Fort Collins debates zoning as proxy for city’s future

FORT COLLINS — As far as Mellisa Rasor is concerned, Fort Collins is where she is meant to be. She’s just not sure if the city of nearly 170,000 people feels the same way about her.

She moved to the city from Oklahoma 11 years ago, alienated by the politics of her small hometown. The schools and environment have been “fantastic” for her two children, and she’s felt at home here through a career change and a divorce. Even for a self-described punk transplant who doesn’t fit the city’s outdoor crunchiness, Rasor felt she’d finally found a place filled with “kind, caring, supportive” people.

Except, she said, when it comes to “this housing issue.”

Like most renters in Fort Collins, Rasor is cost-burdened, meaning she pays more than 30% of her income toward housing every year. To stay in an apartment that’s too small for her family, Rasor pays $1,650 each month, eating up a large slice of what she makes from working in a nearby school and squeezing in side gigs as a photographer. Her two kids, a preteen and a six-year-old, share one of the bedrooms. If the younger sister rolls over in their bunk bed, the older wakes up.

“Even if you do manage to find yourself in a good place — my rent just went up another $100 in April,” she said. “I don’t know how all the bills will get covered.”

As Rasor hopes and worries for her future, the city around her debates its own horizon. An ongoing argument about how to solve the city’s housing crisis has pitted city leaders against a group of organized homeowners, splitting the environmental community and crossing partisan lines. On one side sits most of the city’s council, who last year approved sizable reforms to the city’s zoning code to encourage more density and development as a means to house current and future residents.

On the other side sits a group of local opponents, led primarily by older homeowners who are leery of changes to their neighborhoods, doubtful that more density will help and fundamentally resistant to future growth in their idyllic city. After the council passed the new code in November, those opponents — organized by a former city councilmember — collected thousands of signatures and swiftly repealed the zoning reforms.

The ongoing zoning fight in Fort Collins demonstrates that the obstacles that sank Gov. Jared Polis’ statewide reforms are just as steep on the local level. Local decision-makers here have collided with an organized group of constituents, leaving some wondering how much can be accomplished by one city council alone. More fundamentally, just as Polis speaks about statewide reform shaping the future of Colorado, the debate in Fort Collins has morphed into an existential question about what the city wants to be and who it wants to welcome in the next 20 years.

“Many folks don’t even have the dream anymore of homeownership,” said Emily Francis, the council’s mayor pro tempore and a supporter of the reforms. ” … It really feels like, what do we want the future of Fort Collins to look like? That’s what we get to choose as a community.”

As Polis and his allies plot a path forward on their reforms next year, city staff in Fort Collins have spent the past several months gathering feedback and refining their proposal. The council plans to vote on a curtailed code update in October. Threats of lawsuits and another repeal campaign linger. Some pro-reform council members now face anti-reform challengers in this year’s election.

Rasor supports the zoning reform but hasn’t followed every turn of the debate. She works a lot, she said. But she’s been taken aback by the resistance from other residents. She’s not a developer or an out-of-state millionaire. She’s a single mom who wants a unit in a duplex with enough room for her girls to have their own closets.

“I just want something to change,” she said. “I’m super defeated most of the time and burnt out and stuck. I don’t know how I’m supposed to live life like this.”

A path forward

Francis, of the Fort Collins city council, watched Polis’ land-use reform bill fall apart in May, collapsing under the criticism of local government and intraparty opposition. She thought it “felt very familiar.”

She was surprised by the ferociousness of the local backlash to what she and her council colleagues had passed in November. Years of work had led up to that vote: The council adopted a new city plan in 2019 and a housing plan two years after that, both of which listed zoning reforms as a strategy for the city to provide housing for current and future residents.

Those plans laid the city’s needs bare: Fort Collins was expected to grow by 70,000 residents by 2040, and it was short thousands of housing units. Only a small fraction of renters could afford a home. There wasn’t enough housing choice — not enough duplexes or townhomes, the middle paths between renting an apartment and owning a home.

“I say (I was surprised) because I know that not everyone was supportive of infill and what we’re talking about, but the level of misinformation and misguidance from people who are leading the repeal effort — that was surprising to me,” Francis said. “Because we have so many plans and so much engagement that said, ‘This is the way Fort Collins wants to move.’”

For supporters, land-use reform is a broad-spectrum antibiotic to a suite of municipal ills. They argue that more housing — and more housing types — means more affordability and choice. Denser living near transit lines and commercial areas means more walking, biking and public transit, cutting down on polluting car trips (thousands of workers commute to Fort Collins from nearby bedroom communities). More units mean more efficient use of infrastructure.

But opponents in Fort Collins accused the council of trying to sneak the updates past the public. The council was also proposing to allow property owners to build in many previously single-family neighborhoods with only city staff review and neighbor notification, rather than public hearings. That raised further alarms about transparency. Word spread, via flyers handed out on Halloween and on social media posts on Nextdoor. Residents spoke at council meetings to raise the specter of carriage houses and duplexes eating up parking, clogging infrastructure and blocking their sunlight.

