Citizens, staff and local governments spend thousands of hours every year carefully planning for the future of our communities. These local efforts are extremely important for infrastructure planning, water supply planning and environmental protection, which all require local knowledge and thoughtful action.
Proposed new legislation, Colorado Senate Bill 23-213, could unleash unrestricted, market-rate development across Colorado’s sensitive landscape without thought, care or planning. Colorado communities have a right to determine their own destiny and density. This legislation ignores Colorado’s long, proud tradition of local control and could result in more expensive housing, increased congestion, damage to the environment and loss of community character across our state.
Draconian state-enforced housing policies that completely override local government, local decision-making and community preferences, have no place in Colorado and PLAN-Boulder County has taken an official position opposing the Colorado Senate Bill 23-213.
This bill is titled “Land Use,” but it is fundamentally a massive change to local and state governmental roles and responsibilities across the state. Senate Bill 23-213 dramatically and egregiously expands state power over local governments — including counties, cities and towns where most Coloradans live — by pre-empting numerous roles and regulatory processes historically assigned to local government.
The bill does not just preempt local “land use” policy, but subverts local housing policy, planning policy, water policy, transportation policy and growth policy. The bill represents a large-scale power grab to eliminate Colorado’s proud heritage of local control and replace it with the type of “central planning” common in authoritarian governments.
While the bill’s focus is to increase housing “affordability” by increasing housing density in cities across the state, the bill includes no identifiable or proven provisions to reduce costs. For example, according to the 2020 Census, Boulder and Denver are already the two most dense cities in Colorado, and both are already very expensive. Trying to reduce housing costs by simply forcing high-density urbanization violates factual experience — the densest cities are already some of the most expensive places to live in Colorado.
There are many reasons to oppose Senate Bill 23-213, but here are a few you might want to mention to our state senators and representatives. This proposed legislation:
• overrides decades of citizen input and local planning;
• forces high-density urbanization — up to two to four times greater than currently exists in single-family neighborhoods — across cities in Colorado while doing almost nothing to increase the affordability of housing;
• contains nothing to address the localized mismatch between job growth and housing that is needed to keep demand and supply in some kind of balance that can reduce commuting;
• does nothing to improve transit while encouraging density in already congested corridors with minimal transit;
• imposes increased occupancy rules to pack more people into crowded housing;
• disallows a minimum square footage requirement for a housing unit;
• glosses over and/or ignores impacts on water, wastewater, transportation and other municipal infrastructure required by forced high-density housing growth;
• disregards the environmental impacts on Colorado’s air, rivers, open lands, wildlife habitat and mountain landscapes by forcing increased population growth.
Local control matters. Senate Bill 23-213 makes a mockery of local planning, local government and local democracy. If we want to create land use and housing policies that actually improve affordability, reduce congestion and increase transit use while reducing emissions of GHG, and preserve open spaces this is not the way to go. Senate Bill 23-213 should be withdrawn, and we should start over.
Source: Daily Camera
