Action Alert: January 3rd Public Hearing about Housing Co-op Ordinance
On January 3rd, 2017 Boulder City Council will likely adopt a final version of the cooperative housing ordinance. We need your help to make sure it works! You are invited to what we anticipate will be the last public hearing on co-ops and we need your help to make this one as powerful as the ones before.
This reading of the co-op ordinance will include a public hearing. We are asking co-op supporters to come and speak at the hearing, to show Council that there continues to be support for legalizing shared, community living in Boulder.
When: Tuesday, January 3rd. Sign-ups to speak start at 5:00 pm. The public hearing for the housing co-op ordinance is agenda item 5C and it only takes two minutes to speak.
Where: the Boulder Muni Building (1777 Broadway)
let's tell Council:
We're asking for maximum occupancy levels to remain where they have been proposed: 12 in low density zones and 15 in high density zones. If these numbers are lowered it will make legalizing existing co-ops infeasible and starting new affordable cooperatives highly challenging.
Lot size restrictions are an unnecessary complication. A very limited number of larger homes are available for rent, most of them are on standard lots, and not all landlords will be interested in renting to cooperatives. If the number of co-op compatible properties is very small, then landlords will have pricing power over co-ops, even though the co-op license runs with the group, not with the property. This will likely erode the intrinsic affordability that comes from sharing a home.
Require no more than 200sf per person. a requirement of 250+ square feet would substantially reduce the number of homes that are available for co-ops, making them much more challenging to form. This is especially true for rental co-ops, because homes available for rent tend to be smaller than homes overall. Health & Safety is not the issue here. The International Property Maintenance Code (IPMC) only requires ~70sf per person.
