of our, you know, all of our first responders and our, our, and people in public service. So it's kind of hard to take a position that, you know, that we shouldn't vote in something that's for the police. But, but at the same time, $170 million is for what again? Right. And what do we need to do? And why do we do it on the heels of just wasting so much money? Yeah.

[00:52:18] And, you know, on what I view as a bit of a, you know, I mean, well, let me talk about this. How many city employees live in the city? And how many of them commute? How many of them actually, how many days a week do they actually come into the office? How many are they required to come into office? Because a lot of people are talking about, and I haven't checked the data. I don't know if the data is even publicly available. But the perception is most of them don't live in Boulder.

[00:52:46] The, the, if it's majority or the super majority, you know, 70%, 80%, 40%. But it'd be nice to know how many of them don't even live in Boulder. And then the perception is that they, you know, it's optional to come into office and most, most don't on most days. And so you've got the problem of Boulder, if they're not living in Boulder and they're not working in Boulder, yet they're the people who are being paid by Boulder, they're kind of detached from the community.

[00:53:13] It's like hiring a, it's almost like hiring a consultant and spending money somewhere else. That's the city money and the people don't live here. They rarely come into work here. I don't know how true that is because I haven't seen the data, but the perception is that, you know, most of them don't come into office most days and that most of them don't even live in the city. And therefore we're not even their community. We're not their community during the day. We're not their community at night. They don't spend their money in here.

[00:53:40] They don't, if we have problems here, you know, they're the ones who are supposed to be working on them, but they're not, you know, they're not, it's not their problems. Their problems are in, you know, Louisville or Arvada or Longmont or even maybe up in the mountains. Maybe some of them moved up to the mountain towns and they're three hours away and, you know, and they're able to do that because they only have to come into office once a month. You know, is that, do you have any insights? I do, I do. Yeah.

[00:54:05] I mean, okay, so we know that the vast majority of city employees don't live in Boulder. They can't afford it. It's, and I wouldn't take that though and then say, but they don't care. You know, so my, my partner was Boulder's director of transportation for a while. She worked for the city for 10 years and she lives in Niwot and did most of that time. And I mean, that woman cares more about Boulder though than so many people. I mean.

[00:54:32] Yeah, but it is fair to say the longer someone's day life and night life and schools and restaurants and way of life, their bike trails, their walking paths, the longer that it's somewhere other than Boulder, both day and night, the more detached they are from Boulder. And that's not a critique of the person not caring about Boulder. It's that you're going to care a lot less because you don't even live the Boulder situation.

[00:55:02] Boulder feels less safe. Okay. You know, but Darvada is plenty safe enough for me. If, if it's, if housing is too expensive because that's why they can't live there. Well, I don't have to live there. In fact, I only have to drive there, so it's really not my problem. It's someone else's problem, but they're part of what makes Boulder more expensive. They're part of what makes it very difficult to build here. There's part of, you know, their policies dictate whether it's more safe or less safe. Well, council, that's council. I mean. Employees too. Employees do the work.

[00:55:32] They do the work, but we, it's council's responsibility to set the policy. I actually, you know, in the land use department, many of them think that our land use code is ridiculous. And they would love to see council have the strength to revise it. If they're not living here and they don't have to come here, they might think it's ridiculous. But the motivation to say, hey, we need to stand up and, and, you know, and get this to change because this is affecting us too. We live here. We work here.

[00:55:59] And we can't afford homes here that we should be able to afford because you're not letting homes be built. Well, that's the thing. And you're making it way too expensive to be built. And then you're taking, you know, the supply of homes and you're, you're putting a lot of that supply into other uses like office buildings for the city employees. That's, and that's the key. That's what I mean about don't care. It's not, yeah, they sort of care, but it's not really, you know, they don't have to live with the problem of we're going through. They're like, well, I guess we need to raise more taxes for those people in Boulder to pay more taxes. You know, but our taxes here in Longmont aren't as expensive.

[00:56:29] So, oh, well, you know, let's just raise taxes since we're driving all the people who pay taxes to Longmont and other places. You know, I think they would care a lot more if they had to live the problems. Most city employees, though, just don't make enough money to live in Boulder. So we could, I mean, there's a couple of different routes we could go with this, right? We could try to have a policy of hiring people that live in the city. I don't know that we'd get people with the resume that many of them bring, though.

[00:56:56] Or we could try to have policies that help people who make a modest salary live in the city. And that's what I would love to see. But back to kind of the numbers and whether they work here. We have a lot of affordable housing, but we don't require people in affordable housing to be, I would have, you know, if we were using affordable housing dollars in a way that helped people who, you know, are police, fire, you know, in the city,

[00:57:21] have some level of subsidies that they could, you know, afford the city, but condition on them living in the city, I think that would be a really good thing. But we don't want to do that, right? We don't want to like, well, we can't really go that far. You know, we can't, like, require them to live in the city. Well, okay, but you want to help them in certain ways, but you don't want to tie it to them living in the city. That seems a little odd. You mean employees? I mean, the people that live in affordable housing obviously live in the city because they live in our affordable housing.

[00:57:48] Yeah, but they're not part of the, I mean, if you wanted to make us a police, like, I would think, for example, police. Yeah. If they lived in the city, that would be better than if they didn't live in the city. Now, you can't require them to live in the city, but if we said, for those of you who live in the city, you get an extra, you know, stipend of some sort as kind of an added incentive to live here as opposed to live elsewhere. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. Yeah, I'd have to think more about that. I don't disagree.

