And the neighborhoods they'll target - like Martin Acres - have already sacrificed plenty (we have 2 affordable housing developments and a halfway house and lost baseball fields and the Hi-Mar pool) for more "affordable" townhouses and quadplexes (ignoring the fact that the land alone will be over $2 million an acre to acquire the existing houses).

The real NIMBY here is that they won't do it on Mapleton, in Newlands, Whittier etc. They'll just target the middle class neighborhoods.

Heaven forbid that we in Martin Acres insist they look elsewhere - feeling we have made sufficient sacrifices already "for the good of Boulder".

Not all neighborhoods have been targeted like Martin Acres either.
The baseball fields sit under Alvarado Village Low Income Housing. The Hi-Mar neighborhood pool was bulldozed to build Hi-Mar low income Senior Housing. Across the street is the 48 bed dormitory style half house that just opened. All on Moorhead.

We've been targeted for historic preservation, a "character area", and city council candidates have proposed "special restrictions" for the neighborhood.

Bear Creek flooded and many homes took water in the basement - despite calls to the city - they then claimed they weren't aware of "significant flooding" in area.

We've had a lot of insult and injury to pull together over.

So Bruce wanting to remove all neighborhood serving retail from a BC2 zoning (neighborhood serving retail and offices) to build an obscenely big office building and hotel on a residential access street (there will be "Zero" access from Baseline) was only the latest thing hurled at the neighborhood.

And upzoning - sounds like targeting and redlining to me - (see It Takes A Hero about the fight in NYC to spread affordable housing throughout the city) when they codespeak "certain areas" aka not Mapleton, Newlands, Whittier etc.

Strangely BVSD believes in Martin Acres. They're going to replace the old Creekside elementary with a brand new building in recognition of all the young families with children in MA who wanted single family houses with yards and school w/in walking distance. Of course to buy them they have to compete with investors who want to rent to 4-6 adults vs. 2 parents and kids.

After over a decade of being targeted I'm absolutely voting for 300 because I bought a single family house in a single family neighborhood and if the house next door goes quad - I will literally lose all my solar access - which figured into my decision to buy this house. And wasn't that part of what we fought over during the whole Compatible Development Process?

Here's what's happened in Denver. I sure as hell didn't spend all the years commuting from Jeffco and saving to buy a house in Boulder to end up living next to a monster like that.

Yes! The Mother Jones article was the one I was thinking of but couldn't recall where I had read it. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/black...

At one point 70% of homes for sale in the Tampa area were being bought by large rental firms. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/wa...
Southern California http://www.sgvtribune.com/business/20150628/repor...

These huge rental firms are of concern - the vast majority of us can't compete with them. And the idea of rentals being a derivatives driven product - that's just begging for a massive meltdown with cascading evictions at some future point in time. Or they decide the returns aren't high enough and start dumping houses on the market driving values way down and putting people who did manage to buy upside down on their mortgages. That will benefit new buyers trying to get into the market but potentially devastate a bunch of other families in the process.

The statewide tenants-rights organization found that renters of single-family homes from the three biggest corporate landlords in the state—Blackstone/Invitation Homes, Waypoint Homes and Colony American Homes—“pay higher rents than their neighbors and face challenges getting repairs.”
Doug Henwood, an economics journalist and author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom, says investor-driven home purchases follow the general model of private-equity deals. “They are in it for the short-term, the medium-term,” says Henwood. “They are not in it for the long haul. The incentive is to screw the tenants over completely, minimize repairs and maximize rents.” http://www.gtweekly.com/index.php/santa-cruz-news...

These large national companies don't care about the communities where they own properties. They don't live there. They aren't vested in things like school quality and local infrastructure. But it's another mechanism to transfer what little wealth there is below up the chain......

They're doing exactly what was done in the mortgage market - bundling, securitizing, and packaging rentals as a product to sell to investors on the stock market. Driving home prices and rents up in the process and essentially shutting people out of fixer upper starter homes.
Real Estate "Flopping" The New Corporate Screw Job http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/14/1255423/...

I was reading about a family trying to buy a house and being constantly outbid - not by other families but by rental firms snapping up properties as they came on the market. Since the investors were all cash offers vs a mortgage they couldn't really compete - that's a part of why you're seeing personal letters from people asking if you want to sell your house and telling you all about themselves and their family. I've received several of them this summer.

Blackstone has other subsidiaries like Invitation Homes that owns 45, 000 rental properties http://therealdeal.com/miami/blog/2015/09/14/texa...

"Institutional landlords led by Blackstone have spent more than $25 billion since 2012 buying single-family homes to rent, professionalizing an industry that was previously dominated by mom-and-pop landlords. They’ve accessed public markets, used bank-arranged credit lines and sold bonds to finance purchases." http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-19...

The fact that Blackstone is paying attention to what Boulder is doing is troubling. (And I'm guessing the other big names Waypoint, American Residential, and Colony are watching) http://www.wsj.com/articles/racing-to-buy-homes-s...

Finally - AirBNB just poached the CFO from Blackstone Laurence Tosi.....

The renters are often only as good as the landlord. I've lived next to good tenants who were students, and bad tenants who weren't students. And the owners are absolutely who needs to be held ultimately accountable if their property turns into a repeat nuisance. If they can't keep the property under control or make money under the regulations in place then they need to get out of the rental business.

