SPECIAL FOCUS: AFT’s Top 50
Apartment Markets
APARTMENT FINANCE TODAY • OCTOBER 2007
NO. 6 • BOULDER: Earth to Boulder, Come In
By Dana Enfinger
It’s an old joke in Colorado: Boulder
is 16 square miles surrounded by
reality. Not so original, but it
makes a lot of sense when you look at
the city’s apartment market. The truth
is that Boulder really is isolated from
the rest of the region.
“The city of Boulder bought the
rural land around it to create a buffer,”
said Cary Bruteig, president of Denverbased
Apartment Appraisers &
Consultants, Inc., an apartment consulting
and research firm. “[The land]
is basically a boundary all the way
around the city that you can’t build on,
except for maybe one house every 25
or 35 acres. It’s like a doughnut they
created, with the city in the middle of
it.”
The buffer land is mostly just open
space and farmland. “The county of
Boulder restricts development too,”
said Bruteig. “Once you get outside
that buffer, you can’t build any kind of
real density.”
Boulder ranked sixth in our analysis.
It’s tough to make headway in this
expensive market with its arduous
approval process for new housing.
Building apartments on Mars sounds
like a better idea.
But there’s hope. The city loosened
its permit restrictions for both singlefamily
and multifamily development
when officials realized that encouraging
commercial development caused
nightmare congestion problems.
According to the Denver Regional
Council of Governments, one housing
unit exists for every two jobs in
Boulder. This is placing a high demand
on existing housing. With these dynamics
at work, apartment investors should
give Boulder proper some serious
study.
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