FairFAR.org

Late last Friday, with little fanfare, the City of Boulder released its latest draft FAR regulations. In analyzing it to develop an online calculator to show you how restrictive it would be, we observed numerous inconsistencies between the draft ordinance language and the supporting documents including not only mathematical irregularities but what can only be described as arithmetic errors. Presumably the more obvious of the last will be caught and corrected before or when the Planning Board reviews them–we expect to see the City issue another round of “Oops! We goofed!” errata soon.  We particularly expect to see corrections to the proposed ordinance’s tables 7-2 and 8-3!

Among the current proposal’s lowlights are:

• Proposing not only a 45% cut in the FAR standard (from .8 to .45 on the mythical “reference” 7000 sf lot), but piling several other ill-considered regulations on top of that cut
• A 30% building coverage standard, despite obvious questions of fairness to owners of ranch homes (likely the single most common architectural style of single-family home in the city).
• Abandoning the idea of a larger single-story building coverage standard of 40%.  If you want to expand your own ranch home, you’ll have to block your neighbor’s view by building up, not out.
• Still including basements as part of the FAR calculation, with increasingly complex rules about measuring the grade and increasingly difficult calculations.  And if you have big enough windows to bring enough natural light into your basement to save energy, even your window wells might not be exempt from the FAR calculation.
• Perpetuating the illusion of “increasing” the FAR to .45 from the .42 proposed by Winter and Co.  This of course wasn’t an actual increase, but instead a sleight-of-hand trick by the Mayor and other FAR proponents.  When faced with the fact that not counting detached garages was unfair to the large majority of homeowners who have attached garages, the City compensated by eliminating all garage exemptions while adding only .03 FAR (or 210 sq ft on the “reference” 7000 sq ft lot), blithely ignoring the fact that most homes on any actual 7000 sq ft lot are likely to have a standard two-car garage of about 450-500 sq ft.  In fact, if you already have a detached two-car garage, your effective FAR just dropped by about .04 (280 sq ft on the “reference” 7000 sq ft lot, assuming a 490 sq ft garage size).
• Exterior stairways of more than 30″ high, wherever they are located on your property, are to count toward your building coverage.  We can’t wait until some of the folks who live on steep slopes find out they have to count the steps on their front walks or their basement stairwells.  We know of some tiny homes on slopes in Newlands that just grew by one or two hundred feet!

But let’s be fair.  What they may have done a little better on includes:

• Continuing to treat RMX-1 differently, acknowledging the denser character of the city core (e.g. RMX-1 would only face about a 33% reduction in FAR from .8 to .55 on the 7000 sq ft “reference” lot.)
• There is a new bulk plane requirement that seems to simplify some of the debates over the wall heights at setback, etc.  However, we’ve noted two reservations about this new development.  First, it appears that calculating the bulk plane from the grade at the property line will be particularly hard on anyone who lives on a steep slope (in places, that 45-degree bulk plane might call for earth removal!).  Second, it may in practice turn out to be effectively a backdoor attempt at lowering the height limit on our homes.  No one at the City seems to have asked basic questions such as How wide does a lot need to be before the bulk plane is superseded by the height limit?  And what percentage of lots in different zoning districts are actually that wide?  How many existing homes would actually violate this proposed standard?
• Exempting at most one, but certainly not all, garden sheds, greenhouses or other small detached structures (they must be less than 80 sq ft!).  We have some environmentally-minded neighbors who have a greenhouse or two, a garden shed, a doghouse, a rabbit hutch and a chicken coop.  None of it bothers us, but when City gets wind of this, they’re going to force them to tear them down.  Not only that, but the way we read the ordinance (that is, “literally”), all but one of these small structures will count toward their FAR and/or building coverage.  And we’re pretty sure that garden shed’s roof is more than ten feet high.  We do have snow occasionally in these parts; a pitched roof and putting a shed on a foot-high foundation are both rather sensible.
• Dropping outright the Mayor’s absurd “virtual floors” idea, which attempted to turn a two-dimensional measure (FAR) into a three-dimensional measure under certain conditions where the FAR bears no relation to perceived bulk (that is, basically any time you have high ceilings).  Of course, dropping the FAR measure entirely and choosing a volume-based, three-dimensional measure to address a three-dimensional problem would have been a more logical approach, but logic would be too much to expect in this debate.
• Proposing to waive some of the newly required documentation (and the associated costs to the homeowner) when a home improvement project will obviously not come close to violating the proposed new standards.  We thank City Staff for their consideration here.

We’ll have more to say later, especially about the mathematical irregularities and arithmetic errors in another post.  But if you spot anything else, be sure to comment!