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A number of agenda items for the August 8, 2023 City Council meeting are meant to address affordable housing in Broomfield. They have been working on this problem for about 4 years. Notice the underlying theme in Agenda Items 7b, 7c, and 11c. Item 7b discusses Private Activity Bond monies from the State of Colorado received from the Federal Government in the amount of $4,541,392. The staff memo states, "Broomfield has no pending uses for its 2023 PAB allocation. Without action by September 14, Broomfield's allocation will automatically go to the statewide PAB pool and be allocated to other projects statewide unless the allocation is assigned to a specific project." Broomfield has three choices:
- Return the allocation to the State of Colorado
- Give it to developers for use in their income aligned housing projects
- Give it to the Colorado Housing Finance Authority (CHFA) to issue bods to the developers
Some thoughts:
- If Broomfield doesn't need the money, why shouldn't we return it to the taxpayers?
- If Broomfield doesn't need the money then why would we give them more?
- Subsidizing housing using taxpayer dollars means taxpayers are paying twice, once to subsidize the housing and another to rent or own the subsidized housing.
- Why would we give the money to another government agency, which hires staff (taking more money of of the funds), lowering the amount they can give back to the developers?
Does anyone else see the insanity of this?
Item 7d discusses Proposition 123, a ballot measure, passed November 2022 "authorizing the state to retain money from existing state tax revenue to support affordable (income-aligned) housing investment." Prop 123 support funds may be granted or loaned (as forgivable) to the following types of organizations:
- Non-profits
- Community land trusts
- Private entities
- Local governments
A couple of items that caught my attention regarding staff's research:
- Broomfield income-aligned housing projects and programs have access to more funding to complete projects.
- Eligible projects can go up to 90% AMI for the income-aligned (affordable) baseline achievement goal.
So let me see if I understand this. If Broomfield now has access to more money for income-aligned housing, why do they need a 43% increase in funds due to property taxes? It's time to decrease the city and county's mill levy. If they have so much money that they can now afford to supplement citizens' at 90% average median income (AMI), then do we have a affordability problem or a spending problem?
The average household income in Broomfield is $135,789 with a poverty rate of 4.4%. So we are going to subsidize people who earn (90%)*$135,789 = $122,210?
Finally, it is getting so expensive to do anything in Broomfield that even the developer's need to raise the "income-aligned housing" from 60% AMI to 80% AMI, because inflation, regulations, and site conditions affect the cost of building "affordable housing". Item 11b, states, "The challenges referenced include site conditions determined during the final geotechnical study (collectively adding $1.7 million to construction budget), changes related to new building codes requiring enhanced construction systems (collectively adding $1.1 million to construction budget), and escalating price of materials, such as lumber, steel, concrete, electrical components and labor (collectively increasing the construction costs $3.3 million since December 2022."
So we pay taxes to the federal government, we pay taxes to the state government, we pay taxes to the local government and they keep it within government. All this money is being used to subsidize housing that again we pay for when we rent or purchase a property. Does anyone else see the hamster wheel idiocy in government?
Here are Thomas Sowell's thoughts on affordable Housing.
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