 and welcome to the Backstory as a volunteer for Longmont Public Media. I'm Tim Waters and the host of the Backstory, and we're coming to you tonight live from the Longmont Public Media Studio at 3rd and Kimbark. So if you're not in our studio audience and you'd like to be, remember this, a month from now, we're going to do the September episode of the Backstory on Taker Mill. So we have with us tonight the studio audience, and they're going to be invited to participate in tonight's program. The topic is housing. I think we're going to cover like every conceivable question on housing from A to Z, and we're going to do that with a distinguished panel. Tonight, I am joined by folks who are both experts and advocates when it comes to housing in Boulder County and in Longmont specifically. Joining me tonight is Harold Dominguez. He's known, well, he doesn't need an introduction as a Longmont city manager, but tonight he's here with his hat on as the interim director of the Longmont Housing Authority because in that role, he's both a developer and a manager of affordable housing. And we have Salazar, who everybody in Longmont knows as the former director of the Hauer Center, but she's here tonight as a member of Prosper Longmont. We're going to have a chance to learn more about what Prosper Longmont is, who it is, kind of what they're bringing to this conversation. Anne-Marie Jensen has been a long time activist in policy and politics. I know has a whole career as a lobbyist and has really focused more recently as the founder of ECHO, East County Opportunities Coalition, ECHO. And we're going to come, we'll talk more about ECHO before we're finished tonight in an event that ECHO has coming up. And Eric Wallace, known to most Longmonters or Longmonsters as Eric would say as the founder and CEO of Left Hand Ruin. But he is also here tonight with his Prosper Longmont hat on. So I'm going to give each of you a chance to talk about your interests and why you're around this table, but I want to start, Eric, with you. You're spending a fair amount of time, in addition to what you do with your business on this topic of housing. So what brings you, what peaks your interest and frame Prosper Longmont for it? So we know who it is and what you're up to. I would say that it's driven by really two things. Number one, my own kids can't afford to buy a house in Longmont right now. I have three children, two live in Firestone. And one lives in our rental house that we have here in Longmont. So my own children being unable to afford housing was the first driver. Number two, over half of my crew at the brewery can't afford to live in Longmont. They live out of county. So Boulder County is extremely expensive. Longmont has become quite expensive. And it became a problem for me, and not only for me, but for many other business people with whom I speak. I serve on the Longmont Economic Development Partnership Board. And in meetings and conversations, it became apparent that it is the number one problem for businesses is housing our people that work for us. And the affordability of that. And as they drive farther and farther away, their tenure tends to go down. They're spewing more pollutants into the atmosphere. Their quality of life is going down. Our tax base, they're spending money in other communities. So all of these byproducts of sprawl and lack of affordability in Longmont caused me to want to really lean in here and see if we can fix it. So what captures from a prosperous Longmont perspective is the effects of the housing shortage or the cost of housing, the effect on a workforce. That's a huge. It's stability and it's productivity when they show up. We'll get to the question, but yeah, it's a supply and demand imbalance. And it's not just here, it's everywhere. Can Marie, you've focused on a variety of policy issues over time, but you're really zeroed in on housing. Talk about why, what brought you to this. I was a lobbyist for almost 40 years at the state level. And one of the things I worked on as a lobbyist was affordable housing. And I also worked as a volunteer in Boulder County. We have had two elections since I've lived here to try to get more funding for affordable housing. One was in the city of Boulder and one was in the county, both of which failed. And I've also been involved in trying to get housing cited, affordable housing and seen the strong opposition to it. And so when I retired from being a lobbyist, I spent some time thinking about what I would do next. And it seemed there was a real need for an education and advocacy organization to try to support efforts to create more housing for people who couldn't afford it here. And so that includes both affordable and attainable. And those are not exactly the same thing. And we can talk later about what those are. But we support both kinds of housing. And we work in five communities, Longmont, Erie, Lafayette, Superior, and Louisville. So basically all the communities east of Boulder in this direction, we are doing some kind of work trying to support housing in those communities. That's the East County Housing Opportunities Coalition. Yes. Ed Wiener, you spent for as long as I've been in Longmont, you've been connected with the Our Center until you turned that page fairly recently. But you're now really focused on housing along with others. What brings you to the housing concern? Well, I've worked my entire life with people who are under-resourced, who have trouble having all the resources necessary to advance, to get an education, to get good jobs. And Prosper Longmont was very interesting to me because when I talked to Eric, I heard in what they're looking at is the interrelationship of all aspects of the community with housing. And I was very interested in being an advocate for people who are under-resourced, for people who work in the service economy and who need assistance with getting an education, getting, maintaining their housing. But it's all related to every other aspect of the community. So that was really attractive about Prosper. Yeah. How many leaders in our community are a part of Prosper? Just roughly. Is it a handful? Is it a dozen? Yeah, it's a couple dozen that are fairly closely related and a few dozen more, more loosely related, but absolutely aware of what we've got going on. And for those of you, I'm going to do this because I've heard others characterize Prosper Longmont in various ways. And I think I'd like for people here from you, what your frame or your understanding of Prosper Longmont is, how many developers are part of, how many people will profit from more residential development or members of Prosper Longmont? We don't really have developers as part of Prosper. It's a cross-section of the community, people with a wide variety of experiences. So and we've tried to basically, I mean, we're working closely with AMERI. We're working with Habitat. We've got a lot of resources across the spectrum. People that