Boulder has become more technocratic: The benefits, costs and democratic tension inside City government

This election is different than past elections. There is a divide that cuts across progressives versus moderates, pro-growth versus slow-growth, and even establishment versus outsider.

This election seems increasingly about those who defend the system versus those who want to reform the system.

In a nutshell, the arguments are:

Institutionalists: Boulder has built an increasingly professional and sophisticated municipal government capable of tackling extraordinarily complicated problems. Staff uses data, technical expertise, strategic plans, equity analysis, and measurable outcomes. The city organization is more coordinated than it once was, and outreach is more equitable. And it is working. The systems put in place have led to measurable reductions in homelessness and crime and lower housing costs (rent is at its lowest in many years). Professional administration has real value, and dismantling it would be a mistake.

Reformers: People all over Boulder feel increasingly disconnected from the decisions their government makes. Council often receives choices after staff has defined the problem, established the constraints, and developed the available alternatives. Public engagement happens after the basic parameters of a decision have already been set, and we do not like that. Large expenditures, like Alpine-Balsam, have been made through a series of individually rational decisions without the public ever confronting the cumulative choice. As a result, we no longer trust you to spend our money wisely.

I would argue that both “camps” are right. And I believe that we arrived here - in large part - because Boulder has become more technocratic than it once was.

Technocracy is a system in which expertise, professional analysis, and administrative processes play an increasingly large role in determining public policy. Problems are defined by experts, evaluated through technical frameworks, and narrowed into a set of solutions before elected officials or the public make the final choice.

Technocracy is not inherently bad, but it is different from the more participatory political culture that Boulder residents are used to. In that model, residents, boards and commissions, and elected officials wrestled more visibly (and often more messily) with what the city should do. Council established the political direction, and professional staff advised Council and figured out how to implement it.

Very roughly:

More political model:
Council decides priorities → Manager figures out how to execute them.

More technocratic model:
Staff determines organizational capacity → Council selects priorities from the administratively feasible menu.

There is also a subtle but important difference between staff saying:

A. “Here are the competing choices, their benefits, risks, fiscal consequences, and stakeholder arguments. Staff recommends B.”

and:

B. “Here is the problem, here is the analytical framework through which we’ve defined it, here is the evidence supporting that framing, and therefore here is the recommended solution.”

Both technically give Council a choice. But the second gives staff considerably more agenda-setting power because they have helped determine not only the answer, but the question and the universe of reasonable answers.

The critical difference between A and B is where democracy enters the process, and how much of the agenda has already been set when it does.

COVID didn’t create this change, but I think it accelerated it.

Some of Boulder’s move toward technocracy predates COVID. But COVID was an enormous institutional sea change. For more than two years, Boulder government (like governments everywhere) had to operate with greater executive discretion, remote meetings, fewer informal interactions between citizens and government, more remote work, and more staff-level decision-making.

The pattern set in, and some of it was for the better. Remote participation, for example, made local government accessible to people who could never spend four hours sitting in Council chambers on a weeknight.

I don’t necessarily want to restore the old system. The old Boulder wasn’t as democratic as nostalgia sometimes makes it sound. People with time, money, education, and familiarity with city government had enormous advantages. A room filled with 150 angry homeowners does not necessarily represent Boulder better than a scientifically designed survey. Community Connectors, multilingual outreach, remote participation, and more intentional engagement are all improvements I want to keep.

But there is a difference between participation and agency.

There is a difference between asking the public, “What should we do?” and asking, “Given these constraints and these three alternatives, which do you prefer?” Both are public engagement, but only one gives people meaningful influence over how the question itself is defined.

Consider Boulder’s automated license-plate readers (Flock).

Thus far, the underlying decision to use ALPRs has largely been treated as an administrative and operational question.

The logic has essentially been: Police need an investigative capability. Staff will choose the company that best fits our needs.

A more political approach would start by asking the community: Do we want a network of cameras capable of recording the movement of vehicles around our community at all? What privacy protections should govern it? Who can access the information?

And this particular issue cuts across our normal political lines. People concerned about immigration and civil liberties have raised some of the strongest objections to Flock. Sometimes reducing the power of traditional neighborhood voices makes government more equitable, but technocracy can also bypass people who historically had less power.

The answer isn’t to go back to listening to whoever has the time and resources to fill Council chambers on a weeknight. It is to make sure major value judgments happen at the Council level before they become administrative decisions.

Alpine-Balsam illustrates the same problem financially.

The city purchased the former Boulder Community Hospital property in 2015. It has now been underway for 11 years. The city itself describes it as “one of the most complex” projects Boulder has undertaken.

The current city accounting puts anticipated total expenditures, including future COP interest, at roughly $368 million, with about $258 million excluding COP interest. The city calculates construction of the new services/staffing hub itself at $980 per square foot.

And yet there wasn’t a moment when Boulder voters, or arguably even one Council, said:

“Yes, we affirmatively choose a roughly $368 million Alpine-Balsam trajectory.”