[00:58:16] But I do think that sometimes in the community conversation about employees that work downtown and how many days are they here, the numbers are a little bit overblown. So the number of employees downtown is somewhere between 350 and 400, and most of them are actually out and about. They're writing parking citations, and they're doing building. They have to do their job here. Yeah, they have to do their job here. Well, who are all these people going to fill up that big new office space?

[00:58:45] Because if that big new office space was in Boulder itself. Yeah, they're concentrating all of this. So the city offices right now are dispersed kind of in the civic area, the municipal building, the buildings like where Mustard's Last Stand is on Arapaho. They're a bunch, and they're moving everybody there. So there's a bunch of employees that are here because they have to be, and then there's a bunch of employees that do work from home.

[00:59:11] So the number is they have to be in Boulder two days a week. And my understanding is that that's... For full days? Yeah, they have to come into town and be in the office two days a week. Two days a week for a full day, or is it like, well... No, for a full day. Because a lot of times when people do that, it's like, well, I've got to show up and come in for a while, but I don't want to get caught in the commute in the morning, so I'm going to get in around 10 o'clock, and then I want to avoid the commute out. So I'll be gone by three, and that's one of my two days. You know, that...

[00:59:40] I don't know if that's the case or not. So that's why I was asking, do we really mean two full days, or do we mean, you know, do we mean sort of, kind of? My understanding is a true two full days in that that number's going to go up. But I don't... You know, I think that it's important that our employees are here. I don't think it's sort of the... Like somebody you had on the podcast said, if they were here, we'd have $5 to $10 million in economic benefit from them. I don't think that's true.

[01:00:08] I think they're not going to, you know, Frosca for lunch. They're bringing... They're not even going to go for lunch, but, you know, they're bringing tuna fish sandwiches. And I think that, you know, we're overestimating the impact they would have in terms of economic vitality. It's not to say it's not important. But I think we're underestimating the impact of them not being here hardly at all for a long period of time, while also spending a whole bunch of money to build a brand new, very expensive office complex.

[01:00:35] So, yeah, I agree wholeheartedly that it's easy to exaggerate. But there's a way that can be clarified, and that is just being super transparent. Yeah. And say, let's talk about the exact numbers. You know, here's how many city employees live in the city. Here's how many don't. Here's how often they come into work. Here's when they don't. And just be super transparent, and then we'll know if... But I do think it's a huge hidden cost.

[01:01:03] When people largely don't live in Boulder and largely work from home elsewhere, if their job is to serve the city of Boulder, I just think that's, you know, there's a huge hidden cost because people will, you know, and your partner very well could be a big exception to that, but human tendency is they've got their families, they've got their kids, they've got their friend groups, they've got their local restaurants,

[01:01:29] they've got all of their stuff elsewhere, even during the day, even during working hours, and that's going to make them less attached, less knowledgeable, less vested in what is really going on in the city of Boulder, not because they're bad people, but because, you know, I cared a lot more around Niwot when I lived in Niwot. I cared a lot more in Boulder because I live in Boulder, and I cared even more when we had, you know, 600 employees here in Boulder as well. Yeah. You know, that's just natural.

[01:01:57] I'm very open to looking at ways that we could try to hire from within our own city better. Of course, we also want to hire the best professionals, and a lot of times they fit in kind of a, you know, income and age category where they have families and they just can't afford to live here. I mean, I'm not blaming the city employees of Boulder, but we just talked about all the problems Boulder has that have accumulated over 10 to 15 years. Yeah. So if we had all kinds of great employees in Boulder and great leadership

[01:02:27] and a great city council, why would we have all these problems? So I think it's easy to say they're really good employees. They're really talented. That's why we need to keep them, and in many cases that's true, but I think it also is a convenient way to not act upon what you need to act on, that Boulder has significant problems, many of which are, not all of which, many of which are self-inflicted. We've driven business out of here. We've made things way too expensive.

[01:02:55] We are making our taxes have to be higher than anyone else's taxes in the area. I think that's true. We make it way much longer to build than needs to be built. The city's got tons and tons of, spends a ton of money, has lots and lots of employees, yet also has a lot of, you know, I don't know if NGOs is the right word, NGOs that get funded to help the city do the city work. There's something that's not adding up there. Yeah, well, and a lot of that, again, though, goes back to we manufactured scarcity.

[01:03:23] So, okay, so Boulder zoned itself. Our very first land use code was in 1928, but our big comprehensive code where, kind of as we know it. So our very first zoning code was 1928. Our first land use and zoning and big comprehensive planning was 1955. This was the height of low-density post-war Levitt Town zoning. So Boulder, when you look at a Boulder zoning map, it's a sea of yellow, which is low density.

[01:03:51] And that's what we did in the 19, it was in 1955, and it exists to this day. So of our residential zones where 90% of our housing is, 74.3% are low-density zones. And then when we decided to layer growth controls on top of that in the 60s and 70s, all of the documents from back then talk about we're going to densify the urban core. We're going to put growth controls.