are really expert in lending, local banks, local mortgage lenders. How do we open it up more and try to understand where are the friction points and why are we unable to house our people? Why can't we do it? So it's basically been a learning process and poking at a lot of things, trying to understand it. That's going to be a segue to the next question, but I'm going to give Harold a chance to weigh in here. But just to be clear, how much, how will you two profit as a result of Prosper Longmont's success? Less traffic. If we can house more people here, less people be driving under, you know, on 119 under I-25. I think of that elusive quality of life issue. And I enjoy personally living in a place that's diverse. I want to live in a place that's diverse. I want to be able to walk down the street and see any number of people of all walks of life. And that's what I believe is a healthy community. So the answer to my question is neither of you will benefit other than for the values that you've just articulated in what we've heard from you. My kids and my people, they need quality of life too. I just think that's an important part of this conversation. He brings their values right to this conversation about housing and they get reflected in our rhetoric and then ultimately in initiatives of advocacy and policy. But values like diversity and stability of a workforce and family do show up in these conversations. Just not all about bottom line dollars and cents or just the numbers of homes, right? Obviously, we're going to talk more about building more homes and how we got here. Gerald, you're not off cooking this. Come up with this with your, how did you end up being a developer? Right. Right. And what are your interests in this issue? Not from a city management perspective but from a housing authority perspective. Well, so I'll start with the housing authority but I think it's important to talk from a city management perspective as well. So many people may know that the city took over the operations of the housing authority. And so by default, I became the interim executive director of the housing authority and one of the things that we know is housing authority budgets are really built on the operating revenues that they have coming in and also the development revenues that you have for building properties. And so when we began looking at the, you know, just the financial condition of the housing authority, we knew we needed to build units fast. We also knew the need of the affordable housing component within our community. And so when I talk about affordable housing, that's really related to the housing authority and the rental piece. And when we talk about that, it's really important. We're really talking about 60% AMI below. Subsidized. Subsidized housing. And when we started looking at our housing authority portfolio, most of the units that we had were actually age restricted units for older adults. We only had really one unit that was for families. And so as we started looking about just the need for affordable housing, we really started going through the development process. And so it's a unique opportunity for me because, you know, I sit on one side of the house in terms of the regulatory component on this, but being on the development side has been a great learning experience for me in terms of the challenges that you face. And so we had to very quickly do a rehab on Aspen Meadow, which is an age-restricted unit. We had to finance a non-age-restricted unit in the development of Crispin II, which is under construction. We actually had tax credits associated with that. We had to build the equity stack and understand how that relates to expenses. And just really looking at the amount of pressure that comes into play on the financial portfolio. And when you're trying to close a deal and you have a $100,000 hit, that may kill the deal if you can't manage it. And so that was a great learning experience. And so we have about a few more projects moving forward that we're looking at from the housing authority perspective. But you know, what I learned in that biggest variable that's playing in this is land cost. That, in its own right, is a significant issue for us to overcome in the development of affordable housing. And when we talk about that, we're saying fully supportive housing, which is 30% AMI below to 60% AMI would be average median income to 60% in terms. And that's really that transition you start making into market rate housing on the rental side. Just so that, because people hear these terms AMI or area median income and percentages, that 30% is 30% of what that income level is, and then what percentage of someone's income they're going to have to spend on housing, which becomes kind of the formula or the algorithm for what qualifies. Correct. And so when we talk about 30% AMI below, that's fully supportive housing. And we're talking about mental health services, financial services, working on health side, because that is a demographic that really has a lot of those issues. So that's the gamut of affordable housing. Short of assisted living, but supportive housing. Correct. And that's something we're working on too, is in working through the issues with the council and the Housing Authority Board as part of the ARPA funds. We did set aside one and a half million for affordable assisted living because being on the housing authority side and seeing the number of people that live in affordable housing that is independent living and really seeing how many people need to be in assisted living and the fact that there's no options really available for affordable assisted living. That's another piece. If I can go on real quick, I have the same issue as an employer as a city manager. And so when we look at the staff of our organization today, I think we're roughly at 42% of our staff that work for the city actually live in the city. And as we move through a transition period, when we have someone retired that lives in the city, more times than not, the people that fill those positions actually don't live in long life. And that's really the nature of the attainable housing cost that we have. And these are people that do really well. Save employees in their second. That just can't find the housing units. And so as an employer, that's an issue because we are seeing instances where we have folks that moved to other communities. And rightfully so, a job opens up in those communities and they take that job because you know what, that improves their quality of life, their commute. So as an employer, it's an issue for us too. And we really want people who work for the city to live in the city. And so we're incredibly mindful of that as an employer. And then on the city side, obviously the city's engaged in the affordable housing piece. We put a million dollars a year annually on the general fund dollars into affordable housing, but also looking at the attainable housing piece of which we're