Draconian state-enforced housing policies that completely override local government, local decision-making, and community preferences, have no place in Colorado. PLAN-Boulder County takes an official position opposing the Colorado Senate Bill 23-213.

Introduced into the Colorado legislature on March 22, 2023, the bill is titled “Land Use”, but it is fundamentally a massive change to local and state governmental roles and responsibilities in the entire state. SB 23-213 dramatically and egregiously expands state power over local governments – including counties, cities, and towns where the vast majority of Coloradans live – by pre-empting numerous roles and regulatory processes historically assigned to local government.

The bill does not just pre-empt local “land use” policy, but subverts local housing policy, planning policy, water policy, transportation policy, and growth policy. The bill could only be described as a large-scale power grab to completely subvert Colorado’s proud heritage of local control and replace it with the type of “central planning” more common in authoritarian governments.

While the bill’s main focus is to increase housing “affordability” by increasing housing density in cities across the state, the bill includes no identifiable or proven provisions to actually 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.

PLAN-Boulder opposes the bill because it:

• Overrides decades of citizen input and local planning.
• Forces high density urbanization – up to 2 to 4 times greater than currently exists in single-family neighborhoods – across cities in Colorado while doing almost nothing to actually increase 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 to Colorado’s air, rivers, open lands, wildlife habitat, and mountain landscapes of forcing increased population growth.

PLAN-Boulder County supports land use and housing policy that improves affordability, reduces congestion, increases transit use while reducing emissions of GHG, and preserving open spaces. The proposed legislation is contrary to all these goals. Colorado communities have a right to determine their own destiny and density. Unleashing unrestricted, market-rate development across Colorado’s sensitive landscape without thought, care, or planning ignores Colorado’s long, proud tradition of local control and will result in more expensive housing, increased congestion, damage to the environment and loss of community character.

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PLAN-Boulder County has been protecting and enhancing Boulder County’s unique character and desirability, while at the same time reducing our carbon footprint and environmental impact since 1959. We are a future-focused, citizen-led grassroots activist organization that uses education, political action, and encouragement of good governance to advocate for public—not special—interests. We’re here for you. We’re here for the environment. And we’re here to stay.

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