Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill into law Monday afternoon that will block cities across Colorado from creating or enforcing residential occupancy limits based on family relationships.
Under the bill, health and safety-related occupancy limits, such as the ones required under fire and building codes, will still be allowed. But the new law will directly impact Boulder, which for decades has limited the number of unrelated people who can legally live together.
Until last year, the city had only allowed up to three unrelated people to live together since the 1960s, but the Boulder City Council voted last August to increase the allowable limit to five unrelated people, sparking a mixture of relief and anger in the community.
Karl Guiler, a senior policy advisor for Boulder, said while he believes the city’s occupancy policy will need to be changed under the new law, it’s not clear yet how the change will be made. It’s not the first time Boulder has been faced with changing its own laws in response to a statewide law, though. Earlier this year, the City Council voted to end a decades-long cap on residential growth after state legislators passed a new law last year prohibiting the enforcement of “anti-growth” laws.
“Typically, in these kinds of situations, we might ask City Council what we should do. This state law was passed — should we remove occupancy from the land use code? Or alternatively, we could just come to them with an ordinance that removes it, and then they can act on it,” