Danica Powell and Eli Feldman talk about the Affordable Housing Development in this week’s Chamber Chat.
They discuss their goals, how their organizations support our community, and potential solutions to the development crisis.
Last month the first streets in the Ponderosa Mobile Home Park were paved over the brand new water and sewer infrastructure! This is a huge milestone for the community, and for the community stabilization project Trestle Strategy Group has been working on since 2015.
Ponderosa Mobile Home Park is located along Broadway in North Boulder. Trestle Strategy Group has been working with the City of Boulder and the Ponderosa community through many phases of the project:
Land acquisition: the City purchased the park in August 2017;
Annexation: the park was annexed into the City in October 2019;
Infrastructure and housing plans development: the site plan and technical documents were approved by City Council in October 2019;
Infrastructure replacement - sewer, water, gas, electric, stormwater detention, water quality, roads and sidewalks.
Throughout this very complex process, Trestle Strategy Group focused on innovative, equitable, and customized community involvement, the primary goal being to minimize resident displacement and disruption to the community. Through the end of last year, this substantial community outreach and engagement process was centered around the Resident Leadership Committee, a group of 7 nominated community leaders living within the Ponderosa community, who were sharing information, ideas, and concerns between the City and the residents.
The RLC was set up so Ponderosa residents could co-create the vision and infrastructure and housing plan for the community, work on issues that are important to residents’ daily lives, and empower residents to develop a lasting leadership group in the community. Numerous community meetings, in various formats, all bilingual, were held throughout the process to ensure residents were informed, could get all their questions answered, and could weigh in on important decisions:
22 RLC Meetings
15+ City Q&A Meetings
40+ One-on-One meetings
1 Good neighbor meeting
4 Habitat for Humanity home tours
2 Habitat for Humanity workshop on homeownership and financing
Training opportunities for residents
In addition, we kept communication channels open, and ensured residents had access to up-to-date information, both in English and Spanish, through a variety of tools to fit their needs:
Text updates
Bulletin Board, community signage
Videos
An exceptional property manager, G2 Consulting
More recently, residents formed a more formal Homeowners Association (HOA) so they can stay organized as the construction work progresses and the first Habitat homes are built, starting in 2021.
While the planning process hasn’t been simple, we have been able to come up with a highly innovative site plan that enables current residents to stay in the park - whether in their mobile homes or in a new Habitat for Humanity home, substantially improves infrastructure, services, and quality of life, provides flood protection, and maintains permanent affordability for future generations. We are extremely proud to continue to be part of this project along with many partners including JVA, Caddis, Marathon Construction Management, G2 Consulting, KCI.
On Monday I graduated from the Urban Land Institute Real Estate Diversity Initiative! REDI provides women and people of color the opportunity to attend a comprehensive training in real estate development.
As a complement to classes covering the spectrum of the real estate development process, we worked in small teams to create a development plan and pro forma for a 110,000 sq. ft. site in the Westwood neighborhood in Denver. In an effort to provide Westwood residents with the opportunity to start building generational wealth, our team came up with a site plan where all housing units were affordable and for sale. We also integrated a large plaza and a childcare center for the benefit of the community. You can watch our team's presentation by clicking on the image on the right.
I am very proud of our team's vision, and very grateful I was able to participate in the 2020 REDI program. Huge thanks to the Urban Land Institute, my team members, mentors Rich Wilson, Richard Epstein, and Ken Hoagland, and coordinator Kimberly Ford (Ming), and my colleague, mentor, and friend Danica Powell.
ULI tackled an important question in Boulder on Tuesday night. Is Boulder Living Up To Its Values? We focused on how Boulder is aligned or not aligned with the stated community goals in our Comp Plan and debated some controversial topics like middle income housing, good design, neighborhood planning, economics versus land use, building heights, parking caps, and the all elusive “community benefit”. I joined John Tayer, Chris Meschuk, Laura Sheinbaum, Jeff Hohensee, Masyn Moyer and Jarvie Worcester on the stage to debate this topic from several angles as it relates to affordable housing, smart growth, placemaking and mobility.
We debated Form Based Code (PROS: predictable, quick, less risk - CONS: prescriptive, inflexible and no room for innovation) versus traditional development review (PROS: negotiation opportunity, flexibility CONS: unpredictable, risky, and lukewarm results).
I focused on the community benefit debate to give examples of how we are providing benefit in the wide range of projects Trestle has worked on in Boulder. Along the way, I agreed with Jeff’s comment that it often feels like a game of “whack a mole” and the results can often be death by a thousand cuts. And the consensus was the results may not be reflecting the ambitious, progressive, innovative community we all are proud of.
Most importantly, we all tried to provide solutions to the question “Can we do better?”. While there is no silver bullet, there were lots of great ideas discussed, including bold leadership, predictable processes, Form Based Code, equitable community participation, and innovative housing shifts. I suggested that we harness the millennial energy to bring new ideas to the table and connect the innovation with the doers and implementers and decision makers to create a path forward.
Click here to see the Facebook Livestream or review the full panel’s presentation deck here.
