Jobs-to-worker disparity underscored

BOULDER – You’ve heard about this problem before: The number of jobs in Boulder and the county is growing at a fast clip, about 5 percent a year. The number of housing units – increasing about 2 percent a year – is not.

And that means an increasing number of workers are driving here from homes that are farther and farther away — as far away as Cheyenne or south Denver.

The “in-commuting” pattern has revealed deficits in systemic services such as transportation infrastructure. Roads are overtaxed, clogged like arteries. Traffic is hellish at all hours. And when people spend more time in their cars stuck in rivers of steel, it tends to have a dampening effect on quality of life – one of the primary reasons why businesses move to the area in the first place.

Protecting quality of life becomes a priority, and documenting such dilemmas to get the ball rolling toward solutions has become a priority to businesses represented by the Boulder Economic Council (BEC), an extension of the Boulder Chamber of Commerce.

The importance of addressing the jobs-to-housing imbalance is one of the most significant findings of the BEC’s State of the Regional Economy White Paper released in November. The report identifies several critical issues facing Boulder County businesses.

One of the estimates prepared by Boulder’s RRC Associates for the BEC shows that almost every city in Boulder County, under their comprehensive plans, will allow their job bases to grow. (See accompanying chart.) While populations also will increase, the rate of job creation could outstrip the ability of county residents to fill those positions, meaning even more workers would have to commute in.

In 1998, the Denver metro area had a jobs-to-population ratio of 0.57, which the study says is a good baseline for comparison. At a ratio of 0.55 to 0.60, a community tends to be self-sufficient, the report says, with residents able to supply the needs of employers. A ratio below this range means there are not enough jobs to support the population; a ratio above means the opposite is true.

The current ratio in Boulder is 1.0, meaning a large influx of workers are entering the city at the beginning of the workday and exiting at the end. Other communities in the county also show similar imbalances, as does the county as a whole.

At build-out, however, Louisville’s ratio will climb to 1.63, Boulder’s, 1.22, Broomfield’s, 0.85 and Longmont’s, 0.69. Only Lafayette’s, at 0.19, would be under the present Denver metro average.

“One of the things (this year’s) report is trying to emphasize is regionalism,” says Gary Powell of KPMG Peat Marwick, BEC chairman. “We believe (the jobs-to-housing imbalance) issue and many others in the report are going to have to be addressed from a more regional perspective, because that issue is going to impact how many cars are on the road. If housing isn’t available to accommodate jobs, that means more people are going to be traveling to accommodate jobs.”

Powell says no single community in the county can address the imbalance alone: “We think there has to start being a regional dialogue that brings together government, private industry and communities to address the issues.”

The point of the White Paper is to stimulate such discussion – as well as possible action, says Stan Zemler, president and chief executive officer of the Boulder Chamber. The economic report will be the impetus of “some convening, some conversations,” Zemler says, but not suggestions – at this point – of who or who should not be taking care of the problem.

There will be no finger-pointing, he says, because one of the “really loud messages” the council gets is that businesses do not know government boundaries. And just because problems are regional in nature doesn’t mean the Boulder County commissioners have somehow fallen down on the job, Zemler is quick to note. The commissioners, in fact, already are out talking about regional transportation issues. “We need to educate ourselves,” Zemler says. “There’s (already) dialogue bouncing all over the place about growth management.”

Boulder Deputy Mayor Don Mock says step one is to recognize the problem, the severity of the problem and its consequences. Step two is solutions. “I don’t know that anyone’s come up with solutions yet,” he says. “Obviously (the jobs-to-housing imbalance) is intimately associated with Boulder’s affordable housing and transportation problems.”

If current zoning is kept in place, the imbalance would be slightly better in Boulder, but most county communities would see a greater imbalance at build-out, Mock says. He notes that the city of Boulder already has rezoned, allowing more employment by build-out, but less than originally planned. The city purchased commercial and industrial land to create city parks and changed some commercial to residential or to mixed-use.

“This could be a strategy adopted by other communities or, in some cases, by the county,” Mock says.

Sooner or later the marketplace is going to force an equilibrium, he says. If there are many more jobs than potential employees, businesses eventually are not going to locate here or existing businesses will relocate to places that have a better supply of workers. “It’s just an impossible situation to sustain itself, so eventually something is going to have to give,” Mock says.

Boulder Tomorrow President Gary Myre argues “the natural cycle” will address the imbalance, and that it’s difficult to do by legislation. “Whatever they can do politically is going to happen naturally,” he says.

Myre says tweaking the economy with initiatives such as buying commercial space to be set aside as open space isn’t necessarily going to fix the problem. “You could argue that the open space contributes to the distances people travel as much as anything,” he says, “particularly if there is already an imbalance.”

Myre adds that some Boulder employers already have begun locating to other areas because of access to workers, access to Denver International Airport and lower costs – and because Boulder just doesn’t have any sites left to accommodate large employment centers.

Others say the imbalance won’t self-correct because it was created by interference with the marketplace in the first place. Tom Clark, president and chief executive of the Jefferson Economic Council and former president of the Boulder Chamber, says the problem was created by decisions made in the ’70s under the Danish Plan, named for then-Boulder City Council Member Paul Danish, who now is a county commissioner. The plan called for restricting residential development. That created a problem the county at large now has inherited, Clark claims.

He says the damage will not unwind itself with market forces and inevitably there will be statewide legislation to deal with such results of growth. “The problem was created by politicians, not by market forces,” Clark says.

Local governments have been unable to curb their appetites for tax revenue at the expense of worker housing. Because of the Gallagher Amendment, a state constitutional amendment enacted in 1982, commercial and industrial properties pay three times as much property tax as residential. That alone is a tax code disincentive for cities or counties to OK housing development because residential fails to pay for itself, Clark says.

Nolan Rosall of RRC Associates, commissioned to write the BEC’s White Paper, also argues the jobs-housing problem might require statewide legislation. But Rosall notes that “the state’s been pretty passive about these issues in the past.”

What might be best is the creation of an entity to plan in the best interest of the region instead of the individual community. The Denver Regional Council of Governments does regional planning but doesn’t have the necessary teeth.

“Currently the situation is that each individual community has the power to adopt its own comprehensive plan and economic policies,” notes Rosall, who also says he is not criticizing Boulder County’s commissioners. The county can work with communities, but its jurisdiction is limited, he says.

“The reality is that there is a vacuum that exists, that there is no entity at this point that has the power” to make decisions for the region, Rosall says. “The result of that is that individual communities make decisions in their own best interest.”

Zemler agrees that Colorado tax law is driving a lot of decisions that municipalities are making. Cities are competing with each other for the same set of resources, causing some “very bad” land use planning, which, in turn, is causing transportation problems. What’s worthy of exploration is limited revenue-sharing through intergovernmental agreements. But he doesn’t anticipate a very long discussion about regionwide revenue-sharing: “I don’t think regional revenue-sharing is on the agenda at this moment.”

A non-legislative solution backed by many – including Clark, Zemler, Mock, Powell and Rosall – is to promote telecommuting, or working from home.

“How do we tell our grandchildren that we drove 45 minutes each day, each way, to sit next to a telephone and a computer, two items we have in our homes?” Clark asks, noting that 60 percent of the workers in the metro area are “telework eligible,” meaning they work in industries that easily allow for work at home.

Clark says if half of those people teleworked one day a week, it would take three times as many cars off the road as RTD does: “We would take 6 percent of the cars off the road, and today RTD takes 2 percent. And it wouldn’t cost what RTD costs.”

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