Gov. Jared Polis’ housing bill wants to make housing affordability a state issue, which has local municipalities including Longmont pushing back.
Senate Bill 23-213 was introduced last month as a sweeping bill aiming to address the Colorado housing crisis through several major law changes. Longmont City Council is likely to vote to oppose the bill Tuesday night, with staff citing the preemption of municipal land use rights as the main issue.
Staff said that while the housing and transportation aspects of the bill — both critical issues in Longmont — include many solutions that the city is already implementing, the state’s proposal would take away the city’s local control over the issue.
“While we appreciate the ideas from the state, staff would rather see incentives and technical assistance, rather than complete overreach and pre-emption of our historic land use rights,” staff said in their recommendation to council.
However, Prosper Longmont, an initiative that advocates for housing attainability in Longmont, doesn’t think the city should be so quick to oppose the bill. Prosper Longmont Co-Chair Eric Wallace, said that while the pro-housing organization is still going over the first draft of the enormous bill, Prosper is in alignment with the reasons it outlines as to why it's important to solve housing attainability across Colorado and the Front Range.
“I think that it’s short-sighted to come out and state publicly that (Longmont is) against it,” Wallace said. “I’m not in those offices, but I think we should say this is really interesting. It recognizes that there’s a statewide problem, and it recognizes that Longmont alone can’t fix it.”
Wallace concedes that there are a lot of questions that the bill leaves unanswered, like enforcement, and acknowledges that the first draft will likely be very different from its final form.
He pointed out that Longmont is ahead of most neighboring communities in beginning to address the issue of housing affordability. The value of the state’s bill, according to Wallace, is that it creates a regional approach and stops places from enforcing policies that impact neighboring cities — things like growth moratoriums, multifamily housing limits and low density requirements.
“I think it’s really hard to make the argument that every city should be allowed to do whatever they want regardless of the impact that it has on their neighbors,” he said. “I mean, Longmont has been dealing with that with Boulder for decades, right?”
Many municipalities, however, don’t think the exchange is worth giving up local control. The Colorado Municipal League, which represents the interests of 270 cities and towns, calls the bill “the most sweeping attempt in recent Colorado history to remove local control and home rule authority from elected leaders, professional planning staff and the people of Colorado.”
“The bill dramatically expands state authority by imposing top-down zoning and land use standards on municipalities, and it puts those decisions into the hands of developer interests and unelected third parties,” the municipal league continued. “SB23-213 does not recognize that local governments are best suited to address the needs of their communities, and it flies in the face of local government efforts to solve the affordable housing crisis.”
Wallace noted a concern of Prosper’s — that is reflected in city staff’s recommendation to oppose the bill — is that the looming battle between local and state control of land use and zoning could slow municipalities from actually addressing the issue at a local level.
“I hope that cities don’t stop working because they think they're going to get washed over by a tsunami of state regulation,” he said.
Wallace instead encourages vigorous debate from this bill and wants people who oppose the legislation to come up with their own solutions to the housing crisis.
“You can’t say no; you have to decide how you’re going to deal with it,” he said. “The fairest way to deal with it is to collectively deal with it. So I think the question, the interesting question really is that local versus state — where’s the line going to be drawn?”
The bill is currently scheduled for a hearing with the Local Government and Housing Committee on Thursday.
