Around the country, the lack of affordable commercial space is challenging for small, local, and underserved businesses and business owners who either want to stay open or get a foothold in the first place. As is the case with housing, many people find it difficult to start, maintain or grow a business in their own community, leading to overall affordability challenges in many areas. Now, with the economic impacts of COVID-19, the business landscape of many cities is changing. Businesses have closed or moved to fully remote work, leaving ample room for communities to evaluate how to build back local economies in more sustainable ways. But, the movement to address commercial affordability around the country is nascent. Cities like New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon are still in the pilot stage of many programs. In other places, like Boulder, commercial affordability is only a topic of discussion. Listen to Angela K. Evans discusses commercial affordability with Amy Nagy with Prosper Portland, the city’s economic development agency.

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Over the last few years technology giants have announced major pledges to affordable housing efforts in the cities where they office. While these pledges are welcome in major tech centers in Washington state and California’s Bay Area, the companies are simultaneously expanding in cities across the country. When a tech company decides to office in any area, they attract highly paid employees, who often relocate and can put extra demand on local housing supply, often driving up costs to the detriment of middle-, low-, and extremely low-income earners. The presence of technology companies in a region can also come with benefits, but it’s often associated with growth that’s unequally distributed. Now these tech companies are promising to help, but how exactly will they do that? In this episode of (un)affordable Angela K. Evans speaks with Lisa Vatske, the director of Multifamily Housing & Community Facilities at the Washington State Housing Finance Commission. Since 2019, the Commission has partnered with Microsoft in the company’s affordable housing initiative, the first in the nation.

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Seen as the largest reserve of unsubsidized affordable housing in the country, preserving manufactured home communities is a priority for state and local leaders grappling with unaffordability across the region. Increasingly, local park owners are retiring, making way for investors and corporate owners that institute new policies, even restrictions, and often raise lot rents to market rate, forcing many long-term residents out. In many parks, despite owning their homes, residents feel powerless when up against the forces of park owners who own the land. Recently, Colorado passed new manufactured housing legislation, which updated the state’s Mobile Home Park Act, created a robust dispute resolution mechanism and the opportunity to purchase law, which creates a pathway for mobile home residents to purchase their park if it goes up for sale. In this episode of (un)affordable, we talk with Deborah Cantrell, law professor at CU Boulder and a main author of the new legislation. 

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As cities and local governments increasingly focus on affordable housing around the state (and country, for that matter), homeownership units are often a part of neighborhoods and developments within Homeowner Associations, or HOAs. These come with monthly dues to cover community costs like building maintenance, landscaping, perhaps upkeep of shared amenities like pools, laundry facilities, or community areas. Within associations, there are often competing priorities between market-rate owners, affordable homeowners and, in mixed-use developments, commercial owners, which can lead to disagreements about how the HOA is run and how much they cost. What’s more, with very little regulatory oversight from the state, homeowners don’t have much recourse when issues do arise.To talk more about this, Angela K. Evans sits down with Jay Sugnet, who has been working with the City of Boulder on housing policy for seven years and manages the affordable homeownership program. 

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What constitutes great affordable housing design has changed over the decades. Where hulking concrete structures—Cabrini-Green in Chicago, Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis—were once seen as economic answers to the affordability crisis, time has proven such designs do little in the way of elevating the lives of residents. There’s mounting evidence that the buildings we live in play a significant role in our physical health, mental well-being, economic prosperity and community cohesion. Affordable housing developers in Boulder County (and in other areas of the country) have attempted to increase the positive impact of their housing projects through human-focused design: by mixing incomes within developments, incorporating programming on-site, implementing innovative building materials and systems, and cultivating a sense of community. On this episode of (un)affordable, we talk with Carrie Makarewicz, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver’s Urban and Regional Planning Department, about how the design of affordable housing can contribute to a better quality of life.

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While affordable housing has been a policy priority, at least in theory, across Boulder County for years, need still far outweighs current supply, leaving room for myriad solutions from legislators, nonprofits, city planners, regulators, housing advocates and others. Unsurprisingly, discussions about affordable housing can be confusing, with numerous programs, funding sources and strategies involved. The amount of bureaucracy on federal and local levels can be intimidating both for those who need affordable housing, and for those in the community concerned about it. 

To start, we need to understand the current situation—the programs, policies and strategies local jurisdictions are using now to increase affordable housing across Boulder County, and to do that we sit down with Jonathan Cappelli, executive director of The Neighborhood Development Collaborative, a nonprofit network of 18 Front Range affordable housing and community development organizations, including Boulder Housing Partners.

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Welcome to unaffordable — a podcast about affordability solutions in Boulder County brought to you by Boulder Weekly and KGNU. In each episode, we’ll present an interview with someone involved in affordability solutions from design to homeowner’s association costs to transportation access and more. This is just one person’s opinion on one aspect covered in our written series, which you can find at boulderweekly.com. Look for the first four episodes December 17, 2021 wherever you get your podcasts.

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Traditionally, during winter months, additional shelter beds are made available to account for the added dangers that snow and freezing temperatures bring to people experiencing homelessness. Recent changes to the severe weather sheltering program, however, test Boulder County’s homelessness solutions strategy, as there are fewer shelter beds in the system this winter than there have been for years and new policies have the potential to further limit shelter access. Budgets are stressed, volunteer fleets depleted and unforeseen expenses continue to accrue in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving very few options for those experiencing homelessness this winter. 

In the final episode of Unhoused, host Emma Athena looks at how the ongoing coronavirus pandemic continues to impact possible solutions to homelessness as the temperature drops and winter sets in. Listen here or subscribe to the entire series wherever you get your podcasts. 

A huge thank you to KGNU, specifically Maeve Conran, for making this podcast collaboration possible.  

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Tiny home communities across several American cities like Detroit, Los Angeles and Portland have helped alleviate homelessness, but the idea has been slow to catch on in Colorado. The Veterans Community Project (VCP) has successfully housed and served homeless veterans in Kansas City, Missouri, by designing and building tiny home villages which partner with existing local organizations to provide wraparound services to help keep people off the streets. Now, the organization is breaking ground in Boulder County for its latest project, but are micro communities for non-vets even a possibility given neighborhood push-back and a lack of political will?   

From Boulder Weekly and KGNU, join host Emma Athena as she analyzes how COVID-19 has changed the conversation around tiny homes as a solution for the unhoused. Episode 5, “A tiny house, a big step,” is available Thursday, Nov. 3. Find it at boulderweekly.com or wherever you get your podcasts.  

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The increased visibility of street homelessness as a result of the coronavirus pandemic has motivated a wave of new conversations about the feasibility of sanctioned encampments in Boulder and elsewhere.

The idea of a sanctioned campground for the unhoused is one that’s been loudly and routinely rejected by the larger Boulder community for decades. Concentrated public pressure has even motivated elected officials to move in the opposite direction, creating stricter anti-encampment policies over the years. But in a city where there are no day shelters, and the number of nighttime shelter beds have been reduced over the course of the last year while the criteria for who is eligible to sleep in those beds has also narrowed, many unhoused individuals feel they have no choice but to sleep outside.  

Homeless advocates have long argued a reliable and indiscriminate space for people to rest would go a long way in reducing the number of random camps that pop up in downtown Boulder. And sanctioned encampments are used elsewhere in the country, with dozens created to support the growing unhoused populations since the coronavirus pandemic began. 

Listen here or subscribe to the series wherever you get your podcasts.

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