Instead, the city purchased the hospital, studied it, demolished portions, developed the area plan, financed construction, built infrastructure, created housing, and issued COPs through a series of individually defensible decisions over many years.

The aggregate outcome became enormous without the public ever being presented with the aggregate political choice.

That’s perhaps the best illustration of the democratic/technocratic distinction: Technocracy can break a giant political decision into a series of administratively rational incremental decisions. By the time citizens perceive the magnitude of the cumulative decision, reversing it is prohibitively expensive.

Then came the bond.

I see the proposed $400 million Recreation and Safety Bond as the pivotal moment that sparked public outcry. The bond has become the focal point for a larger argument over city spending, transparency, and trust.

An argument about a recreation center or municipal building is normal politics. But the bond has become more of a meta-argument that applies to many issues:

“Who made this decision?”
“When did we agree to this?”
“How much does this actually cost?”
“Why weren’t we asked earlier?”

To me, the bond didn’t create Boulder’s trust problem. It exposed it.

When fights over Alpine-Balsam, recreation centers, surveillance, permitting, the budget, and a massive bond keep producing the same questions, we may be looking at something bigger than disagreement over individual policies.

I think what we’re experiencing is a crisis of trust in how the institution makes decisions, not another round of Boulder’s familiar policy fights.

There’s also a culture of “can’t” that plays into all of this.

This may be the part people experience most directly, and it provides credibility to the “Who’s in charge here?” sentiment that is so prevalent.

For example: Ask almost anyone in Boulder whether it should take an absurdly long time to open a straightforward café or small business, and they will say NO. Then ask Council to change it. In most cases, you’ll hear something like:

We agree the code needs to be reformed. Reform requires staff capacity. Capacity requires changing the work plan. We will also need a consultant and a legal review. Then engagement. Then another work-plan cycle.

Administrative difficulty starts to masquerade as political impossibility, even if inadvertently. It’s not that staff deliberately take power away from Council. Councilmembers enter a system where almost every institutional incentive encourages deference. Staff has vastly more information, understands the legal and operational constraints, and can usually explain quite reasonably why changing course is difficult.

Over time, elected officials can begin confusing administrative difficulty with lack of political authority.

To be clear: Council shouldn’t tell an individual planner how to process a permit. But Council absolutely should be able to say: “This outcome is unacceptable. Straightforward small-business approvals should happen dramatically faster.”

Council and staff should be able to lock themselves in a room and come out with a solution for how to get businesses dramatically faster permits without dismantling fire mitigation or other important work-plan items.

So, where do we go from here?

The answer isn’t to dismantle technocracy. It’s to build democratic counterweights around it.

The answer to a highly professional administration isn’t amateur government. It’s professional administration with professional oversight, democratic direction, and public accountability.

This is where I think Boulder needs to catch up. We have spent years professionalizing the administrative side of city government. The democratic side hasn’t necessarily developed the same professional capacity alongside it.

There are some pretty concrete ways to change that.

1. Give Council its own professional capacity: an independent performance auditor.

One reason technocratic systems naturally accumulate power inside the administration is information asymmetry. Staff develops programs, administers them, measures them, and then explains their performance to a part-time elected Council.

An independent performance auditor who reports to Council, rather than through the management structure, would give elected officials their own professional analytical capacity. Staff can say, “Here is our analysis,” and Council can independently ask: Is it right? Is this program producing what we were promised? Is there a better way to accomplish the same goal?

It is, in a sense, professionalism with which to check professionalism.

2. Democratize major capital decisions without politicizing construction.

Alpine-Balsam shows why this matters. The problem wasn’t that Council failed to choose the right architect. The problem was that an enormous public investment evolved through many smaller decisions without enough moments when the cumulative political choice was visible.

I support creating a Capital Improvement Advisory Board that would establish and monitor the public parameters around major projects: What problem are we solving? What are the essential public benefits? What is the financial ceiling? What are the alternatives? How much can cost or scope change before the project has to return to Council?

East Boulder Community Center is exactly the kind of project this body should examine. A proposed $53 million deep-energy retrofit and renovation may ultimately be justified. But Council and the public should be able to see clearly how much is deferred maintenance, how much is renovation, and how much results from our own energy requirements. We should also know what alternatives exist, and what tradeoffs we’re making with other needs.

3. Professionalize Council’s oversight of its three direct reports.

Council directly employs the City Manager, City Attorney, and Municipal Judge. Oversight of those three people isn’t peripheral to Council’s job. It’s one of its core responsibilities.

Their evaluations should be serious 360-degree assessments. Council should receive structured feedback from people who work with and experience their leadership, including department directors.

This matters even more as the organization becomes more centralized and professionally managed. Some people may experience that as better coordination; others may experience it as micromanagement or loss of autonomy. Council shouldn’t have to choose between staff anecdotes. It should have a serious process for evaluating leadership.