[01:04:17] We're going to put open space and a blue line and height and essentially encapsulate Boulder. But we're going to densify the core. We never densified the core. We kept it that 1955 low-density zoning, and then we layered growth controls on top. So we manufactured scarcity. And that is a huge reason why it's so expensive. And then in addition to that, so in 1971, this is really interesting in my nerdy mind,

[01:04:45] but there was a resolution to cap Boulder's population at 100,000. And it very narrowly failed. But because it was such a contentious community fight back then, this council at the time said that they would take every measure within their power to curb growth. And that was business and residential. Is this what time frame? That was 1971. And what was the population of Boulder back then?

[01:05:14] Oh, gosh. I'd have to look. Presumably a lot less than 100,000. A lot. Maybe not. But not that much less. We really haven't grown much for a while. I would guess maybe 80,000 or something like that. I have it in here. I just... 70,000? 70,000 including students? Is there a student population then? We've always integrated the student population that puts their residency as Boulder.

[01:05:43] So essentially, the student population that lives on campus isn't included, but the ones that live off campus are, which is a pretty high percentage. But with the 70,000, what would that have been? So it says that if you're looking at the broader metropolitan... No, the city of Boulder, which is apples to apples, not including the 70,000, because I just wanted to compare 70,000 to the 100,000 today.

[01:06:13] That 70,000 does include students. So that would be compare in the 100,000 included students or didn't include students? Yeah. Our population numbers always include the majority of students, not all of them. Gotcha. Yeah. But anyway, so council then said, we are going to take every measure within our control to curb growth, both business and residential. So from then, that's where we got... And I talk about growth control by hassle, but I didn't make up that term. Paul Danish made up that term.

[01:06:43] And I found it in a 1976 newspaper article. Where he said, since 1971, Boulder has taken every measure possible to do growth control by hassle. And that is very true. So I have a whole chapter on all of the different layers of review that we piled on since then to make it really hard. So you've got these two things that have made it really hard to live and to start a business in Boulder. One is manufactured scarcity.

[01:07:10] And two is decades and decades of layers of code. Really, the discretionary review process is when things changed a lot. The fact that you don't really have firm targets for what you need to build or how you need to operate, that it can just sort of change at the whim of, you know, council or planning board is one of the biggest hindrances. There's no certainty.

[01:07:40] And you think about that too. You know, as somebody who does have capital and utilize capital, certainty is huge. And there is no level of certainty. You know, we can call up any project at any time for any reason. And so those are two. And they do, too. And they do. And they do. A lot of them for good intention reasons, but very good people. Because I will say this. Everyone I've met who works for Boulder, who's on city council, I've always liked the people.

[01:08:10] I've never had, like, I don't like the people or I don't. Some of the tensions, I think, you know, I think, you know, to you, to build on what you're saying, if they said, we are intentionally trying to make Boulder not affordable. Yeah. If they would come out and say that, I would say, okay, now you're at least being honest. As opposed to, we want to make Boulder more affordable. However, we're going to do all these things that, you know, drive, you know, the inability to do anything and make it more and more expensive. At least say, you know what? We know we're making it more affordable. We get it.

[01:08:39] You know, vote for us because we're going to make it even more unaffordable because that's what our policies do. So, but there is a little bit of hypocritical behavior. There is. Because when they say we want to make it more affordable, they're not really talking about, you know, I think all of the people in Boulder. I think it's a code word for government-controlled rules and regulation and housing.

[01:09:05] That affordable is often a reason to have more regulation to take money from some and apply it in ways that other people want to apply it. As opposed to, we really want it to be more affordable for families, for people who work here, for people who want to buy a home, for people who want to buy a condominium, people who want to move into an apartment, people who want to work at a company and don't want to commute in from the outside.

[01:09:28] When I say affordable, I'm talking about a set of policies, a set of mindset, a culture, a commitment that we're going to do everything we can within reason. We don't want things to be unsafe. We don't want to lose what Boulder is. But we also want to eliminate everything that we should eliminate that adds delays, adds costs, compresses supply. Because if you compress supply, costs go way up.

[01:09:52] But I think when people say affordable, they're really not as committed to it as the word sounds because the acts that they're taking are making it a lot less affordable for most people. And maybe some people who get the benefit of affordable housing, government-controlled affordable housing, it might be better for them, but that's at an expense of making it way less affordable for a lot of other everyday people.

[01:10:21] And I think that's not something we acknowledge and talk about and realize that there's things we're doing in words that sound nice that are making it way expensive for lots of everyday people in Boulder. Yeah, that's right. And the challenge, though, especially when we're talking about housing, is that we're unraveling so many decades of intentional scarcity

[01:10:46] and that just sort of like, let me give you an example. We do need to find ways to have more density in that 74%, those low-density neighborhoods. And the problem, though, starting this many decades behind is that we just started allowing duplexes in RL1 along transit corridors.

[01:11:15] But the very first examples of what we're getting are either a small little ranch home that a family or a couple lived in gets scraped and built into luxury duplex that sells for $2.5 million per side

[01:11:33] and is a second home for both sides, and I can name specific properties, or B, small ranch home gets scraped and built into a duplex that is high-end student condos, right? And student apartments. There's one going up right now that's six bedrooms, six baths on either side, so 12-bed, 12-bath in a family neighborhood.