engaged in a few conversations. So you really see every bit of my life is really touching some form of housing. And you're a father of two college-age kids who will be looking for a home. Absolutely, absolutely. Or moving back in with you in three or four years. That's a real-world conversation when we see housing prices. Not tonight, but in maybe another backstory, we'll follow up on what we should be anticipating as a city as we have an aging population without the means to be an assisted living. What that's going to mean, because it's a tsunami that's coming. So we're in this conversation. It's a daunting issue in Longmont in every Boulder County municipality and every municipality across the country. How did we get here? And where are we? We're the numbers. I know there's some studies that have come out. You guys have your heads deeply into these. Just characterize where are we in terms of supply versus demand? And how did we get here? Who wants to start with? I'll start, because I've been spouting out those numbers quite a bit. It is about a 10 million unit shortest nationwide. And if you start interpolating that number and a couple of numbers that have come out last year and this year again out of the state in a recent state land use report and another housing tax course report. You can see that they all point out in Longmont, we are between 6,500 and 8,000 units short here in the near term in the next couple of years. We're already have a huge deficit. So it is a supply and demand issue and it's not just Longmont. And we can't solve Longmont's issue just in Longmont, which is why people like Ann Marie are here, why we're talking with people down in Boulder and in other areas as well. Because whatever we're able to learn and figure out and fix has to be exported to other communities. The land use thing that we were talking about earlier, this land use report points out a lot of what's going on and how that's going to have to change not just in Longmont but statewide. And I don't want to get into more of the wonky stuff about home rule and land use and how it's determined locally. But all of those things all feed into the fact that the simple answer, we haven't been building enough housing and we don't have a variety of housing. And I just want to jump back in and change this up slightly. Prosper Longmont is focused on non subsidized housing. And basically we want to butt up against where capital A affordable housing stops which comes up to 80% really of AMI. And we're focused on 80 to 120% AMI. So we want to make, that's the bulk of our workforce. That's what, and we want for purchase homes because what we see right now is a lot of people renting that would like to own. We see a lot of young families unable to sink their roots in to the community and start building equity. And this inability to build equity over time ties into a lot of other societal disconnects and inequalities that we've got. But I have a big fear for my kid's generation and beyond. If we can't get people owning and living and having an equity stake within Longmont, it's going to change the entire nature of our city. I think it's good to hope. Go ahead, pick it up. I'd like to piggyback that a little. I think Eric touched on it's not just that we haven't built housing, but it's also the kind of housing we've built. We've really focused on single family residential, which a lot of people would call the American dream. Well, that has excluded other things. We're trying to change that now. You see more townhomes, paired homes, things like that. But when land is the big cost, as Harold mentioned, if you don't go up or if you don't take advantage of efficiencies and how you use land, you make housing more expensive. But we are also a very desirable community. And part of the reason we're desirable is our parks, our open space, our lands, our hiking trails. We have a lot of beautiful amenities here, which creates more demand here than maybe some place that isn't as attractive. And wages have not gone up proportionately to the way that land costs have gone up. And we are also becoming more and more of a service economy with people in the lower end of that, a lot of restaurants, retail, coffee shops, bookstores. And those people have historically not made a living wage, and that has been exacerbated by this high cost of land in comparison to the wage. But I think, and Edwina started on this, we have intentionally our segregated community, all of the communities in Boulder County. We had things in our laws and policies says people of different colors shouldn't live together. That is the history of the United States. We had mortgage policies that enforced that. We had other kind of real estate policies that enforced that. So those of us who are white folk have had privilege and advantage when it comes to housing. But the GI Bill is another example. When soldiers came back from World War II who were people of color, they think they officially had the same benefits, but they had trouble accessing them. And they didn't get to use them in the same way. So we have a history of racism in the housing. And if we want to change that, we have to be intentional about it. If we want to create the diversity that makes for a vibrant, thriving community, we've got to get into it more. And some people are afraid of that. And so we can talk later about how do we change those fears? I have a question that we're going to come right back to. I think it's even greater than color diversity. Or there are places in our country where families with children can't live. And I think that's one question we need to ask ourselves. Do we want a community where families can thrive and children can live in safe housing? And we could become San Francisco where there are limited number of children because families can't afford to live there. So we've had zoning issues. We've learned a lot about redlining and mortgage qualification. And who doesn't, who doesn't? I mean, all those roll up. If you add to that what happened during the Great Recession, if you just looked at the date in Longmont, the number of housing permits that declined year over year over here for a decade until there were almost none. We're still trying to catch up from that in Longmont. Carl, do you want to weigh in on this one or? Yeah, it's kind of hard. I think when you look at it, I think there's some great points that have been made. So I think density is incredibly important to keep in mind in this conversation. Because when you look generally at the housing stock in Longmont, it is the traditional single family lot. And granted, over time, the yards have gotten smaller, but you still have yards. And so what happens is when you look at an acre of land, and maybe you put three, maybe you put four units. But when you look at where a lot of communities are moving nationally, you know, they're looking at higher densities, really approaching it from the Brownstone town, Brownstone