Colorado’s 25-Year Housing Gamble

Twenty-five years ago, Erie was just another small town on the Front Range, the kind of place you only thought about if you lived there. Scattered farmhouses sat under an endless sky, and families were happy to call the place their home. Then, developers saw money signs and started building houses, strip malls. The traffic followed.  Enough traffic to make any of these poor farmers lose it.

Now, Erie is one of the fastest-growing towns in Colorado, growing more than 9% in the last year. Over the last 20 years, it became a haven for families priced out of Boulder and Denver. These families are chasing the American dream of a backyard, good schools, and a reasonable commute. For that, you have to live close to where you work. Developers saw opportunity, and they took it. They built mile after mile of single-family homes stretching toward the horizon, the old farm roads now feeding into packed intersections and six-lane highways.

Mayor Andrew Moore believes it will stay this way. He’s made it clear that Erie isn’t meant to be a city. He calls it a bedroom community — a place for people to live, not work. In reality, a town can’t survive on single-family homes alone. Walk into any restaurant, coffee shop,  or grocery store in Erie, and you’ll hear the same story. Rent is too high, businesses can’t find workers, and there’s nowhere affordable for them to live. Teachers and first responders commute from towns an hour away or further. Meanwhile, the roads are packed, the gas stations are full, and the people who can actually afford to live here spend most of their time somewhere else.

Erie is a symptom of a growing problem that can be seen in other neighboring cities as well. As sprawl takes over Colorado, there are solutions that can be implemented, but who is willing to take action?

How sprawl took over

Colorado has always had an abundant amount of space, and for a long time, that was enough to curtail the problem. If you need more houses, you can build a new neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. If you need a bigger grocery store, just knock down some trees and call the construction company. The state’s postwar boom followed the same blueprint as the rest of the country. Local governments prioritized cars and land ownership, writing zoning laws that kept housing and businesses separate.

In all honesty, it worked for a time. Land was cheap while there was land. After all, it was abundant. Cars were everywhere, and public transit was an afterthought. Neighborhoods started popping up all over the place, and they stretched out instead of up.

Between 2000 and 2020, nearly 1.5 million people moved to Colorado. Demand for housing shot up, but the local government never adapted. Cities and towns clung to their zoning laws and prioritized single-family development, even as home prices skyrocketed and commutes got longer. Finally, some people proposed higher-density housing as a solution, and the backlash was immediate.

Neighborhood groups fought tooth and nail against new apartments, worried about traffic, property values, and “preserving community character.” In places like Erie, leaders doubled down on low-density sprawl, rejecting the very developments that could have made housing more affordable in the name of keeping towns the same.

The same cycle kept repeating — the endless cycle of more houses, more highways, and more traffic. You can really only call it growth but without a plan.

Why it was never built to last

For a while, sprawl looked like the easiest answer to Colorado’s housing boom. Land was cheap, highways were expanding, and developers had no reason to think twice before stretching neighborhoods further and further from city centers. It was the 1990s, and the priority was simple: Build more neighborhoods.

But no one stopped to ask: Who’s paying for all of this long term?

At first, it seemed like the new developments were paying for themselves. New houses meant new property taxes, new roads, new utilities. But single-family subdivisions don’t generate enough economic activity to sustain the services they require. It’s different from a dense, mixed-use neighborhood, where people are able to live near businesses, and money circulates within the community. A sprawling suburb is mostly houses, and houses alone don’t generate the kind of tax revenue that a fully functioning town needs.

The problem first manifested in public transit. The more spread out a city is, the harder it is to build a system that people actually use. In dense urban areas, buses and trains are a practical alternative to driving. But in places like Erie where houses stretch for miles with no central hub, transit isn’t just inconvenient — it’s financially impossible to sustain.

RTD tried to keep up, expanding routes across Northern Colorado, but everybody was already driving cars. Even Denver’s light rail system, which was meant to ease congestion, barely reaches the suburbs that need it most. And because transit never fully developed, most people don’t have another option.