The renters next door to me are not students(the owner doesn't rent to students which isn't legal either). This property has been problematic for years. The surrounding houses with new kids (a mini baby boom on my block) have had to deal with rats from open compost, noise, semi-feral cats, a dog that barks non-stop when left home alone, weeds, parking issues, people coming and going loudly at all hours of the day and night, and a revolving door of tenants - I can't tell who all is actually living there at the moment but there are 4-6 vehicles parked every night in front of their and the neighbors houses. Add to that the new rental across the street with 4-5 vehicles every night - there are times I can barely get turned in and out of my driveway they've parked so close.

They're not as bad as a group of renters in the same house a few years back that the neighbors finally forced out through repeated noise complaints over time, but the current renters are not as good as the family that lived there before them and took care of the yard and house, kept regular hours and were quiet.

The landlord's response to each request to deal with his renters is "just talk to them" - he ought to pay us 10% of the rent for being his defacto property manager all these years. Repeated issues with the same property over many years and different tenants - it's absolutely the landlord at fault. And when all the renters are unrelated it's amazing how often no one is in charge or responsible for the issue you're trying to get addressed. At least with a family there is usually a parent/individual who functions as the head of household you can talk to about issues. And it's the rare family that has 4-6 adults with 4-6 cars.

Another rental by me - occupied by students who mow and weed the lawn, are quiet, park in front of their own house and are never an issue. The landlord is strict and upfront - no over occupancy and it's a quiet family neighborhood. He visits the property several times a year and has done a lot of improvements(even installed a sprinkler system) over the years. Not once in 10 plus years has there been an issue with the different renters (usually students) living there. The next door rental - the owner admitted to me that he hadn't visited it in years and was only there because the license was up for renewal, and to get it - he let tenants from his other properties do most of the energy upgrade work in exchange for free rent. I can only imagine how much worse it could get if he could legally rent it to more than 3 people and we'd lose what little leverage we currently have.

So no I don't feel this is an unjust risk to the property owners. I've been a landlord and while you can get bamboozled by a tenant and a bad one can do a lot of property damage - chronic property issues are absolutely the responsibility of the owner. If you can't make it work then you need to get into a different business.

Boulder is not a particularly family friendly town these days.

Boulder bulldozed the walking distance neighborhood Hi-Mar pool in Martin Acres to build the Hi-Mar low income senior housing. BVSD though is going to replace the old Creekside Elementary school with a brand new building; recognizing that Martin Acres is a neighborhood with lots of young families with kids. Lifting occupancy limits would make it even harder for families (with one or 2 incomes) to compete for housing against 4-6 pooled salary groups for rentals and investors for purchasing. Majestic Heights got an alzheimers facility on the old National Guard site (a stones throw from Hi-Mar Senior Housing across Table Mesa).

Upzoning - investors will snap up those units, which won't come close to be a high enough number built to lessen housing demand and will in no way lower housing costs(at over $2 million per acre simply to acquire existing houses). And families want nearby schools for kids to walk to and yards for kids to play in, you can't simply send young kids to the trailheads or parks (if you're lucky enough to have one w/in walking distance) unsupervised. Boulder's own housing survey showed relatively few families with children want to live in condo's and townhomes without yards.

Austin, New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco etc. all see outflows of people in the getting married and having kids age group for the reasons mentioned above. I simply don't understand why city council believes that won't be the case here as millennials hit these milestones. There's research easily findable via google showing that reproducing millennials are moving to the burbs for houses, yards, and schools just like the generations before them.

City Council has suddenly discovered the middle class but has no clue what they really need and that affordability is the total cost of living not just the cost of housing. It's the death of a thousand extra higher costs. Boulder works if you're young and single or a retired senior citizen but for those in between it's much harder.

The bulk of residential areas in Boulder are in RL - 3 person occupancy zoning - Table Mesa, Martin Acres, Majestic Heights, Highland Park , etc. are all in 3 person zoned areas.

What's interesting is to note the different categories of 3 person occupancy - RE - residential estate - and RR residential rural (colors are so close I can't tell which is which on map)

A -Agriculture - not much around P- Public (CU, NCAR, NIST etc)

Definitions here: https://www.municode.com/library/co/boulder/codes...
Residential - Rural 1, Residential - Rural 2, Residential - Estate, and Residential - Low 1: Single-family detached residential dwelling units at low to very low residential densities.

Residential - Low 2, and Residential - Medium 2: Medium density residential areas primarily used for small-lot residential development, including without limitation, duplexes, triplexes, or townhouses, where each unit generally has direct access at ground level.

Map of Zoning - http://gisweb.ci.boulder.co.us/agswebsites/pds/pd...

(2)Up to three persons in P, A, RR, RE, and RL zones;
(3)Up to four persons in MU, RM, RMX, RH, BT, BC, BMS, BR, DT, IS, IG, IM, and IMS zones; or
(4)Two persons and any of their children by blood, marriage, guardianship, including foster children, or adoption.

And can we prevent the legal lease renters from AirBnB'ing any extra rooms?

I suspect that's what a nearby house is doing given the everchanging stream of cars that show up for a day or three and are never seen again, along with the sudden increase in middle of the night noise etc.

"Councilmen Andrew Shoemaker and Tim Plass also said they were concerned about the potential of setting a precedent and said other neighbors might not be so supportive of increasing density in an existing community"

Please remember this later when they try to upzone your neighborhood so the single family ranch house next door can be bulldozed and replaced with a quadplex. All neighborhoods are equal - some are just more equal than others.......

I've been commenting for years and never been flagged or gotten that message. I don't have a history of inappropriate comments. It was a really weird thing and I was able to post the followup comment immediately after.......