concept, townhome, narrow sitback homes. And that's different than anything we have in this community. But the reason you have to do that is because when you look at high land costs, you have to maximize your density to reduce what the cost is to each home. And then in today's market, you layer the different cost components onto it. So you have land costs coming in. Then you have the vertical construction costs. Then you have the horizontal construction costs. You have the soft costs that are associated with the financing architecture engineering in those components. And then you have permits and fees that the city comes in. And so you have all of these costs layering on to a project. And so you really need that density to help minimize what the impact is to each individual unit. And there's some projects we're working on where we're neck deep in this right now. And when you look at what's the solution, it is a housing type that is not consistent with what we've seen. But it is a housing type that looks at density. In some cases, you're going to need height in order to get those units for people have the ability of home ownership. And I think that's where we're really working as a housing authority, as a city staff, and other aspects is really dissecting the performance and understanding what are the variables. Because at the end of the day, it goes back to the old adage, you know, death by 1,000 cuts. In order to tackle this problem, you're going to have to look at everything because there's not one single solution to the challenge we're facing. So there are some in Longmont, maybe in Lafayette and around the country who would say, solve your housing problem by stop building. Just don't build any more homes. And you won't have people looking for housing in Longmont. Is that a solution? And if not, why not? What are the consequences? If we just say, we're going to do a moratorium. No more housing permits in Longmont. That solves our housing problem. Well, what I would say is what we've seen in the market growth. I mean, and this is as we're digging into the development side of this and what it takes is we're in a very desirable location in the country. I mean, so you got to put that up on the board. And so if you don't increase your supply, I mean, this is basic economic theory. If you don't increase your supply and you're in an area that's really desirable and people are competing on paying for homes to live in your community, those numbers start moving very fast. I'll give you a personal example. Six years ago, I purchased my house. Thank you, my mom was going to move in with me, so I needed a first floor bedroom and some other things. At that time, I paid $430,000 for a large house. Based on what we've just seen, that's doubled in six years. And I think that really is a personal example to say that's the issue that we're dealing with back to when the employer had. That's why many of the people that work for the city can't buy homes here is just because of the growth and the pricing of those homes. So I think the answer is you really need to figure out a way to deal with creating additional supply so that you can manage that. And the supply has to be attainable and affordable and we also have to figure out how do we maintain those units in the attainable and affordable category in a longer period of time because it does no good if we build an attainable house. And then the next time they sell it, it becomes a market right now. So there's a lot more variables in this. So the effects of just capping, saying we're not going to build that, we'll take the edge off the domain. That's how we got here, Tim. That's what Boulder has been doing that for decades. Then we used to be the relief valve for Boulder, but now the pressure is built so high that everyone understands all you're doing is pushing the problem somewhere else and now it's flooded the entire county. We are still the least expensive town in the county if you can believe that because it's not affordable or it's not attainable. And environmentally it's really dumb. It forces people who work in Longmont to drive from long distances. So the greenhouse gases, the emissions, the ozone problem, the traffic are all higher because people can't be here. So if you care about the environment, that kind of a cap just pushes the problem out and drives it back in. And it is not the green way to go. So we do hear, I'm sorry, go ahead. I was going to say that's an example where we do need to change how we message the need for housing is that it's not this narrow dilemma. It's very broad because it will affect transportation. It will affect the environment. And the folks that are saying cap growth are not necessarily looking at the big picture of how it's going to affect transport, how it's going to affect the environment. How it eventually could affect their own lives if their children can't afford to go to college and move back to Longmont. We hear only two. Take it down to a more basic level. We had certain distances where our water staff and our electric staff, in terms of how far they can live, city employees to respond to emergency issues, outages, water breaks, things like that. We've had to extend that based on it. And so if you really go kind of water or some practical implications, we've talked about this internally is how do we deal with a situation if we haven't outage our water leak or another where we're having to bring people in and how far away are they? Because what that does is it just reduces the time that people are going to go through, or it increases the time because they're coming in from further distances. And the real world challenge is if you say, well, you have to be in here within this limit, they go other places to find employment because housing is so important to them. So there is a practical day-to-day issue with folks having to move further out. So when it's your electricity that's out or the water main in your neighborhood that's broken and the city calls for someone to come and fix it and they can't get here because there's a blizzard or whatever, that's when it becomes real relevant. Yeah, how the distance that someone has to come in. For example, in the last O-Sorm, we bought hotel rooms. Yeah. We're gonna come back. We're gonna come back. I just wanna say one other thing and that is in places that really had cost schools have had to close down because young families with children can't afford to live there. We have two communities in Colorado who declared themselves a housing disaster area because they couldn't get any employees and all the businesses were closing. I heard of a restaurant that took out its refrigerator and put like dorms in there because they needed a place for their employees. So the consequences of that kind of thing, that cap that you just described could be really dire. Let's go ahead. And personal. I think you have to bring it down to domino effect. How's that going to be a personal issue