Colorado SB20-213 Attempts to address myriad issues in a Housing bill
Twelve hours of hearings on Colorado Senate Bill 23-213 on April 6th included testimony from more than 25 leaders from across NWCCOG territory. For our constituents’, recommended edits are being coordinated by Colorado Association of Ski Towns (CAST) with regards to land use and QQ with regards to water. The housing conversation has absorbed many thousands of hours of public input in town halls across–what the bill labels as Rural Resort Job Centers (RRJC) over recent decades. On the 6th, that conversation moved to a Senate Committee under the Golden Dome. There, a much broader conversation is happening at a state level across the country.
As in Colorado, elevating housing from a local to the Governor’s office issue, is not entirely welcomed judging from the 12 hours of testimony. I listened from about 11 a.m. on and off until 8:30 pm, missing Gypsum Town Manager Jeremy Reitman who was the last to testify at 11:30 that night.
We in the RRJC view housing primarily through the prism of workers and preservation of owner occupancy as a marker for a vibrant community. Other testimony last week reflected a state level conversation that is considerably widened from that scope. There it includes issues such as: racist history of U.S. housing policy as addressed in Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law. That legacy extends to exclusionary zoning, and local control, the very protective framework through which our local governments provide due process to constituents, the most vocal of which are sometimes called NIMBYs. At a national level housing is about rampant homelessness and crime which has disproportionately impacted Western cities as discussed in reference to Reno and Denver in this Axios piece. John Frank of Axios notes that in D.C. homelessness is often framed as a crime issue because, “it is a much easier talking point.” The conversation can have a utopian edge also, as it merges with the revolution in urban planning centered around Walkability as outlined in Jeff Speck’s The Walkable City and hundreds of planning concepts that have erupted since the Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Co. led a revolution of New Urbanist design in the 1990s as an anecdote to sprawl. These are gaining new advocates as urban planning converges with energy efficient building codes and climate change policy.
As Norman Maclean ends his famous book, “eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it….” What testimony on SB 23-213 as well as all public policy conversations with my peers in local government merge into is this matter of affordable shelter. We should probably get away from calling it “housing” since that evokes imagery that is becoming less and less relevant to any solution. From economic development (workforce) to delivery of services (employment/wages) to water availability, to social justice or climate change: at a community level, the rock beneath the streambed of national politics, is this word: shelter.
I’d like to have been the one to have coined the phrase, which Annie Lowrey, author of Everything Is About the Housing Market in the March issue of The Atlantic rebroadcasts. Her article claims that “Housing costs are perverting just about every facet of American Life, everywhere.” It certainly feels that way toggling from local to state to national politics. Her home city, San Francisco has produced just 1 home for every 8 jobs in the last decade. She re- introduces readers to a phrase now, coined in September of 2021 Journal Works in Progress by John Myers, Ben Southwood and Sam Bowman The Housing Theory of Everything. Subtitled, Western Housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity and even falling fertility rates.” It may appear a brash statement. The obesity part has to do with a nation of drivers who were once walkers, and could be with The 15 Minute City, which AP news covers as being misconstrued in some Conspiracy theories. The Housing Theory of Everything, Lowery points out, straddles public policy and economic theory. It derives from Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the 21st Century, a book that claims housing inequality is a greater driver of overall inequality in the Western World than income inequality.
A house, a housing unit, a shelter—there is a reawakening right now that challenges the 19th Century American “dream;” that white picket fence of Tom Sawyers, and that single-family home first mass-produced in Levittown, PA as being a useful template looking forward. It is still the predominant housing unit in the U.S.
Talking with 31 managers this past quarter, confirms that the Rubik’s Cube of housing is the alpha and the omega of public policy among NWCCOG members. Recent legislation introduced with the backing of Colorado Governor Jared Polis suggests that it is time to break the current rules and pull the puzzle apart, best outlined by this CPR article. He has followed through on a promise from the recent State of the State address by shepherding SB23-213 through the legislature.
The bill is not an isolated idea. Similar efforts being considered in at least 7 other states including Vermont which estimates the need for 40,000 new units by 2030, a state that also considers local control “a sacred cow.” As well as Washington State which Axios reports has a bill that would require cities with at least 6,000 residents to “allow quadruplex housing on all residential blocks as well as six-plexes near transit to meet a goal of 1 million homes needed by 2044. There, Governor Inslee supports dismantling local zoning rules that prohibit density in many neighborhoods. In a good summary article, NPR reports, “Oregon, California and Maine and a handful of cities have already “opened up” their zoning. (which) Housing experts say is the key to ending the housing shortage.”
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs identifies “air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing and reproduction” as basic human Psychological Needs, also known as Deficiency Needs, without which, a human is merely surviving. In our reverence for free-market economics and boot-strap romance, we fail most miserably at addressing Shelter as a right. In spite of recently heroic policy efforts by entities across the CAST and NWCCOG region, it appears that Colorado, like some other states is deep into reassessing more than 50 years of housing policy, something that hasn’t happened since Colorado in the 1970s led by Governor Lamm last considered state and regional land use control (creating Councils of Government partially for that purpose), fought off a bid for the U.S. Winter Olympics and opposed major freeway expansions.
Due to the explosion in population since the 1970s it would appear to the conservationists that unrestricted growth has won the decades in between, it did, though not without eons of public testimony against just about every project proposed since, and not by creating enough housing, but by gentrifying housing nearly everywhere that growth has succeeded, perhaps even where it was most resisted. It appears that Governor Polis may be willing to trade a bit of due process for public testimony on site specific land use development to pull our collective heads out of the hole we’ve been ever since the 1970s. Up in the rarified air of the RRJC region it is starting to appear that we will no longer be able to have it both ways.