With few other alternatives, there was no option but to expand highways to accommodate more people, a lane here, an extra interstate there. Traffic got a little better, but building more highways never works. Because of something called “induced demand,” only being able to drive makes it so you have to drive. When driving is the only realistic way to get around, people drive more. When a city makes more room for cars, more cars show up. Within a few years, the new lanes become just as clogged as before.

The cycle keeps repeating. We are stuck in a cycle of more houses, more roads, and more traffic.

Now, local governments are stuck, and the options are becoming more and more limited. Infrastructure costs are skyrocketing, but tax revenue isn’t keeping up. Schools are underfunded, police and fire departments are stretched thin, and transit still isn’t a realistic alternative for most people. Cities could raise taxes, but no one wants to do that unless it means lowering them for the poor.

Sprawl doesn’t pay for itself, and Colorado is running out of ways to avoid the bill.

Boulder’s misguided plan to stop sprawl

By the 1960s, Boulder saw what was happening in Denver — farmland vanishing, traffic piling up, neighborhoods swallowed by a never-ending sprawl of subdivisions and strip malls. Cities were growing without thinking about what that growth would look like in 50 years. Boulder decided to get ahead of the problem.

The plan was simple: Buy up the land before developers could. In 1967, voters passed a tax to fund open space preservation, securing thousands of acres that would never be developed. A few years later, they locked in urban growth boundaries — an invisible wall around the city to keep it from expanding indefinitely. Boulder wouldn’t stretch outward like Aurora or Westminster. Growth would happen in a controlled, deliberate way.

And at first, it worked. Boulder stayed green. It avoided the suburban bloat taking over the rest of the Front Range. People wanted to live here because of the open space, the mountain views, the thoughtful planning.

But there was a flaw in the plan. They didn’t build enough housing.

For decades, Boulder added jobs without adding homes. The people who worked here, people like teachers, baristas, and nurses, couldn’t afford to live here. Because Boulder wouldn’t build up, people had no choice but to move out.Boulder had protected itself from sprawl, but in doing so, it had pushed the problem onto everyone else.

Boulder’s skyline and affordable housing

It started in 1959 with the Blue Line, an elevation boundary above which the city would not supply water for domestic, commercial, or industrial uses, to protect the city’s scenic skyline. Boulder continued its efforts to preserve the mountain views by passing a law in 1971 making it illegal to build anything taller than 55 feet. In the early 2000s, that rule became an even bigger sticking point as the city faced pressure to build more housing, reinforcing growth restrictions with new policies meant to control development while protecting open space. The logic was the same as it had always been — slow, deliberate expansion instead of unchecked growth. Developers proposed mid-rise apartment buildings to help alleviate the housing crunch, but the city shot them down. They didn’t want to change the skyline.

At the same time, Boulder reinforced its growth limits by tightening the rules around urban infill. The city had long prioritized commercial growth over residential, adding new office space while making it harder to build apartments and condos. The result was a booming job market with nowhere for workers to live. By 2010, Boulder had three times as many jobs as housing units. It was an equation that made sense on paper — businesses wanted to be in Boulder, and Boulder wanted their tax dollars — but it ignored the reality that workers were commuting from farther and farther away.

In 2010, Boulder introduced inclusionary housing requirements, forcing developers to set aside a percentage of new units as affordable housing or pay into a city-run housing fund. The goal was to create mixed-income communities, but developers mostly took the buyout option, funneling money into a system that couldn’t keep up with demand.

Meanwhile, other cities along the Front Range had started looking at Boulder’s policies as a warning, not a blueprint. Places like Denver and Fort Collins relaxed their zoning laws to allow for the increase in population while Boulder did the opposite. In 2015, the Boulder city council put even stricter limits on co-op housing and accessory dwelling units, making it nearly impossible for homeowners to build a rental unit on their property. Boulder wasn’t banning new housing outright. It was just making sure most of it never got built.