down the road? Well, you both have mentioned congestion, traffic. So there's, we hear from time to time, stop building and that'll solve your problem. And we're saying, you're saying, no, no, that just creates a new problem. We also hear and read a lot about traffic congestion. You know, we have too many people where if we continue to grow, we're gonna have just more intractable traffic congestion. Are you saying that's not true? Go ahead. Well, I'm working on an affordable housing project in Lafayette. That's a 400 unit project. And the original opposition to the project was traffic related. People were very worried about the traffic. Well, it turned out the number of units, which was pretty large for an affordable housing project, enabled better bus service. It enabled enough traffic to create some right turn lanes in a place where they were really needed some traffic circles. And the traffic on measured traffic in that area went from an F to B with adding 400 units because they qualified for certain things that weren't. So it could be that it could create more traffic, but some of it is how do we grow and are we smart about how we grow? And you could put 20 units in somewhere and do it badly and create bad traffic. So there are smart ways to do that kind of thing. So it doesn't create traffic. And just so listeners will understand, F to B, the Department of Transportation has established very specific criteria for intersections and they rate them A through F based on numbers and numbers of lights. People have to wait to turn left and those kinds of things and numbers of cars in the intersection. So that's the scale you were talking about. Thanks. I also want to talk about, and Harold and I have had these conversations as well, how a community is built and designed and developed impacts how far things you need are from where you live. And we have a single family detached kind of community right now. And that's not sustainable. The farther you build out, the less financially maintainable is your infrastructure. But I don't want to go in that direction. I want to say, if you're complaining about traffic, you're probably driving to the store in your car. Well, if you had a store nearby that you could walk or bike to, traffic would be less. And as we grow, because you can't stop growth, we have to grow in a different way where bicycling and walking are definitely more doable. Try walking down South Main Street anytime right now. It is not a walkable corridor. I've done it, but you need to create that kind of mixed use. And that's why you hear mixed use being talked about all the time. Hey, the daycare is right over here. The flower shop's right over here. There's a small grocery store here. I can get a lot of the things I need, my coffee shops over there. It's all right here in my neighborhood. And I'm going to walk there. But I spent a long time living overseas in denser countries like Italy and Germany. I've lived in Japan. So I've seen- This is an Air Force vet. Yeah, so I've seen the way other places do it. And there's a lot less driving and a lot more walking. And the people aren't as big either. There's health benefits to that. Well, I think as they talk about it, I think when you look at, and I'll just use the word mass transit, but a bus system, and when we talk about it, the parameters for transit funding is really built on ridership. I mean, and so it is what it is. Everyone complains about, they say, well, you don't have enough ridership, so you can't get additional routes and you can't do this. So it's sort of backwards. But what we know in that conversation is the more density you have, the more ridership you're going to get, which actually will allow you to make a stronger argument for more transit in your community because you have that density. It is rare to find transit systems that run routes and a bunch of single family neighborhoods. But when you get the density and you start locating it in areas with employment opportunities, that actually can help you get the transit system you need to make some of these other improvements from an environmental standpoint, reducing traffic. And so, density is a piece of that question. It also helps low income people not to have to buy a car and take that out of their budget so they can maybe save to buy on at some point. So, capping growth doesn't solve our housing problem. Capping growth doesn't solve our transportation or congestion problem. It exacerbates it. And it makes them both worse. So that's kind of counterintuitive for some folks or we wouldn't keep reading about it in our local loosters. I think the key is everybody said it's smart growth because you don't want to sprawl either because that doesn't make sense financially for communities is to just have this sprawl where you're just going out. Which would be a consequence of capping growth within our city limits. It's not gonna, you're not gonna stop building it. They would just, we would just build outside the city. Well, right. And some cities that have been around they just keep doing this. And that gets really expensive. And so it's really a smart growth approach that you have to take. So, I'm gonna come back. First of all, I wanna say we have our studio audience that's here. If anybody in the audience has questions and you want to ask one, queue up over here. I'm gonna ask you another question and I'll call on our audience members to participate with their questions. But I wanna come back to the, as they're queuing up if anybody does, I wanna come back to the diversity, equity and inclusion topic. How should the values, right? We talk a lot about valuing diversity, equity, inclusion as a community. How should those values show up in housing policy and on our housing initiatives? Well, I think it does with the city of Longwell. So programs like the down payment assistance where people can augment their own resources and scale up. I think that's an excellent example of how you can really increase diversity. The other thing is, I think people can scale up by utilizing education opportunities which does depend on transportation, programs that are able to stay in a community because there are people that are utilizing those programs. Also our school district benefits from the diversity and being able to house our teachers who then in turn are educating our youth and congratulations to the same grand district because over the years they have been working on increasing the graduation rate. Well, you want those kids to graduate, go to college, the college rate has radically increased among diverse populations. You want those kids who we've invested in over the years with our city programs or our school programs. We want them back because we put a major investment in them. Yeah, that's our biggest return on investment during economic velvet, our kids. But if they can't afford to come back and raise their children here. So given the values of diversity, how we value