Sharing Boulder

For episode twelve, I sat down with Dan Williams in his backyard to talk about his candidacy for Boulder City Council.  This fall the city of Boulder will be electing five representatives to city council.  Boulder Coalition, a consortium of several progressive organizations including Open Boulder, Boulder Progressives, and United Campus Workers Colorado, have endorsed four candidates including Dan, Nicole Speer, Matt Benjamin, and Lauren Folkerts.  Dan’s campaign is gearing up for a busy election season.  He has qualified for the city election matching funds and has boxes of yard signs and campaign stickers in his garage.  Despite the swirl of new activity in his life, he made time to sit down for a long conversation to discuss his values and what he hopes to accomplish on city council.  I appreciate the calm and thoughtful way that he discusses the issues without trying to soften or downplay the urgency of the problems we face.  We hope you enjoy this episode with Dan Williams. 

For episode eleven, I sat down with Jennifer Livovich at a park in southeast Boulder.  Jen is the founder and executive directory of Feet Forward a 501 c-3 non-profit organization that provides services to individuals experiencing homelessness.  As a person who has experienced homelessness herself, Jen has deep connections with Boulder’s unhoused population and leverages her first-hand knowledge to provide services that are thoughtful, compassionate, and meet people where they are at.  I really appreciate Jen’s no-nonsense, pragmatic approach and I learned a lot from our conversation. 

I am excited to announce that Sharing Boulder now has a blog!  We hope you find it interesting and educational and that you will share it widely with other people concerned about making Boulder more inclusive.  The first post on the blog is titled “Green Urbanism for Boulder” and I am going to read it here for this podcast episode.  It helps make the important connections between climate change and the environment and housing policy. 

For our tenth episode I sat down with Matt Benjamin in my backyard. Matt is running for city council this fall. We covered many subjects in our marathon conversation including rank choice voting, parking minimums, zoning, the role of city council, the city budget, effective governance, and a living wage for city council, among many others. Matt knows a lot about how the city of Boulder works and he was eager to get in the weeds on just about any subject and he taught me quite a lot along the way. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Matt Benjamin.

For our ninth episode I sat down with Nicole Speer near her house in Tantra Park. Nicole is considering running for city council this fall and has a lot to say about the city’s most pressing issues including diversity, equity, and inclusion, housing, and transportation. We covered all these subjects and more including what 14-year-olds worry about and the CU South annexation proposal. Nicole brings a wealth of leadership experience to the table and articulated what it means to be a visionary and inclusive leader that brings people together in the face of crises and change.

I give an update on the quilt I’m sewing for a fundraiser and wax philosophical on the importance of diversity in the context of the books I’m reading.

For our eighth episode I sat down with Taylor Jaworski in his office at the University of Colorado where he is a research faculty.  Taylor is an economist studies regional economics and is passionate about what makes cities work.  Our conversation ranged across topics including what’s so great about cities, why is housing expensive, collective action in the context of incumbents and newcomers, tax policy, whether Boulder residents are uniquely greedy, dynamism, diversity, radical markets, and more.  Taylor tends to wave his hands around while speaking in generalities – but when I really pinned him down on what policy changes he would make in Boulder, he singled out exclusionary zoning, occupancy restrictions, and NIMBY attitudes more generally as being important impediments to having the kind of dynamic city he wants to live in.   

A book that Taylor recommended to me about a year ago quotes the famous economist John Maynard Keynes as saying the following: “The ideas of economists both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.  Indeed the world is ruled by little else.  Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Taylor is no defunct economist – he is brimming with energy and ideas and is passionate about seeing Boulder become a prosperous and diverse city.  And I think that is totally funct! 

For our seventh episode we sat down on David’s front porch and caught up with each other on a sunny summer Sunday morning. The topics we explored in our conversation included Bedrooms are for people, Nextdoor.com, the upcoming elections, how the housing market should work, how to make friends and influence people, and future episodes.

Welcome to “Nightmare on 4th Street” – a live action short film, written, directed, produced, acted, and filmed by Philip Ogren. This true-life adventure story takes place on a lovely residential street lined with beautiful single-family homes. I hope you enjoy this Sharing Boulder exclusive extra – bring your shades and sun hat because it is summertime in paradise. Or is it?

In the first episode I explicitly did not promise that we would never wander from subject to subject and free associate and pontificate about whatever pops into our brilliant minds. In this Sharing Boulder extra I faithfully stand by my word and fulfill this non-promise by letting my mind wander in juxtaposition with video footage of myself engaged in the hyper-focused creative activity of making a quilt.