By Dom Nozzi
March 27, 2018
Historically, anti-city and anti-environment folks were in force in places like Houston and Phoenix and Atlanta and Buffalo. They fought hard and successfully for:
- Easing car travel and car parking.
- Providing more open space and larger setbacks.
- Opposing parking supply restrictions and opposing parking pricing.
- Opposing road diets.
- Opposing road tolls.
- Supporting highway widenings and overpasses.
- Lowering densities and increasing fees to the point where new development is unaffordable (an indirect way to stop development and growth).
- Keeping buildings no taller than 1 or 2 stories.
- “Protecting” neighborhoods against infill, mixed use, co-ops, and backyard cottages.
All of these are anti-city (and anti-environment) efforts.
I don’t want Boulder, Colorado (the city I live in) to follow the path of Houston or Phoenix or Atlanta or Buffalo. And that is an important reason why I am so troubled that so many in Boulder have aggressively promoted (and continue to promote) the tactics I list above that were so strongly pushed in cities such as Houston and Phoenix.
Tactics that ironically made places such as Houston and Phoenix the awful places they are today.
Boulder Transportation Reforms 