diversity, equity, inclusion and all the things you just described, why is it so difficult for us to get communities to embrace affordable housing development and opportunities? Ann Marie, you're right in the middle of this. I am and it's challenging. It really is challenging. I think people are afraid of change. So some of it may not be that they're afraid of affordable or attainable housing. They just don't want their neighborhood to look different than what it looked like when they moved in. They moved there because there was a certain feel and I'm working on an issue where it's a piece of property that's on commercial and they want to build housing. But the people opposing it are saying, what about the owls and the foxes and all the other things that are on that property? And the thing is it's gonna be developed. It's either gonna be commercial or residential and the owls and the foxes are not gonna be there. They'll be moved into some other area as it gets developed. But I think that sentiment about we live in this place with wildlife. We wanna keep our wildlife. And what people need to understand is if we wanna keep our wildlife in our parks and in our open areas, our building needs to be in the city limits where we already are urbanized, where we already have sidewalks and we already have sewers and things like that. And that protects our open space from encroachment and sprawl by keeping our building in that area. But I believe number one, people don't know that affordable housing in Boulder County is attractive. And throughout Colorado, some of the best affordable housing developments have actually increased property values and created whole new redevelopment of neighborhoods because it's so attractive that it's brought in businesses. It's brought in other kinds of housing because we've done such a good job. And there are lots of examples. The spoke on Kauffman is one. Josephine Cummins in Lafayette, Pearl Street. I think it's called the Pearl in Boulder are really good examples of very attractive affordable housing. So I think that's one of the concerns. And I think people are afraid of density. They're afraid they're gonna be crowded. They're afraid that there's gonna be traffic. And so we have to show them that we can actually do things in a way that doesn't increase traffic. And that requires people pay attention to this. So appreciating that you're giving us a forum to talk and to be able to say, it doesn't have to be that way. And so that's part of what Echo is trying to do is we are trying to educate people about what is affordable housing. How can it look up? Josephine Cummins in Lafayette has this beautiful community center that during the pandemic became a place where seniors were getting vaccinations, where they were getting meals brought to them because they didn't wanna go out. Groceries brought to them. There are a lot of community amenities, community gardens that can be part of affordable housing. But people have to not just be knee-jerk and not say, oh, I heard about the projects in New York. That's what they think about. And that's not what we're talking about. We've done a very good job of building beautiful environments for people to live in in this county and we have to be open to it. But I think some of it's just change. People are afraid of change. I have pages of questions, but we do have a member of the audience queued up over here. And part of this whole storyline is to make certain the public has a chance to have their voice in this as well. So this is an opportunity. Thank you. The preference, but I'm gonna ask you with the observation that density actually predated Henry Ford and what he did and also predated zoning because the principle and seminal case in zoning was at Euclid v. Amher, which is 1921. So if you look at density as a development strategy, it came about really because of workforce and transportation needs. Well, duh. So I'm curious whether you know of any jurisdictions in Colorado that have studied, implemented, or considered what's really economic zone. Perfect example of that would be maximum lot sizes. And again, this is all in the residential area. And how about the farm? I'm gonna, Greg, thanks for the question. I'm gonna try to recapture that just in case the sound system didn't pick it up since we didn't have a mic set aside for our guests. The question really is about economic zoning, not just the kind of traditional criteria zoning that we've done from commercial, multi-use, et cetera. And whether or not anybody's familiar with areas that have used economics or economic zoning as the basis for land use. Is that fair, Summit? Yeah. I think, you know, what I would say from the, that's what we're digging into right now. I don't think we're calling it economic zoning, but I think what we're looking at is when you're looking at workforce housing and density. The person who asked the question was correct. It's interesting when you look at communities now, a lot of the housing that you're seeing being developed for home ownership actually looks like housing that was built in the early 1900s. We call it shot, you know, people call them shotgun houses, you could shoot. That's what you're seeing people develop. There's some, you know, great example here is in the Stapleton area where they did some work there to really maximize density. Austin, Texas has done a great job in the Mueller redevelopment of the airport area. So from a city standpoint, that's what we're looking at. And it really, we're not calling it this, but it really is, how do you bring the things together that you need to to ensure that you have housing available for your workforce? And yeah. So I've heard you in other venues talk about rethinking long months as opposed to land code, land use and the land code that goes along with that, with to put an urban frame around that as opposed to an outlying city frame. What would be the implications of an urban approach? Or the, I guess, I'm not sure, we're either the right way to frame it or state it, Harold. But the use of urban land code for the purposes of land use in foreign countries. You know, I'm gonna go pretty general. So I think if you look at it, it is, if you look at our, if you go to any neighborhood and you look at it and you see the size of yards, what you're doing in an urban, more of an urban development is you're reducing that yard space. You're reducing the setbacks to the road because again, you're maximizing the value of the land for housing units versus yards. So more units per acre. More units per acre. We might see the allowance for buildings more than four stories. Correct. For housing. And so then what comes with that is reduced street widths. And that's when you're managing multiple codes. The setbacks that you have from house to house, utility easement setbacks, how are you laying in your water lines, your electric lines? And that's the work we're digging into right now. So that's really what we mean