Boulder County approves limits on house sizes
Below is a brief summary of the new housing development guidelines passed in Boulder, Colorado.
After years of discussion and debate, Boulder county commissioners unanimously passed new regulations Thursday meant to preserve the rural character of unincorporated Boulder County by limiting house sizes.
The new rules, effective Aug. 8, will force anyone who wants to build a house larger than 6,000 square feet -- including basements, garages and storage areas -- to purchase extra "development credits" from smaller houses or vacant lots to do so.
The new regulations also include changes to the county's site plan review process to ensure that new development is compatible with the existing neighborhood.
The claim that a proposed house would not be in harmony with existing homes has often been relied on as a reason to deny large houses. But defining what harmony looks like and defining a neighborhood has caused a lot of frustration and debate over the years.
"Changes to the site plan review may be the element that has the greatest impact," Commissioner Will Toor said. "What does that mean for a house to be compatible with the neighborhood?"
Toor said he hopes the new rules, which clarify both neighborhood boundaries and how large a house can be and still fit in, will clear up the historically murky process. Beginning in August, a house's "neighborhood" will be anything within 1,500 feet of the property unless the lot is in a platted subdivision or in a historic townsite, such as Eldora, Allenspark, Raymond, Riverside, Eldorado Springs or Hygiene. In those cases, all the houses in the subdivision or in the mapped townsite will equal the official neighborhood.
The commissioners also set up guidelines that will allow developers to get a better handle on what harmony and compatibility look like when it comes to house size. When the new regulations go into effect, developers can assume that any house smaller than 125 percent of the median size for all homes in the defined neighborhood won't be considered too large. Of course, the house could be denied on other grounds, but not just because of its size.
In townsites where existing houses are often smaller than even 1,000 square feet, builders can use 1,500 square feet as the rule of thumb for harmony, and in other parts of unincorporated Boulder County, developers can assume that anything less than 2,500 square feet will pass muster, even if the median is quite a bit smaller.
"I think there are a lot of people, when the dust has settled, who are going to be happy to be able to sell off their development credits," Pearlman said. "That may be the greatest legacy of this project allowing people to choose to keep small houses for the benefit of themselves and the rest of their community."
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Bachelors of Science in Finance and Real Estate, Certified International Property Specialist (CIPS), Transnational Referral Certified (TRC), QSC Serving the Metro Denver market
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