4. Move Council upstream in the budget.

Right now, Council enters the conversation after programs, staffing levels, and priorities have already been built into a proposed budget. Much of the policy-making has already happened.

Budget conversations should begin months earlier and should probably operate on two-year cycles. Council should debate what our priorities are, what’s working, what isn’t, where we need to invest, and what we need to reconsider. Then professional staff can build the budget around those elected priorities.

5. Create a fast lane for obvious problems.

Technocratic systems naturally value consistency, process, risk reduction, and analysis. There are important reasons for this, but it also increases bureaucracy and slows down Council’s ability to act decisively and quickly (not that we were ever great at that, but we were arguably better).

Again, take small-business permitting. Council could establish a real deadline, maybe 60 days, for straightforward, low-risk permits and licenses, with automatic escalation when the city misses it. Then let staff determine how to achieve it.

Instead of asking, “Why can’t we do this?” the question should become: “What would it take to do this?”

6. Bring the public upstream too.

We don’t need more engagement for engagement’s sake. We need earlier engagement when the actual values and tradeoffs are still unsettled.

The DDA discussion is a good example. By the time the broader public was asked to weigh in, staff and consultants had already defined the problem, developed the analytical framework, and identified the institutional solution they believed made sense.

A more democratic process starts one step earlier: What problem are we trying to solve downtown? What should success look like? What role should the city play? What alternatives exist? What are residents, businesses, and property owners willing to trade for greater investment?

Then let professional staff analyze those choices, explain the consequences, and make a recommendation.

That’s the balance I’m after throughout this essay. Staff should absolutely recommend. But whenever possible, Council and the community should help define the question before staff determines the answer.

7. Restore human access where professionalization has created distance.

Remote work, online permitting, and virtual meetings have real advantages. But efficiency for the organization isn’t always efficiency for the public.

In Planning and other public-facing departments, residents and businesses should have the opportunity to sit down with someone, work through a problem, and get an answer. We used to have this above Mustard’s Last Stand. Our code was just as complicated back then, yet people could navigate the system with greater ease.

There is also value in newer employees working alongside experienced professionals and absorbing institutional knowledge that doesn’t always transfer through scheduled video calls.

And then there are some things Boulder residents have been saying for years.

They are things I hear from people all the time. None of this requires dismantling professional government or a full system change. It requires professional government to remain responsive.

  • Make it easier to open a business. If someone is trying to open a straightforward café, shop, or small business, our posture should be: How do we get to yes?

  • Enforce the laws against open drug use. We can have compassion for addiction and homelessness and still insist that public spaces be safe and usable.

  • Let residents decide how much surveillance they are comfortable with. Police expertise should inform that conversation, but whether Boulder wants a network of automated surveillance technology is a community value judgment.

  • Keep the city clean. Parks, sidewalks, public spaces, and basic infrastructure are some of the most tangible ways people experience their government.

  • Keep public facilities open whenever we responsibly can. Pools, recreation centers, and community spaces aren’t abstractions. They’re places people actually use and love.

  • Don’t stand by while investors fundamentally change the Hill. We may disagree about the exact policy response, and we have to respect housing needs, property rights, and the law. But when residents can see a neighborhood changing in ways nobody intended, “it’s complicated” can’t be the end of the conversation.

Moving forward, I feel strongly that residents need confidence in two things at the same time:

  1. They need to know somebody is watching the big things: the budget, hundreds of millions of dollars in capital spending, major programs, and the performance of the people who run the organization.

  2. They also need to know government is still nimble enough to respond to what they can see with their own eyes: the business that can’t get open, someone openly using drugs in a public space, the camera recording their license plate, the park that isn’t clean, the pool they’re about to lose, the neighborhood changing in ways nobody intended.

In other words, we need oversight at the top and responsiveness on the ground.

These everyday things matter because people learn whether democracy works through feedback loops:

I complained → somebody listened → government changed something → my participation mattered.

If the recurring experience instead becomes:

I complained → the city conducted engagement → staff explained the constraints → a consultant studied it → nothing discernible changed

people eventually stop believing participation matters.

Obviously government can’t respond to every complaint by doing what the person complaining wants. Sometimes Council should listen carefully and still say no. But there must be enough visible examples of residents raising a legitimate problem and government actually changing course that people retain confidence in the feedback loop.

That’s why fixing a permitting process or finding a responsible way to keep a public facility open matters beyond the thing itself. It demonstrates something very basic: We heard you, and we are changing course.

What I fear if we don’t listen to the calls for change…

The institutionalist response to all of this is understandable. The system is functioning. Many outcomes are improving. The city is professionally managed. Why destabilize it?

Because failing to reform it may ultimately be what destabilizes it.

If people repeatedly feel that they aren’t heard, that enormous expenditures are beyond their control, that obvious problems can’t be fixed, and that consequential decisions have already been made by the time they’re invited to participate, eventually they stop trusting the institution itself.