is, think about some of our more historical communities there's places where you can see examples of that in Longmont and places that were built probably when the community was first being developed. It really is. The original square bond? Looking back to that time going, this is how they built because they were maximizing that. They needed to be within walking distance of where they were. They didn't have cars, they had a horse. And minimum lot size, we've been talking about that. Like minimum lot size, maximum lot size, like Greg said, that makes more sense. How do we squeeze more closer together so that cities become more walkable, pedestrian friendly, cyclable, and then the amenities that you need will tend to locate near those, that denser, that denser- And you're designed with the intention where, you design with, you're intentionally designing where maybe you design those amenities into it. So I may not have a yard, but I may have a larger space in the development that I could utilize. One of the kind of tangential, the Longmonts Main Street corridor plan is a really great example of rethinking land use just relative to a number of parking spaces. I mean, that's a real time right now in the city because of what you're able to do with land more productively than just parked cars. It does have an implication then for how many cars you're gonna have operating right within a vicinity. But that's a good example of what's happening right now. We have another audience member and a question. My name is Michael. Oh, I know that, I know that voice. Hey, Michael. Michael Schnaufer, I'm kind of speaking from the dark here and I'm starting a little hoarse. First of all, thank you, Dr. Waters and all the panelists, Harold and Eric and a couple of panelists I have the opportunity to meet. So grateful that you're having this session on this really critical issue. So thank you for that. Thanks for being in the audience. My pleasure is many of you know I have been an advocate for almost two decades now about lobbying for the city to be proactive about a potential flood event, catastrophic flood event. Unfortunately, we experienced that flood event and the city's doing a wonderful job in responding to that after the fact. But underneath that is my deeper passion climate change. I'm incredibly concerned about the existential threat of climate change, not just to humanity but locally to the city of Longmont. And I am very important to see this panel talk about a lot of issues like walkability, social justice, traffic, carbon emissions, things like that. And what we're beginning to do here tonight is talk about things from a more systemic, holistic point of view from what I would phrase the multi-salvation point of view where our solutions don't just solve the issue of housing but they can also solve the issues of traffic, social justice, climate change, environmental protection, things like that. So my question is how can we in the conversation and the narrative within the city of Longmont how can we begin to shift those conversations to a more holistic systems thinking framework so that the solutions are multi-salving? And I'll just two quick examples. One is regarding wildlife ecosystem protections. We are a grassland primary ecosystem. Every single tree here in the wildlife system itself is every single tree is here because of the consequence of development. Our wildlife ecosystems are enhanced and more robust if you look at numbers, more species, broader ecosystems because of development. Hundred years ago we had Buffalo, we had bears roaming through this area. We're not gonna return to that. So it's a very specious argument to say that we need to protect the environment by not allowing development. It's incredibly re-washing. And relating to the developers making profit, we're elected to see if there's any comments on how the NIMBYs are actually profiting from their anti-development rhetoric how the value of their homes is going up by opposing development. There needs to be honest conversations from the systemic point of view. So thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. That's it. There was a lot in that Michael's statement and a couple of questions embedded. And I won't try to restate them. He didn't mention it. I just want to say quickly, talk to your neighbors. I have a development going up in my neighborhood of 144 units and my neighbors are going crazy about it. They are not excited about it. And I'm trying to say, but we need housing, we need, and it's not even an affordable housing. It's just work for something. And I'm having conversations with them about our needs and about why it makes sense. Now maybe it's, we don't want it exactly as the builders proposing it. Maybe there are different points of access, but we need to be talking to our neighbors about those kind of things. And most of us avoid those difficult conversations. We don't want to do that. It's hard. And I would just say we got to because our world was at stake. I think Michael's point is, we've chosen the hardest thing to solve in my opinion is how do you build housing that people can afford to live in to stabilize the community with all of the benefits that he was bringing up? And how do we start that conversation? Well, we've started it. That's why we're all sitting here bringing up all of these different issues. So people that are interested in having the conversation and actually solving problems should lean in to what Echo's doing and Emory, what Prosper's doing, what we're trying to do. We're trying to bring in every element of the community into the conversation because it's not simple and it's not easy. And saying no is the lowest form of intelligence. Solving problems is really, really challenging and in this context, extremely complex. So it takes a lot of moving parts. Like Harold said, a lot of different things have to happen all incrementally to really start to solve the problem. We have time for one more question and we have an audience member ready to ask. Housing is a very important topic, especially in my campaign to the state legislature. What sorts of things would you need support from me to help you with? Because I want to help with this topic from the state legislature's point of view. There you go. There's a leader leaning in. What's your response? Nationwide, legislatures are looking at the issue of zoning and whether there should be some guidelines or maybe strings attached to state money to try to encourage good land use planning. But I wanted to say there's a ballot measure that is gonna be on affordable housing this year that has raised enough signatures and it is gonna be ballot measure 108 and it will have 300 million a year for 17 years for affordable housing. So I think that's really important and talking to people about that and engaging them. Now I think this ballot measure is imperfect and there are some things I would have done differently if I had drafted it. So I