[01:11:58] And I don't really see either of those outcomes as a great outcome, right? Like when we passed this upzoning along the transit corridors, we talked about this is going to create middle-income housing. But, again, capital goes where it can get the highest rate of return, and we didn't put any requirement for owner-occupancy or occupancy at all or any affordability. So you're talking about more regulation and more rules. Well, I'm talking about –

[01:12:27] That's an important question because that's what got us into this mess is all these good intentions translate into a laundry list of requirements. You eval shalt not to do this and you eval shalt that. But what you're not saying is we will have housing built for families if families have a big reason to be here, and families will have a big reason to be here if we make it really easy on families to be here. And if we do that, businesses will want to be here as well. Well, what you're saying, and this is where – you and I are agreeing on a lot of stuff, right?

[01:12:57] But this is where I think the tendency of Boulder is to have these really good intentions, and then want to use those really good intentions to start to dictate a bunch of regulations on what you can do and you can't do. As opposed to say, you know what? It's in our power as leaders of Boulder to do other things as well that we could get those offices, spaces filled, and we could get more housing supply, but we've got to change our ways. Let me go back to that Glenwood example because that's the only one I'm involved with,

[01:13:26] but there's probably 40 of those examples that we could put in our mind. Instead of trying to have more rules and more regulations to tell people what they can and can't do, why don't we take the opposite approach in saying that Glenwood people want to build there, and if they build there, that is going to be accessible housing. What can we, the city, do to work with them not by taking taxpayer money and give them incentives, but remove the barriers, remove unnecessary costs, and say, if we help you get this thing built, that's going to be good for the city.

[01:13:56] Let's start there, not start with, you know, we're going to put more regulations, more policies in place. So we need far fewer regulations in our multifamily zones and in our business zones, far fewer. And I've covered that, you know, I think in this podcast kind of extensively. And so I want to strip that away again when it comes to medium density because we do have regulations that make it so difficult to build and that cap what you can build.

[01:14:26] That equals luxury townhomes and condos that are vacant. Vacancy is the worst possible land use in a land-constrained city. I feel very strongly about that. Eventually it wouldn't be vacant if we had the business parks filling up because... That's right. All of a sudden there'd be people who are willing to buy it. I agree with you. And they wouldn't be vacant if they took a different form. But I think that when we're talking about... Well, let's skip over that because that's where I think you and I can disagree that you want to change the form. I want to create more opportunities for families to be here. I think it would create more opportunities for families.

[01:14:56] Yeah, but if a solution is more, you know, more, you know, city of Boulder, you know, dictating what people can and can't do, you're going to end up with a lot of really bad outcomes of the very type that we're experiencing right now, as opposed to saying we got to do a lot less, you know, trying to think we're smarter than, you know, the market and dictating what can and can't be done because we have our own view. We know we have empty office.

[01:15:22] We know we have land that wants to be developed that, you know, that's... We don't have a ton of it, but we have plenty enough to keep us busy for 10 years. And then we're going to have to be like, okay, well, now we're running out of, you know, land that wants to be residential anyways and business parks that want to be filled up. And maybe we reach our capacity as Boulder, but at least we did stall that by making, you know, really available land that can be built on and really available office buildings that can be filled up.

[01:15:51] You know, I think we could focus on low-hanging fruit and change our mindset. That is what I'm really saying. Don't think let's come up with more reasons to regulate and more, you know, top-down planning on what can and can't be done. Let's put our minds to, like, see what it is that's preventing us from attracting the businesses that will fill up the business parks, which will fill up the shops on Pearl Street, which will fill up the homes and will fill up the schools. Let's start there, not start with more, you know, brain and fossil regulations. No, we need to start there.

[01:16:20] So there's the business track and then there's the housing track. And we've talked a lot about the business track. And then the housing track, I think the point that I'm trying to make is we're starting from way behind. We're starting from over 100 years of intentionally manufacturing scarcity. And we need to be much more sophisticated in how we go about housing reform. So if you go to jill4council.com backslash housing, you'll find how I'm thinking about this

[01:16:47] is we tend to be too simplistic of either just straight up, build more housing, up zone, or don't build more housing, we don't want any more people here. Whereas I think that we need to take a much more sophisticated sort of zone-by-zone approach and say, okay, medium mixed and business zones make a lot of sense to roll back barriers, to roll back all of the rules and regulations that we have on the unit caps.

[01:17:13] And the fact that we are really, our code is unintentionally incentivizing luxury townhomes and condos that are vacant. How do we change that? But in our low-density zones, I don't think it's just as simple as start allowing whatever we want because we don't end up with the outcomes that are serving the community. And we end up with people that are so upset. We have to find ways to bring the community along.

[01:17:40] We are going to end up swinging back towards a very kind of no-growth mentality, which we had for so many decades, if the community is as mad as they are about the things that are getting built next door to them. And so I think that, you know, like it's not more regulation. We just forever in those zones, you were only allowed to have one home, one single family home.

[01:18:08] We have rolled that back and we're allowing for more. But I think saying how can we both allow for more and how can that more be what we want it to be like for families is a smart thing to do. And it's something that will bring the community along in a better way. So I totally agree with you. We need more economic development. We need to be friendlier to businesses. And we need to be really smart and sophisticated with how we look at housing reform so that we get

[01:18:36] we've got to get people living here again. And actually, I want to touch on one other thing that I meant to say when we were talking about what I would do with businesses. So relocalizing the Boulder economy is a big part of my platform. And a lot of cities are starting to look at procurement. So the city of Boulder and CU both actually I'd add in Boulder Public Health or spends hundreds of millions of dollars on procurement every year.

