O’Toole: Density mandate in Senate Invoice 213 will not do what planners declare – Full Colorado

Colorado Senate Bill 213 will make housing less affordable and increase greenhouse gas emissions. This is exactly the opposite of what its proponents claim.

Polls show that 80 percent of Americans want to live in single-family homes. Recent census data shows that more than 80 percent of residents in 14 states live in single-family homes.

Colorado isn’t one of them.

Census data also shows that more than 80 percent of residents in more than 30 percent of the country’s urban areas live in single-family homes.

The Denver metropolitan area is not one of them.

Neither are the Boulder, Ft. Collins or Longmont urban areas. However, more than 80 percent of residents in the urban areas of Colorado Springs and Pueblo live in single-family homes. In the Pueblo it is almost 85 percent.

Boulder and Denver don’t miss out, with more people wanting to live in apartments than other parts of the country. But because the planners deliberately made the single-family house more expensive by making new construction outside the city limits more difficult.

Boulder has a vast green belt that has helped make it the least affordable urban area in the nation outside of California or Hawaii. Denver has an urban growth frontier that has nearly doubled the cost of single-family homes. Meanwhile, El Paso and Pueblo counties have some of the least restrictive zoning in the state, allowing more Colorado Springs and Pueblo residents to achieve their single-family home dreams.

Dense does not mean affordable

SB-213 supporters claim it will make housing more affordable. In fact, this makes it less affordable.

The House amended bill requires many cities to change zoning ordinances to allow developers to demolish single-family homes and replace them with high-density housing developments near busy bus routes and light rail stations (a statewide mandate for such upzoning was removed from the Senate bill). ).

In other words, the bill will reduce the supply of housing that at least 80 percent of Colorado residents want to live in. This will drive up the price of the remaining single family homes in these areas and make housing less affordable, not more affordable.

Imagine there was a shortage of pickups. Since pickup trucks are used by plumbers, electricians, and other contractors, the shortage drove up all sorts of costs. A pickup weighs as much as two small cars. To alleviate the shortage, the Colorado legislature is proposing a bill to scrap pickup trucks and use the materials to build small cars. Would that alleviate the pickup shortage? Obviously not. Still, some Colorado lawmakers believe that replacing homes that people want with homes that people don’t want will make housing more affordable. It will not.

SB-213 also asks cities to allow the construction of so-called transit-oriented developments. You may have seen these mid-rise (four- to six-story) apartment buildings popping up all over Metro Denver and other Colorado cities.

These stack-n-pack developments are hardly affordable. As California developer Nicholas Arenson recently testified before a planning commission in San Francisco, the need for more steel, concrete and elevators makes building such apartments much more expensive per square foot than single-family homes. The demand for living in them is low, so most of them are subsidized.

Even with subsidies, these mid-size apartments are only “affordable” because they are broken up into small apartments, often 1,000 square feet or less. In some of these buildings, the rent for a 900-square-foot apartment is more than the monthly mortgage payment for a 2,000-square-foot home in Colorado Springs or another city that doesn’t severely restrict rural development.

SB-213 is based on a flawed premise: that denser cities are more affordable. In fact, the opposite is the case. As can be seen from the chart comparing housing affordability versus density in the country’s 100 largest urban areas, the country’s densely populated urban areas are the least affordable, while the cheapest urban areas have the lowest density.

click to enlarge

As the blue trendline shows, census data shows that density is making housing less affordable. The 2020 census calculated the population density of the largest urban areas in the country. The Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey measured median home values ​​and median family incomes in 2020. Housing affordability is commonly measured by dividing median housing value by median family income; 3 or less is affordable, 4 is marginally affordable, 5 or more is unaffordable. For the 100 largest urban areas in the country shown in this chart, the correlation between density and unaffordability is 0.8, meaning this is far from coincidental.

Sprawl is not a swear word

Planners also say urban growth limits and other rural land-use restrictions help protect farms, forests and open spaces. But the 2010 census found that all urban areas in Colorado covered just 1.5 percent of the state. Data from the 2020 census shows it’s still just 1.5 percent. So-called urban sprawl (which is really just people living the American single-family dream) is no threat to Colorado’s farms, forests or open spaces.

Density does not reduce greenhouse gases

The planners admit that SB-213 will build homes that people don’t want to live in. But they say Colorado needs to force people to live in denser settlements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They are wrong about that too.

Data from the Department of Energy suggests that people living in more densely populated areas tend to drive slightly less. But data shows they also slow down in heavy traffic, which wastes more fuel. As a result, driving in densely populated urban areas uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases per capita than driving in sparsely populated areas. If Colorado is to be climate-friendly, it must allow more people to live in sparsely populated single-family neighborhoods.

Senate Bill 213 is not about making housing more affordable. Nor is it about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s about government trying to force people to do things they don’t want to live, including a commitment to forcing more people to rent cramped apartments rather than owning their own homes. The legislature should resolutely reject this bill.

If Colorado wants to make housing more affordable, it should remove city growth limits and other constraints on rural land development. Yes, that could result in urban areas covering 1.6 or 1.7 percent of the state instead of just 1.5 percent. But isn’t that better than forcing young families to leave the state because they can’t afford housing in Colorado?

Randal O’Toole is a land use and transportation policy analyst, director of the Thoreau Institute and director of the Independence Institute’s Transportation Policy Center.

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