And when that happens, people don’t necessarily demand careful institutional reform. They may decide they want somebody to tear the whole thing down. Then we risk losing the parts of professional government that are genuinely valuable along with the parts that need correction.

That is why I don’t see democratic reform as an attack on Boulder’s increasingly technocratic government. I see it as how we preserve the best of it.

I don’t want a weak City Manager. I want a strong City Manager accountable to a strong Council. I don’t want less expertise. I want Council to have independent expertise of its own. I don’t want residents designing buildings. I want residents and their elected representatives deciding what we’re building, why, and how much we’re willing to spend before the design becomes inevitable.

And I don’t want to go backward to a Boulder where the people with the most time and money had the loudest voices. I want the broader participation we’ve worked hard to create. I just want it to happen early enough to matter.

We have spent years strengthening the professional side of Boulder government. Now I think we need to modernize the democratic side to match it.

That means a Council strong enough to set direction without micromanaging, staff empowered to execute without becoming the final arbiter of political choices, and a public whose participation is broad enough to be representative and early enough to actually change something. It means a government sophisticated enough to study the problems that require study and nimble enough to just fix the ones that don’t.

If I am elected to Council, this is what I will push for.

Who Is Boulder For? Part 2: Solutions

A few weeks ago, I published “Who Is Boulder For?”, a visual essay tracing Boulder’s shift from a generative city to an extractive one (a common trend among desirable blue cities).

More than 8000 people have read it, and many wrote back asking the natural next question: What do we do about it?

This is my starting answer.

A couple of caveats:

  1. Boulder is facing a budget shortfall, and I am not proposing expensive new programs. Most of what follows is designed either to generate new revenue, to redirect existing spending to stay here, or to do both at once.

  2. This is not a list of solutions to every problem Boulder faces. The ideas below are specific to my last post.

p.s. Anything underlined is a hyperlink. There’s a lot here to nerd out on. At the very end, I offer some of my favorite books on the broader topics of financialization and localization discussed here.

The thread running through everything below is the same: relocalize the economy.

We need to make it easier for people to live here, stay here, raise families here, and easier for small businesses to start here, grow here, circulate money here. At the same time, we need to make it harder for outside capital to extract value from us.

A recap on the problem

Like many cities, Boulder once produced its own wealth… Companies started here, made things here, hired across the income distribution, and reinvested locally. That still exists in pockets, but our economy (like many others) is also steadily shifting toward one in which our largest landlords, employers, and asset owners are headquartered elsewhere.

The counter-arguments are real:

  • Local developers struggle to build housing, so Wall Street does.

  • Institutional capital has owned commercial real estate forever.

  • Most second-home owners love this place.

  • Business acquisition is a success story.

All true, and none of it changes the cumulative pattern: value is generated here and captured elsewhere.

Most of us do not want to live in a city where the rent we pay flows through Blackstone to billionaires and sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East, where defense contracting is one of the fastest-growing job sector in a place built on natural foods and the outdoors, and where homes sit dark because the owners are here three weeks a year.

Four principles to apply to everything

Before specific proposals, there are four important principles I think Council should apply to every major decision in the next budget cycle:

  1. Prioritize existing places first. The first dollar of discretionary capital should go to maintenance, safety, and capacity in buildings and corridors we already have, before funding edge expansion or new civic additions. Every new asset adds to a maintenance burden that lasts decades. Boulder’s own Facilities Master Plan covers 75 buildings totaling 1.8 million square feet with a replacement value over $550 million, and it names consolidation of uses as one of its two guiding initiatives. Buildings the city no longer needs to operate from should be leased, sold, or repurposed for housing, small-business space, or other community uses, with proceeds either to maintain the buildings we keep or to retire debt on underfunded facilities. (Area III is the one place this principle gets complicated, and only if Council decides to prioritize middle-income family housing there. To get the type of housing and price point middle-income families need would take real commitment … more on that below.)

  2. Measure return per acre. Boulder evaluates major proposals against many criteria. We should add a basic one: how much taxable activity does this generate per acre, relative to the cost of serving? Our land is constrained, and our demand is high, which makes small-scale infill in already-served areas extraordinarily valuable. Every acre that underperforms is an acre we are subsidizing. (For consideration: A firm called Urban3 has done these value-per-acre analyses for dozens of cities, including Durango, mapping the tax productivity of every parcel against the cost to serve it. The output is a three-dimensional visualization that lets residents and elected officials see where their city is making money and where it is losing it. Boulder has never commissioned one that I know of, but it could be useful.)

  3. Favor incremental, community-scale development. As the broader economy financializes, we have to find ways to build at a human scale. Incremental development is cheaper, more responsive to local conditions, and far more likely to keep ownership in town. Burlington, Vermont is the clearest American example of a small college city building community-owned institutions across housing, downtown commercial life, and local food. (Want to learn more about incremental development? Here’s a great resource to start. Join webinars, search through resources, etc.)