“There’s some altruism here that (city leaders say) we have to comply with,” said Peter O’Neill, a retired electrical engineer who is part of an HOA coalition opposed to the code reforms. “There’s some large goal here that all the city needs to sacrifice and sacrifice equally to meet, and a bunch of us old-time residents are saying, ‘No, there isn’t.’ We don’t believe we have to keep growing.”

Ross Cunniff, a former city council member who organized the repeal effort under the banner of Preserve Fort Collins, said he thought the council’s approach showed “contempt” for the public. Though he agreed the city had a housing problem — Cunniff was on the council when it passed its various housing and city plans — he decried zoning updates as a “fad” that wouldn’t help. Opponents have said the city should continue to develop outward — instead of upward. Or that the council should focus on building “legitimate,” income-based affordable housing, rather than market-rate units in existing neighborhoods. They argue that simply building more won’t increase affordability if there are no income requirements attached.

But supporters of reform counter that there aren’t enough resources available to fund sufficient income-restricted affordable housing and that continuing urban sprawl isn’t efficient or environmentally conscious. Without more density, officials said, developers won’t stand up buildings with a prescribed number of affordable units. City staff estimate that if all of Fort Collins’ residential areas are developed, it will still be short thousands of units for its future needs.

Growth

As she worked at a Sierra Club trash cleanup in Fort Collins, councilmember Julie Pignataro spoke with another volunteer about the code updates. The council had sent out thousands of postcards and held town halls and walking tours as it sought to expand outreach ahead of another run at reform this fall. Members said they’d talked with neighbors and constituents around town as they weighed what to do next.

Pignataro asked the man what he thought of the proposal.

The man told Pignataro that the city should’ve closed its gates to more residents 10 years ago — right after he’d walked through them. It’s an argument other opponents have made, one that underpins their resistance to building more housing: If the city wants to solve this crisis, stop letting — or at least incentivizing — people to move here.

“Thinking from experience, everyone wants Fort Collins to be like it was the day they were either born here or moved here — the majority being the day they moved here,” she said. ” … I think to say that someone should shut the door after they moved here is very elitist, and I don’t agree it’s a way to control growth.”

Preparing for coming growth is not Fort Collins’ problem alone: Polis signed an executive order Monday that reaffirmed his commitment to land-use reform while directing state agencies to prioritize pro-growth programming. In that order, Polis wrote that the state expects to add 1.72 million people by 2050.

“The choice is not between growth and no growth,” he said. “It is between more traffic, longer drives, and sprawling neighborhoods that bleed into our rural communities and place tremendous pressure on our agricultural land and natural resources, or strategic growth that saves money, supports our economy, uplifts people, and protects our environment.”

While supporters say land-use reform is an environmental policy, opponents in Fort Collins have attempted to argue the opposite. The problem, they claim, is people and a growing population. Kelly Ohlson — a “growth-neutral” councilmember who’s opposed the land-use reforms — criticized the city for “encouraging and supporting the perpetual growth model.”

“Growth rates are unsustainable that we’re chasing and trying to provide for,” Cunniff, the former councilmember and leader of the repeal effort, said. “No way we‘re going to keep up with building enough housing and trying to do our climate action and try to find ways to squeeze a little more water between agricultural use and neighborhood uses. That rate is unsustainable, and if something’s not sustainable, it should stop.”

Ohlson said the city and state should stop incentivizing businesses to move here. The focus should be on supporting current residents, he told the Post, not ensuring there’s housing for the future. He likened continued growth to a Ponzi scheme.

“I’m also planning for the future,” Ohlson said at a council meeting Tuesday night. “But I’m planning for a far different future.”

Critics of that position have cast Ohlson as others as pulling up the ladder behind them, and several said they didn’t want to live in a city with that governing philosophy. Growth is inevitable, other council members and city residents say, and the city can either prepare for it or let the crisis worsen. Mayor Jeni Arndt said it was unethical to stop people from moving to the city and that if Fort Collins wanted to accommodate its projected growth and preserve its open spaces, “the math says we have to live a little closer together.”

It’s also not just faceless future transplants who need help, either, Arndt and other supporters said: There are people in the city now who need solutions — kids who grew up in the city and may not be able to afford to stay there in adulthood.

“(Opponents are) putting a wall around Fort Collins and saying, ‘No one else is welcome here because it’s ours,’” said Chris Conway, a teacher who helped start the pro-reform group YIMBY Fort Collins after the new code was repealed last year. “Where, to me, the great thing about Fort Collins is I always thought it was for everybody.”

The microcosm

The city council is set to vote on its revamped code proposal in October. Though staff is still drawing up the exact details, it would likely allow property owners to build carriage houses and other, non-single family homes across the city, with various restrictions in certain neighborhoods. The council dropped its plan to limit public meetings for new developments, a plan that would’ve expedited building but inflamed locals’ concerns about who controlled their neighborhoods’ character. If adopted, thousands of new units could be built in the city in the coming generation.

The plan is to have the vote completed before city elections in November, Mayor Arndt said. Challengers who’ve opposed the code reforms have filed to run against at least two councilmembers who supported the new proposal.

The election will show whether the vocal opposition has been reflective of the community overall, Arndt said.

“I think that’s what elections are for. They (will) know who voted yes on that, we’re going to vote on it before. And if they don’t like the way we’re representing the people on a whole, they can change that,” she said. “The power’s with the people.”