The city of Boulder was spending millions on open space preservation while pushing workers into neighboring towns. In 2019, Boulder County released a report showing that more than 60% of the county’s workforce commuted from outside the city. The traffic problems worsened, air quality suffered, and businesses struggled to hire employees who could actually afford to live nearby.

Although no one can argue that Boulder, in part, succeeded in protecting its gorgeous open spaces, these policies made the affordable housing situation worse. Boulder stands at a crossroads. They can side with the state pushing for zoning reform or with the housing advocates. Now, with the state pushing for zoning reform and housing advocates demanding change, Boulder faces a choice — keep protecting the past or start making room for the future.

The domino effect on nearby towns

If Boulder had made it impossible to build new housing, where did all the people go?

Longmont. Lafayette. Erie. Towns that weren’t prepared for Boulder’s overflow but absorbed it anyway.

Longmont’s population basically doubled. Lafayette’s remaining open space filled in fast.

The twisted punchline of this cruel joke is that no one learned. They didn’t learn from Boulder’s mistake. Lafayette had a working-class history, a mix of small businesses and neighborhoods that didn’t try too hard to be anything else. Erie barely existed as a destination. But once Boulder’s housing market squeezed out anyone who wasn’t making six figures, these towns became the next best option.

There was an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of places like Boulder and add some intentionality to urban planning. These towns could have built multiple family dwelling units, invested in transit, and created neighborhoods where people could actually live and work in the same place.

Now, they’re dealing with the same problems Boulder is experiencing. They have way too many people, too much traffic, and nowhere near enough housing. They’re just 20 years behind on realizing it.

Colorado isn’t the same place it was in the ‘90s. But a lot of its cities are still acting like it is.

The consequences of stubborn growth

It’s easy to see the cracks when you’re sitting in traffic, inching your way down U.S. Highway 287, wondering why this road still looks like it was built for a town half this size. Cities across Boulder County refused to adapt and stuck fast to zoning laws that were no longer serving our best interest and propping up landowners so their properties didn’t devalue. Now, they’re paying for it.

Housing shortages aren’t just about rising prices. They help determine who gets to live here and who doesn’t. They help determine if a teacher can afford to live five minutes from their school or if they have to drive an hour each way. They help determine if a coffee shop owner can keep their doors open or if they’ll have to cut hours because they can’t find baristas. In Boulder County, approximately 58% of renters are “cost-burdened,” spending more than 30% of their income on housing, which doesn’t necessarily put you in a position to enrich the local economy.

The transit problem we refuse to solve

A region built on sprawl runs on cars. There’s no other alternative. That’s how these towns were designed, and that’s what’s making things worse.

Public transit in Boulder County isn’t built for the kind of commuting people actually do. If you live in Erie and work in Boulder, you’re probably driving. If you live in Lafayette and need to get to Longmont, that’s another drive. Even if we prioritized public transport, it’s impossible to keep up with the rates at which urban sprawl expands our cities and towns. Neighborhoods are coming together faster than we can connect them to an existing system or build a system that can accommodate all the neighborhoods that already exist for that matter.

Denver has its light rail system, but it doesn’t reach most of the people who need it. The Front Range passenger rail has been talked about for years, but it’s still just talk. Until there’s a serious commitment to connecting these towns in a way that makes public transit an actual alternative to driving, we’re just going to keep pouring money into widening highways that will be just as clogged in five years.

That’s the real issue at hand. No one wants to admit that this isn’t working.

The economic fallout of housing shortages

It’s easy to frame the housing crisis as just a problem for people struggling to find a place to live. But it’s bigger than that. It’s a problem for the entire local economy.

Take a drive through Boulder County, and you’ll see the signs. “Now Hiring” signs in restaurant windows, at grocery stores, on billboards along the highway. Businesses aren’t just looking for workers; they’re desperate for them. Too many studies have proven that it’s not because people don’t want to work, it’s because people can’t afford to live here.