  4. Demonstrate stewardship before asking for more. Everything in this framework rests on public trust, and trust is not a resource the city can spend indefinitely without earning it back. Boulder's voters have been generous, passing tax after tax, passed in good faith. As a standing practice, not just when a ballot measure looms, the city should be able to show residents the math: a ranked inventory of what we own, what it costs, and what it returns; good-better-best tiers on major projects; and a clear accounting of whether past investments delivered what was promised. Boulder's Charter allows for an independent city auditor. San Diego hired one, and they surfaced roughly $1 billion in deferred maintenance that would otherwise have stayed buried. Accountability is not austerity. It is the precondition for everything else here.

These are not anti-anything principles. They are a way of asking important questions we do not ask often enough: Will this strengthen Boulder’s tax base, reduce long-term maintenance burden, get more out of the land we have already paid to serve … and can we show residents the math?

The principles above are an analytical framework for the next budget cycle and a useful lens for new policy tools. Most of the proposals below are direct applications of them (proposals 1, 3, and 5). Proposals 2 and 4 pursue the same goal, relocalize the economy, through different means: by keeping public dollars circulating here and by simply letting us see who owns the city in the first place, so we know how to maximize value per acre. The thread is the same throughout.

Proposals

1. Make small businesses viable again

Downtown office vacancy is 29%, four times pre-pandemic levels (and significantly higher when you include subleases). Pearl Street offices and storefronts that once anchored a small-business ecosystem are stuck at prices companies cannot or will not sign. Apply the return-per-acre principle from above, and the picture gets grim. Pearl Street is among the most expensive tracts of land in Colorado, and the city maintains streets, sidewalks, lighting, utilities, and the public realm around it at full cost. Roughly a third of the storefronts and offices on that land are producing close to nothing — no sales tax, no foot traffic, no employment. I cannot think of another land-use category in Boulder where the gap between what we spend to serve the land and what we get back is anywhere near this wide.

A commercial vacancy tax was proposed and then withdrawn. There are other important tools, and hopefully ones the community can come together around. They include:

  • Streamlined temporary use and creative space activation. Boulder treats most temporary uses the same way it treats permanent ones. The existing Temporary Sales or Outdoor Entertainment permit caps activities at two consecutive weeks in any three-month period, while anything beyond reverts to full Use Review, which can take 200+ days. A six-month pop-up coffee shop in a vacant office faces, in practical terms, the same regulatory gauntlet as a permanent ground-up build. So almost no one tries. Other cities have gone the opposite direction: Washington, DC’s Pop-Up Permitting program gives entrepreneurs a streamlined Certificate of Occupancy for up to one year; San Francisco has a Vacant to Vibrant program that helps small businesses collaborate with local property owners to create pop-up experiences and community spaces in downtown San Francisco; Austin has run a temporary retail permit ordinance since 2011. The deeper issue, which I wrote about at more length in a piece on “growth control by hassle”, is that Boulder’s code applies essentially the same review path to projects of every scale and duration. A streamlined temporary-use track would not solve the whole problem, but it would prove the principle on something that ought to be easy.

  • A category for hybrid and creative uses. The kinds of small businesses people are trying to open in Boulder right now do not fit the categories the code was written around. In the last two weeks alone, I have talked to one woman planning a coffee shop and retail store that would convert to a music venue and wine bar in the evenings and host art classes on weekends, and another planning a wellness collective along food-hall lines (IV therapy, red light, sauna, cold plunge, acupuncture, sound healing), each practitioner with their own corner. Both are exactly what you would want filling a vacant Boulder storefront. Both run headfirst into Boulder’s Use Table, which defines and approves “uses” one at a time. A space that serves as a café, retail store, performance venue, bar, and educational use is treated as five separate uses, each potentially triggering its own review path, parking calculation, occupancy standard, and conditional approval. Some standards directly contradict each other. Other cities have started consolidating their use categories or dropping use-based zoning altogether in favor of form-based codes so that a hybrid space isn't treated as a stack of separate uses. New York’s 2024 “City of Yes for Economic Opportunity” folded its café, bar, and live-music categories into one; Buffalo replaced use-based zoning citywide. Boulder is in the middle of a Use Table update that could incorporate this.

  • An adaptive reuse track for local entrepreneurs in long-vacant commercial buildings. Los Angeles’s 1999 Adaptive Reuse Ordinance is credited with producing over 12,000 housing units in vacant downtown buildings, and a December 2025 expansion took the program citywide. A small business or local developer willing to take on a long-vacant space should not face the same review timeline as a ground-up institutional development. Boulder has plenty of older commercial buildings along Pearl Street, along East Pearl, across the eastern industrial areas that would qualify and have sat partially or fully vacant for years. An adaptive-reuse track designed around them would not change the underlying zoning. It would just acknowledge that the cost of regulatory friction falls hardest on the kinds of small, local, incremental operators we most want to see come in.

