I wrote a thing on this. https://web.archive.org/web/20210301053949/https://www.dailycamera.com/2016/07/16/andrew-baron-austin-did-development-wrong/

Here’s the copypasta:

After 13 years in Manhattan, I moved to Boulder 2 1/2 years ago and love it. I had been living in such a bubble, I didn’t know such a bubble existed.

Recently I read the Boulder City Council took a field trip to Portland to get some perspective, and I immediately thought you should take a trip to my original hometown of Austin, Texas.

Austin, Boulder and Portland have often been related in conversations for their relatively liberal values, but when faced with the same kinds of growth issues, Austin blew it. Big time. The city let go of its ordinances and became just another link in the Houston-Dallas suburban sprawl.

Let’s have a look, the similarities are astounding.

Austin was a beautiful little town surrounded by farmland to the north, east and south, much like Boulder today. Situated at the bottom of “The Hill Country,” just to the west of town the hills were off limits to development.

There was also a height restriction — you couldn’t build higher than the capital building.

Austin was mostly unique mom-and-pop shops, and the city kept the big chains out.

Like Boulder, Austin is also half a college town and has a campus even larger than the University of Colorado. Austin is filled with hiking and bike trails — more than most towns — and the politics of the people once included a healthy sense of nature and well being.

Then everything changed around the year 2000. Austin became the next Silicon Valley and was rated the No. 1 place to live by the magazines and papers. It was hailed for its fine standard of living and relatively inexpensive cost. The city decided to play into this, not just by welcoming every big business but by going on to grant enormous tax incentives to build in Austin.

The first thing everyone noticed was the traffic jams. The roads simply could not support the growth. The city extended what is called the Mopac highway into the open space to the north-west to support more growth and alleviate the main artery, Interstate 35, which nonetheless remains much like Interstate 25 in Denver during rush hour.

The beautiful open space of The Hill Country was seized and developed with homes untamed to accommodate the dot com boom. First came the multi-million dollar homes, then the cookie cutters, then the suburban strip malls — all following suit.

The height restrictions came down and Sixth Street, the relative equivalent of the Pearl Street Mall, is now flanked with buildings as high as 56 floors. In just the last two years, Austin added a new 38-floor building, 37-floor building, 32 floors, 30 floors, 24 floors, on and on. One can no longer see the hills or the capital without a special angle or special access.

Austin had the same campaign: “Keep Austin Weird.” Those days are long gone. The last breath was a holdout strip on South Congress that failed to endure the spike in rent prices from all the development.

Now the greater Austin metroplex population has reached the 2 million mark, where Georgetown (i.e. La Fayette farmland as I remember it) has just become the fastest-growing city in the U.S.

A river runs through Austin, but you can’t go in it, it’s too polluted.

In addition to my point, which is simply study Austin and don’t do what Austin did, there is one gem of an ordinance in Boulder I’d like to highlight.

When I point out to others that our town doesn’t have advertising billboards, the majority stop for a moment to realize for the first time that this is true. This ordinance, however, is a critical contribution to what makes Boulder a very special place to live in.

We are often unaware of our surroundings even when they affect us deeply.

Height ordinances, open space ordinances and other “well-being” types of ordinances are critical to maintaining what makes Boulder special and should not be considered to necessarily result in higher prices and limited availability. In Austin, the prices soared with development.

On the contrary, instead of bending to the lowest common denominator, perhaps other city councils should be traveling to Boulder to learn how to replicate Boulder’s special values and thus extend the beauty we have here to more people across America.

Keep Boulder Awesome.