don't want to say it's perfect, but it's statutory so it can be fixed and some of the rulemaking could fix. As opposed to constitutional. Right, right. So I would encourage everybody to look at that. It'll have a different number. It won't be 108 when it gets set on the ballot right now. It's being called 108. So I would say looking at how to incentivize good land use and how to fund housing. We need more money. However, people need to vote for that. And I think the step before that is showing them some of the messages that prosperous developing of the big picture and how every sector is affected by housing and it does affect them personally and it's not just their own little block with their big yard and it's going to affect them personally if we don't get a handle on it. So the education piece before the ballot measure I think is important. Well, and I think what Emory talked about, so there are some dollars coming out from the state and DOH for workforce and affordable housing and you can see some of the strings already in place in terms of they are looking for more dense designs. They're asking questions about turnaround time. How are you dealing with everything we've talked about and those are requirements in to just the letter of intent for some of these funds. And so I think the big piece is if you kind of did some rough math on that ballot initiative, I think that equates to about $31,000 per unit if you look at the number of units they want to build for that amount. You know, when you start looking at the gap and this is some of the proformas that we're looking at depending on land prices and things like that. You know, the gap for workforce housing could be around 40 to 55, $60,000 depending on the land price. And if we can get assistance to where you can cut that, that lets the cities also come in and do it. But right now it's all borne by the cities in terms of, you know, if you can get a grant you can do this. But in terms of a long-term sustainable program it really is how do you start bridging gaps in order to get these units built. And so I think it's incredibly important for the state to really look at this because funding is a huge piece of this. Well, so about half the questions I was going to ask, I haven't had a chance to. So maybe we'll do a second session on this. Because I do think bringing the community along with understanding what the challenges are and what the options are and the rationale is as important as financing and land code and where the money's going to come from, whether it's the state or the feds or wherever. But we only have a couple of minutes left in this program. So if there are any last thoughts that any of you would like to share, this is your chance to offer. I would say that the thing we're focused on in Prosper Longmont is Harold mentioned strings. We're trying to get to a point to take the market power to start addressing this. Now there's things that have to shift and move and change to allow that to happen. But it's the only thing big enough to actually really put a dent in it. I've heard many times we can never tax and subsidize our way to housing solutions. It's going to take a combination across the spectrum, a bunch of different solutions in order to get there. One of my questions was take government out of this. How are we going to do this just with social capital and what capital's out there in terms of mercury housing? But anyway, are there other final thoughts? I like Eric's comment because if you get buy-in from business and can influence public policy, I think that increases the support and then it gets other sectors involved in the solutions. I also want to speak a little bit about renters. We talked about a lot about home buying, but post-fire in some of the communities, we're seeing 40 and 50% rent increases and that is spread all the way to long months. And so I think that right now there's a statewide ban on rent control. So that even if, for example, Louisville and Superior wanted to say after the fire, rents can't increase by more than 10% a year for the next three years. They can't do that. They have no authority under the legislature. Most people don't realize that in the state. I know because people have said to me, why isn't my local government doing something to help me after this fire? And so there are things that need to be done. And also in talking to renters, we've had people, we had some really bad circumstances after the fire with landlords behaving badly. Our law needs to be fixed. There are some ways and there are other things, keeping people in their existing home who are renters and also people like seniors who need, maybe just help to stay in their home. I think we haven't talked about that. And I'd like to say there's lots more to be done there. There is, and that's part of what the city does. I know with the affordable housing fund. You got about 10 seconds. Well, I don't know if I can get it done in 10 seconds, but I'll go as fast as I can. We're in the middle of budget right now. And budget is predicated on revenue streams coming in from sales tax, property tax, you name it. And our business community is a big part of that. In terms of the money we receive. We've talked about all of these issues, but at the end of the day, if we want to continue to attract companies like Smuckers and the companies we've had recently, they need places for their staff to live. And I know when we're in those conversations, one of the first questions is, what's your employment picture like? And now we're having to give them a different example. And when you look at the long-term financial viability of the community, it's important to have the labor force there. And I think it gets lost in this conversation, but it is down the road important to a community's overall financial condition to have houses where people can live or in that area. Well, we're over time, but I want to say to you four, there couldn't have been a better panel for this conversation. So thank you so much for giving us an hour tonight. More importantly, for what you do every day, day in and day out, I know that kind of service you all, I'm gonna find the kind of service you all render to the community and we're deeply grateful. The next opportunity, maybe the next opportunity for people to learn about land will be on October 13th. ECHO is hosting, I think there are some others and prosper, a hosting a Zoom session to learn more about land code and what the data that Eric was referring to earlier. So if anybody's interested, they could go to echocolorado.com, www.echocolorado.com and register for the Zoom session, that'll be on October 13th. Longmoner's the next opportunity you'll have to be part of the studio audience, to be part of the backstory will be on September 26th and we will be focusing on the tinker mill. So thanks to you, thanks to our studio audience and thanks for anybody who was listening. That's your backstory on housing in Longmoner.