  • Long-term lease support for legacy businesses. San Francisco’s Legacy Business Program, created by voters in 2015 through Proposition J, registers businesses that have operated in the city for 30+ years and contribute to neighborhood character. Landlords who sign 10-year leases with registered businesses receive a Rent Stabilization Grant of $4.50 per square foot, up to 5,000 square feet. As of late 2024, the program had over 400 registered businesses and supported 56 long-term leases. A 2024 amendment requires landlords to share at least 50% of the grant with their tenants, so the benefit actually reaches the business. Boulder has plenty of its own businesses that would qualify, and the program does not require new taxes (San Francisco’s grants are funded by a dedicated preservation fund approved by voters at the same time).

Filling vacant commercial space with local businesses is one of the highest-return-per-acre moves Boulder could make, and one of the most direct paths to closing the budget gap. Revenue compounds because each newly occupied storefront feeds the local multiplier described below.

2. Local procurement and city investment

The City of Boulder, Boulder County, CU Boulder, Boulder Community Health, and BVSD spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on goods, services, and contracts. Most of that leaves the local economy, paid to vendors headquartered elsewhere, banked elsewhere, taxed elsewhere.

The local procurement idea is simple: spend that money locally, with a small business. Where the business does not exist, create it. When a dollar is spent with a local supplier, that supplier spends part of it locally on payroll, on their own suppliers, and on rent. That second round creates a third. Economists call this the local multiplier, and studies of independent businesses versus chains consistently find multipliers in the 2x to 4x range. A dollar spent locally generates two to four dollars of local economic activity before it leaves, while a dollar spent out of state leaves immediately.

This is something agencies and cities around the world do, and Harmon Zuckerman, one of Boulder’s most thoughtful former Planning Board members, has been advocating for it for years.

Preston, England, has a proven model. Starting in 2013, Preston worked with its largest anchor institutions — council, university, hospital, police, and housing association — to map where their procurement spending went and shifted it toward local suppliers wherever law and quality allowed. Over five years, the share retained in Preston rose from 5% to 18%. The share retained in surrounding Lancashire rose from 39% to 79%. Roughly £200 million redirected back into the local economy through procurement reform alone, with no new spending and no new taxes. Preston went from being one of the most economically depressed cities in the UK to being named the most improved city in the country. (Want to dig even deeper into the Preston model? Here is a great book.)

Three steps for Boulder, in order. All of this can be outsourced, so it does not consume staff capacity (here is a helpful step-by-step guide, too):

  1. Perform a procurement baseline analysis across the five or six largest local institutions, mapping where current spending goes by geography. Typical cost is $150K to $300K, and grants frequently fund this kind of analysis.

  2. Set local supplier targets in city contracts, within the limits allowed by Colorado procurement law. Even a modest shift (say, 10% of currently external spending) represents tens of millions of dollars in new local activity.

  3. Provide active support for local businesses bidding on these contracts. Sometimes the contract is there, and the local business cannot bid because they do not know how to do it or are not big enough to handle it. There are mechanisms for grouping smaller contracts, walking local firms through the bidding process, and helping them scale. None of this is complicated. It just needs someone whose job it is.

For further exploration: The same logic applies to where the city itself invests. Boulder’s operating investment portfolio is about $454 million, mostly U.S. Treasuries, federal agency securities, and corporate bonds issued by companies such as Microsoft, PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson, Caterpillar Financial, and Toyota Motor Credit. Day-to-day management is handled by Insight Investment, the institutional asset-management arm of BNY Mellon, headquartered in London. Every dollar is lent to the federal government, to multinational corporations, to global capital markets. The yield is modest, and the local economic activity is zero.

Some have raised a separate conversation about the portfolio, proposing that the investment policy be used to take a position on Israel and Palestine. I am talking about something completely different. The question here is narrower and all about localization: Could some portion of the $450 million the city already invests earn comparable risk-adjusted returns while flowing through Boulder’s economy rather than around it?

Boulder’s investment policy (Boulder Revised Code Chapter 2-10) was amended in 2017 to broaden the range of permitted holdings, and the Q2 2025 investment report confirms the city already holds one affordable-housing municipal bond purchased explicitly for impact reasons. Colorado law (CRS 24-75-601 et seq.) limits public funds to federal securities, high-grade corporate bonds, in-state municipal bonds, and CDs at PDPA-approved depositories. So this is not a venture-capital fund. But within those constraints, several avenues are worth exploring: Boulder- and Colorado-issued municipal bonds (Boulder Housing Partners, BVSD, local water and sanitation districts); linked-deposit CDs at local PDPA-approved institutions (Elevations, Premier Members, FirstBank, Bank of Colorado), with the deposit conditioned on commitments to lend the equivalent within Boulder for affordable housing, small business, or worker-owned enterprises; a modest impact-investment allocation parallel to the existing affordable-housing bond, with explicit yield, credit, and liquidity guardrails.

Like the procurement work, this starts with a baseline. An outside municipal finance advisor can answer in a few weeks for well under six figures, yet it could bring in meaningful revenue for our community.