[01:19:05] And other cities are saying, OK, 25 percent or even 10 percent of that has to come from local businesses. Not I'm not making this some some do kind of gendered or or BIPOC or whatever. I don't even think we need to get that niche. I think just local business and where those businesses didn't exist before they started forming. And so I think it's another. I mean, great intention, great, great intention, more regulation, more telling people what they can do and can't do.

[01:19:34] Why not just make it easier for businesses to be here? Well, it's not people what they can't intend to. It's the city. It's the city saying we have to go out and find. The city needs to shave off spending. Not like we're going to add to our cost structure by forcing ourselves to buy unnaturally from businesses that don't exist in Boulder. But if we have to buy in Boulder, then those businesses will exist. Those are businesses that maybe aren't meant to exist because that's just a hidden form of subsidy.

[01:20:03] Boulder needs to learn how to be disciplined with the spending, not give it more opportunity to spend more money. Except that this the places that have done local procurement have the tremendous amount of economic benefit. I mean, if you're in New York City or Chicago, big city. Yeah, maybe. But but, you know, those aren't exactly great around cities either. Boulder, but city Boulder, I mean, we have crisis problems here. And that's not a crisis problem.

[01:20:27] A crisis problem is, you know, we're spending way too much stuff on on things we don't need with one big example. But that's just happens to be very visible example. There's probably lots, lots more spending we don't need to be making. We got way too much regulation. We got land that is meant for housing to be built on that can't be built under today's regulations, including all the added costs we add to it. Some of those added costs came from very good intentions.

[01:20:54] We're going to be the most forward, you know, community in and these kind of stoves or that kind of something else. And it's like, does anyone add up that that's an extra 30 percent, 40 percent cost to build? It's a lot of money. Which means we don't build, which means the supply is low. And there's a lot of unsightly lots that really are screaming to be built with more density and look nicer and be better for, I think, better for the community. I think that's safe to say. Why don't we start there?

[01:21:23] Why don't we start with let's get our top 10, top 15, top 20 pieces of land and say, what can we do to spur an economic boom there so that we can get housing built on places where it's meant to be built? And let's get those businesses full so that it's families who buy there, people who live and work in Boulder, not out-of-towners who want to use this as a vacation home. Let's work on those two because, you know, we'll generate more tax revenue for the city. We'll provide more business for the businesses of the city.

[01:21:52] We'll get more families here. We'll keep kids in school. As opposed to, nah, let's not work on that stuff. Let's work on these other things because we want the city to, you know, buy from businesses that don't exist in the city at more expensive rates than they could get it next door. No, it's not an either or. It's not, nah, don't work on that because we need to work on this. Priorities are parties. You know, you're a business person too. I mean, if you're a business person, you've got to work on high priorities because if you work on everything at once. Yeah, we can't work on everything at once. We have crises going on.

[01:22:20] No, I'm not saying we need to work on everything at once, but I would encourage you to look at Press in England and Cleveland, Ohio and places that have done local procurement. And it does generate a tremendous amount of economic benefit for the local community. You know, I think there's a lot to localization. But it's regulation and it's government control. It's not regulation of businesses, though. It's the city saying we're going to invest in our own community. That's all it is.

[01:22:46] We're going to own our own public utility and spend so many years and so many dollars. And now we're suffering from having, you know, instead of working on having a really good utility here, we've worked on kind of fighting the utility with tons of taxpayer money, which is probably going to pay for in that $400 million measure. It's probably a lot of those costs that were spent because we're funding the idea that we could run a power utility better than a power utility so that we have local jobs and local investment. And we created a mess.

[01:23:17] And these all start with good ideas, good intention ideas. They may not be good ideas, but well-intentioned ideas. And I think we've got to, like, know the difference between, okay, that might sound interesting. Maybe Cleveland's doing it. I don't know. But that's not our priority. Our priority is we've got a huge vacancy rate of businesses. And we are letting our community down. And our tax revenue is growing at a really small rate. And our spending is growing way north of inflation. Those are our problems. Not we don't buy from businesses that don't exist. Those are our problems.

[01:23:44] But we do, in a budget crisis, you've got to do two things. You've got to get your spending under control. So we need that performance auditor to understand how we've been spending. Where's the fat? We need to cut on consultant spending. We need to roll back and really get tight about spending. But you also need to find ways to generate economic activity. Yes. Build up the office buildings. That's right. We need a lot of economic activity for not just informants. Dan, I use the word vacancy on the campaign trail more than any other candidate. Vacancy is...

[01:24:13] But you're usually talking about small... I think, maybe I'm being unfair, but I think when you see vacancy, you see small businesses on Pearl Street. And I do too. But I'm also talking about tech businesses. No, vacancy everywhere. Vacancy of any kind. I cannot overstate how passionate I am about filling vacancy. It is the worst land use in a land-constrained city. So my area of expertise on vacancy is in housing because I've actually poured through thousands of public records and one by one.

[01:24:43] I appreciate that you put that together. Yeah, yeah. I haven't seen it all yet, but I hear you talk about it. So the city has had a really hard time even gauging residential vacancy. Commercial vacancy is really easy. But residential vacancy is tough because the only municipal utility that we have is water. And a big, giant second home spends actually more on water just on their yard and landscaping maintenance. Ours comes from, by the way, ours comes from the, you know, from the, we're the last ditch Yeah, you have a ditch here. And we collect that water. So.

