Broomfield's Affordable Housing Rule Needs More Than a Checkup
When Broomfield's City Council sits down this September to review the 2020 Inclusionary Housing Ordinance, the temptation will be to treat it as paperwork: confirm the numbers still work, note that the program is functioning as designed, and move on to the next item on a crowded study session agenda. That would be a mistake. The ordinance was built to solve a housing problem the city had six years ago. The housing needs assessment now sitting in front of council describes a different problem. Broomfield should use this review to rewrite the ordinance, not just to reaffirm it.
The 2020 rule is straightforward: developers must make 10 percent of for-sale units and 20 percent of rental units affordable to households earning 80 percent of the area median income. That threshold was calibrated for a particular kind of buyer, roughly a working family stretching to afford a starter home. It is a reasonable tool, and it has likely helped some number of Broomfield households into homes they otherwise couldn't reach.
But the supplemental housing needs assessment scheduled for the same study session identifies gaps that this tool was never built to close. It calls out a need for greater housing diversity, for rental stability, and specifically for senior and workforce housing. None of these are the same problem as “help a moderate-income family buy a first home,” and none of them are solved by adjusting a percentage on new construction.
Consider rental stability. A family renting at 80 percent AMI today has no protection against being unable to renew that lease at market rate next year if the building changes ownership or the affordability period lapses. The ordinance sets a threshold for entry; it says nothing about what happens over time. If council is serious about the word “stability,” the ordinance needs mechanisms that outlast a single leasing cycle, not just a qualifying income band at move-in.
Consider senior housing. An inclusionary rule keyed to standard for-sale and rental units does not by itself produce the smaller units, the accessibility features, or the fixed-income affordability calculations that aging Broomfield residents need if they want to stay in the city where they raised their families. Broomfield's population is not getting younger, and a housing policy that doesn't say the word “senior” anywhere in its operative text is not a senior housing policy, no matter how many total units it produces.
And consider workforce housing, arguably the most glaring omission. Teachers, nurses, police officers, and city employees earning solidly middle-class wages can still be priced out of a market where “affordable” is defined relative to area median income calculated across a metro region far wealthier in pockets than Broomfield's actual workforce. An ordinance that never asks who is doing the essential work of running this city and whether they can afford to live in it is missing something a six-year-old rule was never designed to catch.
None of this means the 2020 ordinance failed. It means it was built to answer one question, and the city has since discovered it has three more. The danger is procedural: this review is one line item in a study session that also covers an EV charging proposal, victim services updates, and a separate assessment discussion. It would be easy for staff to present compliance data, for council to nod, and for the actual substance of the needs assessment to go unaddressed until the next review cycle, whenever that is.
Council should resist that path. The needs assessment did the hard work of naming what's missing. The obligation now falls on elected officials to treat September's session as the start of a rewrite, not the renewal of a warranty. A city that waits another six years to ask whether its housing rules match its housing reality will keep discovering, too late, that they don't.