3. Owner-driven, incremental housing

Boulder is currently producing four kinds of new housing:

  1. High-density apartment buildings, mostly purpose-built for students and mostly owned by institutional investors.

  2. Luxury townhomes that are often acquired as second homes. (In 2024, I examined hundreds of public records of luxury townhomes in downtown Boulder and found that 34% were second homes).

  3. Multimillion-dollar scrape-and-expansions, in which a modest existing home is torn down or doubled in size. Here are 108 homes that have sold or are for sale between $2,000,000 and $16,500,000, built since 2020.

  4. Boulder Housing Partners’ permanently affordable inventory, which by every measure is the strongest housing program in the city.

We need more of the fourth, especially at 40% and below AMI. I struggle to see why we need more of the first three.

But that does not mean we halt all housing production. As I chronicle in detail in my thesis, the imbalance between housing production and job growth is what got us here in the first place. We need more housing, but we need the right kind, housing that isn't immediately captured by the financial sector or second homeowners. Short of opening new land for family housing (which we could do with community will), that looks like incremental, owner-driven housing: one or two units at a time, built by homeowners on lots already served by city infrastructure. It's housing that keeps Boulder's existing homes from being scraped.

Here is what this could look like: a retired couple builds an ADU, condoizes the lot, moves into the smaller unit, and sells the ranch to a young family. A homeowner adds an ADU for an aging parent. A 1950s ranch on a deep lot is reconfigured into two attached homes, each separately owned. This is the housing form that built Boulder's most beloved older neighborhoods. It is also the form in which our current code makes it structurally hardest to produce.

Four reforms, all with precedents elsewhere, would meaningfully shift this:

  1. Pre-approved ADU plans. California’s AB 1332, passed in 2023, required every local jurisdiction to make pre-approved ADU plans available to the public by January 1, 2025. Property owners use these plans free of charge, shaving tens of thousands of dollars and several months off the front end. Cities like Escondido, Citrus Heights, Santa Clara County, and others now publish multiple architect-designed, code-compliant plans homeowners can pick from a catalog. The bottleneck on ADU production in Boulder is not zoning … City Council and the State of Colorado have eased ADU zoning multiple times. The remaining friction is design, engineering, and permitting costs, which are exactly what pre-approved plans address.

  2. Let homeowners sell an ADU separately.

    Today, a Boulder homeowner can build an accessory dwelling unit (a backyard cottage, a basement unit, a converted garage) but cannot sell it. It has to stay on the same lot, under the same owner, indefinitely. Letting that unit be owned separately is the natural next step. The mechanism is called condominiumization. The ADU becomes a separately deeded condominium on the same parcel as the main house — no lot split, no subdivision of the land, just two units that can be owned on their own. One home becomes two separately owned homes, by the owner’s choice, on a lot the city already pays to serve. Colorado’s Department of Local Affairs lists separate sale of an ADU as a recommended strategy in its ADU Toolkit, with a step-by-step playbook for cities ready to adopt it. The legal vehicle already exists in CCIOA. **This would not be for developers. It is for homeowners — and the premise is simple: two small, separately owned homes on a lot the owner chooses to build serve more of Boulder than one multimillion-dollar scrape-and-build.

  3. Owner-occupant covenants on incremental units. Allowing ADUs, condoization, and small infill without protection against immediate investor capture would just produce the next wave of LLC-owned rentals. The protection comes from Vail. The Vail InDEED program, launched in 2018, attaches a deed restriction to participating properties requiring that the residence be occupied by a household with at least one member working 30+ hours per week locally. The town pays property owners 15-20% of fair market value to accept the restriction, which then runs with the title in perpetuity. Critically, Vail’s restriction limits occupancy, not ownership, which keeps it on clean legal ground. About 180 homes are under restriction, and roughly twenty other communities have replicated the model. A Boulder version, attached to newly condoized ADUs, would keep the housing form we are trying to enable out of the investor pipeline.

  4. Intergenerational home-sharing. Boulder has a meaningful population of older residents living alone in houses that are too large for them, and a meaningful population of graduate students, junior staff, and lower-income workers who cannot find a place to live. Washtenaw County, Michigan launched a Shared Housing Program last year that matches home providers (typically 55+) with home seekers, run through the local housing alliance. The Ann Arbor version is partly modeled on Michigan Medicine’s earlier HomeShare program. The cost to launch is low, and the housing it produces is real housing that did not exist before, in existing dwelling units. It also addresses something none of the other reforms do: the isolation that comes with aging in place alone in a house designed for a family.

The deeper point about these four reforms is that they are not only a supply strategy. They are a wealth-distribution strategy. The incremental model puts a little new housing into the hands of many individual homeowners, mostly existing Boulder homeowners. Every owner-occupied condoized ADU is also a household that did not get displaced, a property tax base that grew, a utility ratepayer added at near-zero marginal infrastructure cost, and a small wealth-building opportunity for the household that built it. None of that happens when a 300-bed institutional apartment building goes up.