[01:25:12] Yeah, that's great. So we're geothermal. And so we don't draw as much power. We create power and we use water that otherwise I don't know where we go. Right. But when the city is trying to determine it, you know, I live in a tiny little condo. I use less water than many vacant homes. So the city's had a hard time understanding. So I literally went through one by one, property by property on countless properties to identify where the vacancy problems exist and try to come up with solutions for how we can, you

[01:25:42] know, how we can fill that. So I. Do you buy into what I'm saying? That if we focused on understanding what are the impediments for the business parks being filled up, a lot of these other problems start to solve themselves as a result, as opposed to saying, well, we're really not going to spend that much time on that, but we're going to try to add new regulations and new requirements and new expectations of what gets built and who lives there.

[01:26:11] It's like, well, I think there's a lot more families that move into those places and a lot more response. If we make it easier to build, what gets, will get built is for people who work here and live here and have kids here. You know, I think the first order problem is getting kind of back to the point where people want to be in Boulder, you know, starting with businesses and that directly leads to families that come in and grow together, but they leave together too. I know. They've been leaving together. I hear what you're saying.

[01:26:40] And the, here's where, here's where I get caught up. The, so I, I don't at all disagree with the need to fill those spaces. I really do. I can't emphasize that enough, but I don't necessarily think that that's what brings families back only because like when Google came, for example, everyone was like, oh my God, prices are going to go up. Housing prices, right? These are really, they're, everybody's rich. And I'm, I've been in real estate for a long time.

[01:27:07] So I worked with a bunch of people that worked at Google. The average Google employee, when they moved here made a hundred thousand dollars and they couldn't afford a house in Boulder. Even back then, that was what, like 2000, like, I don't know. The early 2000, like the early 2010s. So, or mid 2010s. So I'm working with this one Google employee. He makes $125,000 and we cannot find a house for his wife and two kids.

[01:27:36] Yeah, because we make it so expensive to build here and so much time frame and so much added costs. And we're going to make someone who builds it, they're going to have to pay for this. They're going to have to pay for that. They're going to have to have this. They're going to have to have that. It's going to take four years. Yeah. And then it's never going to get built. And yeah, it's too expensive, but it's too expensive. One, because we're land constrained, but two, because of city regulation policies and a lot less commitment to say, the solution is not to regulate even more and create even more

[01:28:05] rules and more policies. We could do that. But first, let's get rid of everything we could get rid of. Let's partner with those who want to put capital to work, want to build, and let's look for opportunities to do it. But even when we have big opportunities for them to do that, we kind of jump in as a city and we make it so that they can't even use the land. I mean, we're the, you know, I'm not an expert at, you know, there's some land just north of here, north and a little bit east, north and a little bit west.

[01:28:34] I look at them like, what prime real estate that's screaming for like, you know, neighborhood communities. But instead, the city's like, well, no, we're not going to let that be used for a neighborhood. We're going to like make it really, really hard to build there and just, you know, keep the warehouses or the storage units or set it aside for some kind of city use. It's like, well, actually, Dan, I don't know if you know this, but the property that we're

[01:28:59] on right now, your property is, you know, it's 6.35 acres on a transit corridor next to both kind of medium density and low density housing. And when it came up for sale, I was pushing really hard to get this zoned for housing. And it's zoned agricultural, as you know, so you can build, you know, something bigger than you can on most other parcels. But I definitely think that there are parcels all throughout.

[01:29:27] And you got a great, I mean, it was a great deal on this property. This was such a good, I mean, I remember this so vividly because I wrote to council, I wrote to planning. I was like, this is a property that should be housing, you know? And so, like, that's no, you know, you, it wasn't. So, like, you didn't do anything wrong. Well, we had a binary choice. Yeah. A binary choice was, you know, build a single house here. Yeah. On the whole piece of land.

[01:29:53] Or have the city say there needs to be, you know, this plan here that you have to abide by, which would be lots and lots and lots of units, which neighbors would have hated. They would have hated it, yeah. But there was no, like, opportunity to sit down with the city and say, let's take this and make it eight pieces of land. Yeah, that's right now. They'd be like, oh, you need to change something? Here's your plan. We're the city. We know what's best. You know, you have to do all of this or you could do what you did. We didn't really even have a chance to have that. And it even being lots of housing was totally uncertain. No one was willing.

[01:30:22] It was like, well, if you want to go ahead and buy it and then take it through all of the discretionary use reviews and spend four years trying to build something. So you, you know, again, like, you know, capital follows the route that you kind of make for it. Right. And so that was what happened here. But there are parcels all across the city that we should be looking at that are kind of similar to this situation where, like, when it goes up for sale, is it zoned to be what we want it to be?

[01:30:50] Is there a buy right opportunity to put what should be there and would be community serving on it? And I have wanted to do that as for a decade. But there's some balance there. Boulder has taken that to the extreme. And that extreme is what led to, in my opinion, all these problems that we've been talking about in there that Boulder has taken that mindset way too far. And instead of saying, okay, let's start, like, you know, point to Glenwood ones because there's a lot of examples like that.

[01:31:19] That's not, you got to get it and you got to, like, control it and you got to, you know, prevent this and require that. All you got to do is, like, hey, let's go work with the people who own that and say, we'd really like to see something built here that is a lot of units. Oh, we'd really like to build something that's a lot of units. It's, okay, what can we do together so that that happens versus not happen? There's probably, I don't know, 30 opportunities to have those conversations with different people and say, what can we do?