When housing costs skyrocket, service workers are the first ones forced out. A barista at a coffee shop in Boulder making $17 an hour isn’t going to be able to rent a place anywhere near their job. A teacher starting out at $45,000 a year can’t even think about buying a home in the county. First responders, the people keeping these towns safe, are often commuting an hour or more just to make it to their shift.

Danielle, a preschool teacher, laments, “I’d love to live near [my job] too, but there’s no way I can afford a house here.” Danielle’s story isn’t uncommon. The majority of people have been priced out of Boulder. It’s not sustainable. When workers have to leave town just to find housing, businesses suffer. Restaurants cut hours because they don’t have enough staff. Schools struggle to retain teachers. Local economies that once thrived start to stagnate because the people who make a community work can’t afford to be part of it.

Boulder County isn’t the only place dealing with this. It’s happening up and down the Front Range. But the places that refuse to build enough housing are the ones feeling it the worst.

Why NIMBYism is holding cities back

The solutions to the housing crisis aren’t a mystery. Build more housing. Build denser housing. Make sure that new developments include affordable units. Invest in public transit, so people don’t have to rely on cars just to get to work.

But every time these ideas come up, they hit the same wall — NIMBYism.

NIMBY stands for “Not In My Backyard,” and it’s the reason so many cities in Colorado keep making the same mistakes. Neighborhood groups show up to city council meetings in full force, fighting against new apartment buildings, affordable housing projects, even mixed-use developments. The concerns are always the same: traffic, crime, property values. “I didn’t move out here just to feel like I’m back in the city,” says Allison, a longtime resident of Erie, echoing a sentiment that is heard all over the state.

But the reality is simple: Without density, without apartments, without walkable neighborhoods, cities are going to strangle themselves.

Look at Erie. Look at Longmont. These towns are desperate for more housing, yet every time a new development is proposed, the same arguments come up. Either the project gets shut down, or it gets watered down to the point where it’s just another batch of single-family homes that only the upper-middle class can afford.

The same thing happens every time only the middle class are allowed access to housing in towns: more traffic plagues our long commutes, more businesses are struggling to stay open because of understaffing, and more people leave town because they don’t have another option.

Every time the idea of density comes up, the conversation gets hijacked by people who already own homes — people who got in at the right time and now don’t want anything to change.

But change is coming, whether they like it or not.

What sprawl really means

It’s easy to think of housing as a personal issue — something that affects individual renters and buyers, something that boils down to whether someone can afford to live in a certain neighborhood. Sprawl doesn’t just make housing more expensive; it makes everything more expensive.

Public services like police departments, fire stations, and school districts have to stretch their resources further when a town sprawls outward instead of building up. With more roads to patrol, more schools to build, and more infrastructure to maintain, the burden on local government is just too high. When tax revenue isn’t keeping up because these sprawling neighborhoods don’t generate enough economic activity to pay for themselves, cities have to make a tough choice. They can either raise taxes or cut services.

Sprawl’s impact on climate and the environment

Sprawl is one of the biggest contributors to Colorado’s worsening air quality. More cars mean more emissions. Longer commutes mean more fuel burned. The Front Range has already been struggling with ozone pollution, and transportation is one of the leading causes.

And it’s not just about cars. The way we build matters too.

Low-density, single-family housing is the least efficient form of development. It takes up more land, requires more materials, and uses more energy than denser housing. Meanwhile, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods reduce emissions, save energy, and make communities more resilient.

Boulder County prides itself on environmental sustainability, but when people who work in Boulder have to drive an hour each way just to afford rent, those sustainability efforts start to look like empty gestures.

Cities don’t just need to build more housing — they need to build smarter housing.

Who’s doing it right? Comparative studies and solutions

It’s easy to point out what isn’t working in Colorado’s housing policies. What’s harder — but more important — is figuring out what cities can do differently.