4. Beneficial ownership disclosure

This is a boring but critical first step. While researching who owns Boulder for my thesis, I kept hitting the same wall: LLC shells. A Boulder property owned by “1234 Spruce Street LLC,” which is owned by another LLC, is registered to a generic address in Texas. Tracing the real ownership of a single building can take days of public records work, and sometimes it is impossible.

A beneficial ownership ordinance requires that any LLC, corporation, or trust purchasing Boulder real estate above a defined threshold disclose to the city who ultimately owns and controls the entity. The disclosure can be public or confidential, depending on how the ordinance is written. The federal Corporate Transparency Act already requires similar disclosure to FinCEN, but enforcement has been spotty, and access is limited. A local ordinance closes the gap for Boulder.

This enables better data on who actually owns the city. By extension, it enables real enforcement of a vacancy tax, STR rules, and other LLC-targeted policies. A clearer public conversation about who Boulder belongs to.

Cities and states with versions in place: New York (the LLC Transparency Act), several Vermont municipalities, and in parts of CA. Models differ on which transactions trigger disclosure, what gets exempted, and what is public versus confidential.

5. Residential vacancy tax

A residential vacancy tax is now actively moving toward the November 2026 ballot. On May 15, City Council directed staff to poll likely voters on several measures, including a vacancy tax. The commercial component was withdrawn earlier this year, but the residential one is a real first step. I encourage residents to vote for it.

A vacancy tax works on a simple principle. If a residential unit sits unoccupied for more than a defined portion of the year, the owner pays an annual excise tax. Owner-occupied homes, second homes used for a minimum number of nights per year, units under active rental marketing, and other reasonable carve-outs are included in the ordinance. The tax applies to a relatively narrow class of clearly unused property.

The point is not the revenue, though these taxes do generate revenue. The point is to change the math on holding Boulder housing as a passive store of wealth. Vancouver, BC’s tax, in place since 2017, has reduced the number of empty homes by more than half and now funds affordable housing at a meaningful scale.

Staff initially proposed $2,000 per year. Several councilmembers have pushed for a higher figure, and they are right to do so. The original Vacancy to Vitality citizen ballot measure proposed $7,000. In a city where annual carrying costs for a vacant high-end home already run $30,000 to $80,000 in property tax, HOA, insurance, and utilities, a $2,000 tax is a nuisance fee, not a behavior change. At $7,000, or something in that range, it begins to shift the holding calculus, which is the whole reason to do it.

Polling wraps in mid-June. The final referral vote is in August. The window to weigh in with Council is now.

For further study and community conversation

The two proposals below are bigger and slower, and they need more public debate before becoming policy. I include them because the diagnosis in Part 1 leads to both, and I would rather start the conversation now than after the design is already set.

Recalibrate inclusionary zoning for actual students

CU enrollment growth has produced a wave of large, mostly luxury student housing buildings around campus. These buildings typically rent for $1500 - $1900 per bedroom, effectively walling off lower-income members of the student population, which is significant, since CU has a meaningful number of Pell-eligible students and graduate students on stipends that do not cover the cost of living in Boulder.

Boulder has had an inclusionary zoning ordinance since 2000, but it was designed for a workforce context. Purpose-built student housing developments technically meet our IZ requirements while producing essentially no beds that the actual students who need them most can actually afford.

I would like to further examine whether it is possible to recalibrate the IZ ordinance to create a deeply affordable tier specifically required in purpose-built student housing, set at income thresholds (30-40% AMI) that financial aid students can access.

Boulder is a home-rule city with broad land-use authority. This could work within the IZ framework we already have, does not require state authorization or a ballot measure, and can be advanced through normal Council process.

The longer-term answer to student housing pressure is the community-scale principle from earlier, but I think this is worth exploring.

A community land trust for the Area III Planning Reserve

This is the one that is outside the three principles I said Council should apply. This is the one that would require community buy-in, and — at least how I see it — it all revolves around this question: Do we want families back? Only 9% of Boulder residents are ages 0 to 14, and BVSD schools are closing. If we think this matters, and we want families back, we need to build housing for them. Which means we need land. I have written extensively about this here.

Closing: Who is Boulder for?

The solutions above are not a comprehensive answer. They are a starting answer to the question I left readers with a few weeks ago, and they share a common feature: each one moves at least a small amount of decision-making, ownership, or revenue away from outside capital and back to the people who actually live and work here.

I am under no illusion that any of this is easy. The status quo serves the institutions that benefit from it, which is most of why it has persisted. But the alternative — continuing to drift toward a city whose value is generated locally and captured elsewhere — is not actually a status quo. It is a slow erosion of what makes Boulder Boulder.

If any of this resonates and you want to work on it, get in touch. Several of you wrote after Part 1 asking how to get involved. I meant it then, and I mean it now: if enough people care about one of these ideas, we can form a working group around it.