[01:31:50] But what it would require is a uncomfortable conversation. It's like, okay, you see these 20 requirements here? That adds a lot to the cost. You have to get rid of those. You know, you're not going to get any of the benefits anyways if nothing gets built. But if something gets built, you're going to have people who live in these. They're going to be paying taxes to the city and they're going to be, you know, supporting the restaurants and they're going to be helping make Boulder be what we all want Boulder be. So what you have to do is not spend more city money, but you got to get out of the way.

[01:32:19] Not get out of the way is a strong way of saying you got to work with us that these policies that, again, sort of a lot of them have great intentions. But it's the cumulative effect of all these that means these places that can be built aren't. And then we can go worry about, you know, even more creative solutions down the road. But when you're standing in the way of a lot of stuff that wants to happen, let's fix that first. Let's go after a law hanging fruit. Yeah. I completely agree with you.

[01:32:48] And again, I do think that on the housing end, we need to be really, really sophisticated about how we approach that to get the outcomes we want. And on the business end, I totally agree. I mean, it's there's so many crazy things that the city does for businesses. I mean, a friend of mine owns a store downtown and they were like, OK, you've got to rip out the whole back part of the store to build an ADA compliant bathroom. And she's great. We welcome, you know, the disabled community.

[01:33:18] Of course, we support this. Did that. And then she was like, well, no one wheelchairs can't fit through the door because it's too narrow. So I'm going to go ahead and widen the door. And they said, no, no, no, you can't widen the door. It's historic. So we have like, you know, she spent all these months. I mean, another business owner trying to start a restaurant downtown. He applied after the city had passed the parking reductions, but before they had been implemented. And so he wants to have this beautiful back patio where there would be parking.

[01:33:45] And they said, well, you're going to you either have to build the parking or you have to wait six months to reapply until he's like, well, it's already passed. Like you're going to make me have carrying costs for six more months to do something you've already said you're going to do. And it's just I mean, I mean, we could go on and on and on the way that our rules are just roadblocks. I mean, you can barely even start a little taco truck in the city. And I think this is true. You can tell me if it is or isn't.

[01:34:12] But when you talk to a person in the city, they don't want to be that way. I mean, it's not like you got people who are the barriers. People feel like I really wouldn't. I get it. I get the covered example. I get it. You know, that's really a bad thing. But I feel helpless. I feel unempowered. I feel like I have no choice but to do what I'm doing. And that's where leadership matters.

[01:34:34] And that's where, you know, I'd look at the opportunity to be, you know, if you're on if you want to be on city council, not you, but a person wants to be on city council, a person wants to be mayor. I mean, it starts there. But if they're taking the tone of like we're going to add more restrictions, we're going to add more barriers. And, you know, we're going to, you know, add more to this. And, you know, how's that person who works for the city, who maybe even lives in the city,

[01:35:00] and maybe even comes to work every day in the city, and has every one of the right intentions and the skill set. If they're helpless, whose fault is that? Because that's not, you know, I'm not an overly religious guy, but certainly God didn't make that person helpless. Someone else is making that person helpless. Something in the system, something that helps. It's true. And that whole mindset needs to change. And unfortunately, I think, you know, this is voters, you know, voters elect people in, obviously.

[01:35:27] But our voters, it's like, why wouldn't they, why wouldn't the voters of Boulder, like, say, you know what? We need to, like, try something different because what we're doing right now is really, you know. And I think even the existing people would be different in their, in what they do if they heard that. And, you know, they thought them would respond well to that, I assume. At least I hope they would. Yeah. Yeah. I would love to see what it would look like to just sort of start with yes, especially when it comes to businesses.

[01:35:55] And even just, even in a certain zone or for a certain time period or something, just, just say yes, you know. And businesses are people, right? I mean, it's like, when we're saying yes to businesses, we're saying, you know, yes to people who are in Boulder having a small business and employees who work there. And the people, those people live somewhere and hopefully a lot of them live in and around Boulder. So the yes to businesses doesn't mean we're catering to businesses.

[01:36:23] It means we're catering to the people of Boulder who are part of the economy. And I think maybe saying yes to the people of Boulder, including the people who are a big part of our economy, you know, and their families and their kids. And how do we keep schools open, not closed? And how do we keep them full, not empty? You know, how do we make them feel safe, make the parks feel safe? You know, how do we say yes to the people of Boulder is the way I guess I would put it.

[01:36:50] Because right now we do a really, really good job of saying, no, but let me explain to you why we can't do what seems to be a reasonable thing that you would expect as a person who lives and works in Boulder. Let me tell you why we can't do what seems to be stuff we should do. And I think it's that mindset shift that frustrates me. Now I got a good life.

[01:37:13] I got, you know, I came from, you know, I didn't start in this area, but, you know, I want people all around me to, you know, have opportunity and have, and have a, you know, a safe and secure life and a life where they, you know, they can live opportunities that they want to live. And I think, you know, we need to do better as a city to do our job.

[01:37:38] You know, it's not my job, but people who work for the city, but me as a community person to make us more responsive to the people of Boulder as opposed to, you know, spending way too much time on what looks like pet projects that leaders have to get elected. And they focus on things that, you know, seem to be not, you know, the issues most in front of us. Yeah. Can I ask you a question about how you think about the certain thing that's happening?