The truth is, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Other places have faced the same challenges and found ways to build smarter, more affordable, and more livable communities. Some of those solutions are happening right here in Colorado. Others are playing out in cities across the U.S. and around the world.

If state and local leaders are serious about fixing the housing crisis, they need to start paying attention to the places that have actually gotten it right.

Minneapolis: The end of single-family zoning

For decades, cities across the U.S. operated under a zoning system that effectively outlawed anything other than single-family homes. That meant no duplexes, no townhomes, no small apartment buildings — just suburban sprawl by design.

Minneapolis changed that in 2018. The city became the first in the country to eliminate single-family zoning, opening the door for more housing types in every neighborhood. Duplexes and triplexes were suddenly allowed in areas that had been restricted for generations.

And it worked beautifully. More housing supply, fewer barriers to entry, and a city that’s now leading the way in tackling the affordability crisis.

Since then, other cities have followed Minneapolis’ lead. California ended single-family zoning statewide. Oregon did the same. Colorado lawmakers have talked about it, but so far, efforts to change zoning laws have stalled. NIMBY opposition has been relentless.

But if affordability is the goal, eliminating single-family zoning has to be part of the conversation. The numbers are clear. When more people are allowed to live in an area, housing becomes more accessible.

Portland: The power of infill development

Portland, Oregon has taken a different approach. Instead of sprawling outward, the city has focused on infill development, building housing within existing urban areas rather than pushing into undeveloped land.

Ultimately, this solution not only started to mitigate the sprawl problem but benefited the communities in ways no one saw coming such as preserving natural spaces and keeping sprawl from eating up the forests and farmland surrounding Portland the way it has in other growing cities. Not only that, but infrastructure costs are down. Because new development is happening in areas that already have roads, schools, and public services, the city isn’t spending millions on extending infrastructure into the middle of nowhere.

Infill development is one of the most cost-effective and environmentally responsible ways to build. It prevents the endless outward expansion that fuels long commutes, traffic congestion, and higher carbon emissions.

Colorado cities could follow suit. Denver has already started shifting in this direction, but places like Erie, Longmont, and Lafayette are still prioritizing single-family subdivisions over denser, mixed-use neighborhoods that could make housing more accessible.

Curitiba: A transit-first approach

Where other cities are struggling with lack of public transit, long commutes, and expensive car ownership, the approach Curitiba, Brazil took is worth looking at. It’s a mid-sized city that faced rapid population growth and had to figure out how to expand without turning into a traffic nightmare. The city did something that no one had done before: It established a good system of transit first, then developed the land around it.

Curitiba built a new system of public transport called the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) from the ground up, designed to use buses as efficiently as possible. And to the surprise of no one who was paying attention, it worked: lower transportation costs, less congestion, and a city that’s both affordable and sustainable.

Colorado keeps making the same mistake: building housing first, then scrambling to add transit later. That’s how you get long commutes. If cities planned development around transit from the start, they wouldn’t need to widen highways every five years.

The question isn’t whether we have the solutions. It’s whether we’re willing to use them.

Washington, D.C.: Build transit first, then build the city

D.C. gets a lot of things wrong, but it got one thing right: If you want people to actually use public transit, you have to build around it, not force it into a city after the fact.

That’s what transit-oriented development is supposed to be: Figure out where the train or bus routes go, then make that the center of a neighborhood, not the other way around. It’s simple, but most cities don’t do it.

Grocery stores, coffee shops, and small businesses are all within walking distance of a transit station. That’s how you keep people from spending half their lives stuck in traffic.

Pittsburgh: A tax that punishes speculators, not renters

The housing crisis isn’t just about how many homes are getting built. It’s always been about who owns the land and what they’re doing with it.