[01:38:06] So one of the big, you know, blessings and benefits of Boulder and challenges is the university. I mean, it's been so part and parcel of our city, but we are very land constrained. And CU has a really aggressive growth plan. And when I was doing my research, I got on a bunch of investor calls where, you know, sort of to kind of track like where's the, you know, what is capital chasing, right?

[01:38:34] And so one of them is called the National Student Housing Outlook. And I was just on a call where, you know, it's a very like specific strategy. It is small liberal arts universities are closing. Big state schools is where the growth is happening. Identify the schools with the most aggressive growth plan and go buy up all the real estate that you can in that city. And that, you know, we see that.

[01:39:00] Like our high density zones, we have such only 9% of our residential zoning is high density. And that's where we could be building a lot more units that our workforce could live in and presumably even families. You know, I live in high density with my son. If it had the amenities that families wanted, I think more people would live in it. But they're getting bought up by, you know, actually big capital. Like Blackstone Capital owns five multifamily student apartments now. Core Spaces is moving in in a more robust way.

[01:39:30] And then it's happening in, you know, low density on the hill too. And this is something I don't have all the solutions for. I'm just thinking a lot about. Like given that we are so land constrained and that the strategy is go buy up all the land where state universities have an aggressive growth plan, us. What do you do about that? Yeah. That's something I've had to think about. Yeah. I've never heard the question posed in that way.

[01:40:01] I guess where I go to first is we're doing a really, in my opinion, poor job on stuff that's in our control. You know, things that we can do and should do, we're not doing a good job in. Let's get momentum there first because that's kind of easier.

[01:40:20] If we create more reasons for land to be used not to be gobbled up by the school but land to be used to be gobbled up by families because, you know, there's a vibrant ecosystem here. There's businesses and families have more reason to be here as opposed to outside of here. Let's get some of that low hanging fruit. Let's get like, you know, let's, let's, you know, let's get some shots on goal and get some shots on goal.

[01:40:46] And then, you know, the big hairy, you know, challenges don't look that challenging. But right now we are so ill equipped to tackle a complex problem. I mean, you know, there's evidence by big bond that we need all this more money and the big price tag on an office building that should never have been, you know, built in that way. And it's like for that same group of people to go tackle something that complex, it's like, you know, let's show we can be competent in stuff that we should be able to be competent in first.

[01:41:13] Yeah, it's almost like stabilize the patient first and then, and then we can deal with the underlying issues. I will say this, having a constructive set of conversations as opposed to a fight with university is a path to solution. So it's like what we're doing right now, we're sitting out and talking to each other, I'm listening and hearing and hopefully you are too. I think you are. But it seems like we've gotten into fights with the university as opposed to, okay, you know, university has certain needs and desires.

[01:41:43] We have certain needs and desires from outside of the university. How can we have a set of conversations and try to find a solution that works for both sides? And that's, maybe that's part of it too, because I was never close to that big fight over a piece of property, but it was just so adversarial. Oh yeah, see you south. Yeah. And so like, you know, I think so misguided, but when you build kind of an adversarial relationship, you know, people will dig in. Maybe that's part of the solution.

[01:42:12] I know the chancellor's going to be here with a group of business people just having roundtable discussions where we're talking and listening to each other. In two weeks, three weeks, we're going to have 50 people. I know we're over time here. Oh, okay. We're going to have 50 people on each of two different days, mostly tech and business people, but talking to one another.

[01:42:35] We're on, okay, we all have these concerns about what's happening in Colorado, driving businesses away to those, you know, red states of Texas and Florida and others. You know, we shouldn't be giving our business opportunities to those other states, whether they're blue or red or some other color. I don't really care, but, you know, but I do care about Colorado and I think Colorado should do everything it can to retain and build on kind of, you know, the businesses that create opportunities for all of Coloradoans.

[01:43:02] And we're really concerned that the set of macro policies that Colorado's taking is driving those, you know, those people away. You know, Boulder's kind of a microcosm of that, but Colorado is a big part of that. And, you know, but I think it starts by, you know, trying to understand situations better. Yeah. So maybe the answer to your question is, I don't know, I'd be willing to get engaged in a conversation if helpful, but get in conversation with the chancellor and say, hey, here's our concerns. We know you have your ambitions. What can we do? Yeah. Thank you.

[01:43:32] It's something I'm thinking a lot about. And I have started those conversations with them and agree that it shouldn't be adversarial. We need the university, but I was just curious. Well, it does sound like we're over time and this has been lovely. It's been a fun conversation. It really has. Yeah. Thank you. I always knew you were intelligent and well-spoken and now even know it more. Oh, you're so good. Thank you. You're very thoughtful and it's been a great conversation.

[01:43:57] Well, like you, I do care deeply and, you know, weirdly stay up all night thinking about these things. So it's always fun to talk about them. And clearly we could have kept talking forever. So. Good. All right. All right. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Bear Roars. Check out Stretch, the new song from Dan Caruso with music by Jason Mendelsohn. Available now on all streaming services. If you enjoyed the episode, please like and subscribe on your listening platform.

[01:44:24] This podcast was produced by Loud Bear Productions and edited by Hannah Schmetzer with support from Kendall Weinberg, Alex Kim and Gibson Seagut.