In Boulder, there’s a ton of empty land sitting untouched, not because there aren’t developers ready to build, but because landowners are sitting on it, waiting for prices to go up. They don’t have to do anything and can almost treat it like a stock, something that just adds value to their net worth. That’s speculation. And it’s making everything more expensive.

Pittsburgh’s solution to this problem was simple. They created a specific tax to target speculation. This tax targeted property itself, not just the building.That means if you own a vacant lot in a city, you’re paying taxes on its full value whether you build on it or not. Suddenly, holding onto land without developing anything isn’t just easy money, it’s an expensive proposition that might not be worthwhile.

A land value tax wouldn’t solve everything, but it would stop the worst offenders from making money by doing nothing.

San Francisco: Forcing developers to build affordable housing

Developers love to promise affordable housing. They’ll slap the words “mixed-income community” on their plans, throw in a couple of lower-rent units, and call it a day. But unless cities force them to actually follow through, those affordable homes never get built.

San Francisco figured this out a long time ago. The city passed inclusionary zoning laws that made one thing clear: If you want to build here, new developments are required to set aside a percentage of their apartments or homes for lower-income residents. No loopholes. No opt-outs.

If a developer doesn’t want to do that, it has to pay into a fund that builds affordable housing elsewhere in the city. Either way, the city gets more housing that regular people can actually afford.

Colorado could have done this years ago. Instead, we’re watching cities approve massive housing developments without requiring anything for lower-income residents. Erie, Longmont, Lafayette. All of these cities just keep adding new neighborhoods full of expensive single-family homes while working-class people get pushed out.

Imagine if Boulder County required every new development to include affordable housing by law. Not just a vague promise, not a deal cut behind closed doors — a real percentage, locked into policy. If a developer wanted to build a 200-unit complex, at least 30 of those units would have to be affordable. If they refused? They’d have to write a fat check to fund public housing somewhere else in the county.

Instead, we’ve let developers dictate the rules, and the result is exactly what you’d expect: big houses, big profits, no room for anyone making under six figures.

Stockholm: When you make driving expensive, people stop driving

Stockholm took a different approach to “solving traffic”:  Rather than trying to accommodate more cars, they made driving more expensive.

The city introduced congestion pricing, which means if you want to drive into downtown Stockholm during peak hours, you have to pay for it. The result? Fewer cars on the road, better public transit, and a city that actually functions.

People hated the idea — until they saw it work. Congestion tax has also worked in Singapore and London, making traffic go down significantly.

Using this tax to build an actual robust public transportation system would make it a viable option. People wouldn’t just default to cars anymore.The policies that built Boulder — and the ones that might break it.

Prospect New Town: A solution in our own backyard

Prospect New Town is a neighborhood within the city of Longmont. In the late 1990s, the people of Prospect bought an old 80-acre tree farm and started building. This time, they had a plan in mind and weren’t just building whatever was convenient at the moment. Prospect offered pleasant sidewalks and parks instead of wide roads and massive parking lots. The neighborhood was walkable, and the people of Prospect saw it as a community. Shops and offices are scattered throughout the neighborhood — not tacked onto the edges, but baked into the design, making it possible to live, work, and spend time all within the same few blocks.

It was one of the first New Urbanist communities in the state, and it’s still one of the few places in Boulder County that feels like it actually took the ideals of walkability, density, and design seriously. The homes don’t look the same. The blocks don’t stretch into oblivion, and more importantly, the community was built to be a place, not just a product.

At a glance, Prospect might feel like an outlier, but it’s not some utopian dream. It’s proof that this kind of development is not only possible — it works. The people who live there can live the suburban dream: kids bike to school, you can walk to that coffee shop nearby, and you know the neighbors. Prospect shows that it doesn’t require reinventing the wheel. It requires letting go of the car-centric approach that we’ve become so attached to.

Prospect is working so well because it was planned intentionally following the guidance of organizations like Strong Towns. Founded by civil engineer Charles Marohn, Strong Towns sounds like it’s about architecture, but it’s really about combating the spread of urban sprawl. It’s a framework for understanding why our cities are financially broken and how to fix them with small, smart decisions that prioritize long-term stability over short-term solutions.

The Strong Towns philosophy is rooted in the idea that most postwar development — especially in suburbs — simply doesn’t pay for itself. It’s obvious that 500-house McMansion neighborhoods, with all the added infrastructure and utility costs, are impossibly expensive to build and maintain. Cities have to constantly be building new roads, new schools, new everything to keep up.

The fight over Colorado’s future

For years, Boulder’s stance on growth was simple: Keep it slow, keep it controlled, and keep it from changing the city too much. It was a strategy built on the idea that if Boulder just set enough boundaries, literally and figuratively, it could hold onto the things that made it special. By 2020, that strategy was doing a lot more than just preserving the city’s character, it was boxing people out.

The people who built their lives in Boulder, the teachers, the baristas, the mechanics, were disappearing. Not because they wanted to leave, but because they couldn’t afford to stay. Even people with solid paychecks were getting pushed to the edges. Nurses, engineers, even some tech workers were starting to find that living in Boulder required either a windfall or a willingness to commute an hour each way.

Boulder tried to address the problem in a way that didn’t fundamentally alter how the city looked or functioned. Officials set a goal: 15% of Boulder’s housing stock would be permanently affordable by 2035. It was an easy headline. The problem was that it didn’t actually change anything about how housing was built or who could build it. The units that were approved weren’t woven into the fabric of existing neighborhoods — they were clustered into specific developments, keeping Boulder’s economic segregation intact.

And while city leaders talked about affordability, they weren’t touching the policies that had made Boulder so exclusive in the first place. Minimum lot sizes stayed large. Parking requirements kept costs high. Zoning codes still made it nearly impossible to build anything but single-family homes in most parts of the city.

Governor Jared Polis, however, went to war against cities that were enforcing NIMBY policies, pushing through legislation that changed zoning laws statewide.

Boulder’s leadership pushed back immediately, arguing that the law was a blatant overreach of power and that it undermined their efforts to preserve the city. Neighborhood groups rallied against the changes, bringing the same concerns they always had — density meant traffic, crime, and declining property values.

Boulder’s arguments were falling on deaf ears. The city’s refusal to grow had already shaped the entire region. People who have jobs in Boulder were by and large leaving the city in droves, leaving Boulder a weird combination of student housing and million-dollar properties. Boulder was doing everything in its power to preserve a nebulous idea of what it once was but was in reality doing everything but.

While Governor Polis was getting into a long, drawn-out legal battle with Boulder, Colorado, lawmakers started trying to fix the sprawl issue elsewhere. In 2024, three lawmakers, including U.S. Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, introduced the CORE Act to protect the land Colorado is famous for from urban sprawl.

Not everyone saw the CORE Act as a huge step forward. Housing advocates worried that locking up even more land would only make the affordability crisis worse. The state already had strict limits on where development could happen, and with Boulder resisting density within its own boundaries, some were asking the difficult question: If cities weren’t willing to build up and land use outside those cities was becoming restricted, where was housing supposed to go?

For years, Boulder operated under the assumption that it could have it both ways — that it could keep its wide stretches of open space, limit growth, and still somehow remain an accessible, livable city. But that balance had already tipped. The city had kept its views and its trails but at the cost of making Boulder a place where only the wealthiest could afford to live.

For decades, Boulder leaders stood by the idea that managing growth meant slowing it down. Now, state lawmakers aren’t so sure. Governor Polis has made his stance clear: Colorado needs more housing, especially near transit, and cities like Boulder would have to do their part. The city, so far, has refused to budge.

At its core, this fight isn’t just about zoning codes or land conservation. It’s about who gets to be here, who gets to build a life in Boulder, who gets pushed out — in other words, who is welcome, and who isn’t.

The city has spent years crafting policies to protect what it already has. The question now is whether those policies are protecting Boulder’s character — or just making sure it stays out of reach.

At the crossroads

Colorado has spent decades betting on sprawl, single-family homes, cars over transit, and growth policies that keep housing supply strangled just enough to drive prices up. Now, Colorado is a state at war with itself. Booming cities that can’t house their workers, once-affordable towns now out of reach for middle-class families, and a transportation system buckling under the weight of congestion are the sad realities for the citizens of Colorado.

Even though it seems like the consequences of sprawl are just compounding, towns all over Northern Colorado seem to be doubling down on these low-density housing zoning policies. Housing prices will keep rising, forcing even more workers into hour-long commutes just to keep their jobs. Traffic will worsen, no matter how many times we widen I-25 or US-36. Local businesses will struggle to hire, leading to shorter hours, higher prices, and a workforce that increasingly can’t afford to live in the communities they serve.

And it’s not just an economic problem — it’s an environmental one. Boulder County prides itself on its environmental leadership, but those green initiatives start to look hollow when the people who work in the city are forced to drive 50 miles each way to afford rent.

A different future is possible

Other cities have proven that it doesn’t have to be this way, like Minneapolis, Portland, and Curitiba. None of these places is perfect, but they’ve made real progress. Colorado could, too — if it stops clinging to the idea that a house with a yard and a three-car garage is the only acceptable way to live.

We’ve seen a few cities around the world successfully battle this problem with different strategies. End exclusionary zoning like Portland did. Push for inclusionary housing that allows for duplexes, triplexes, and multifamily housing in areas that have long been reserved for single-family homes. Or you could follow Curitiba’s path to success and invest in transit before expanding roads, which in turn would make it easier and more affordable to take a bus or train than to sit in gridlocked traffic. San Francisco took a different approach altogether and worked to tie development to affordability. All in all, we just need Colorado to prioritize walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods that let people live closer to where they work.

What if we were to adopt a different — better — approach? What if, instead of approving another sprawling neighborhood four miles from any town center, we focused on building MFDUs? What if towns like Erie took the Strong Towns approach and focused on infill development and financial solvency before we focused on constant sprawl? It’s a beautiful future that seems so close yet so far.

We already have blueprints for a different future — examples of what it looks like when communities stop doubling down on sprawl and start imagining something more connected, more sustainable, more human. You can see it in Longmont, a city that looks nothing like the rest of Boulder County. You can hear it in the language of a movement that’s been quietly challenging the entire postwar development playbook.

Without reimagining our relationship with development and nature, this shift is not possible. A shift like this means challenging the powers that be, making them change, and having an honest conversation about what Erie wants to be. With our current leadership, that sounds like threading a needle in a hurricane. But it’s not impossible. The models exist, the data corroborates it, and the benefits aren’t hypothetical. Things like lower infrastructure costs, more vibrant local economies, and healthier communities are within our reach. They’re happening in places that were willing to rethink what a “normal” town should look like.

Prospect New Town didn’t just build houses — it built a community. Strong Towns didn’t just write blog posts — they built a movement. Together, they represent a vision for what Colorado towns could be if they stopped chasing sprawl and started building for people. Because the real question isn’t whether we can afford to build differently. It’s whether we can afford not to.

At this point, the problem isn’t that we don’t know what to do. We know exactly what works: density, transit-oriented development, zoning reform, and infrastructure investment that prioritize people. Cities across the country and the world have proven that these strategies create livable, sustainable, and affordable communities. The question isn’t what to do — it’s whether Colorado is willing to do it.

Colorado is at a breaking point. The state can either double down on the policies that got us here, endless expansion, skyrocketing prices, and communities designed for cars instead of people, or it can take a different path. We can choose to value density, sustainability, and housing policies that actually work for everyone, not just those who got in before the housing boom, and build a community that is made to last.

The future isn’t set in stone, so we need to do something now.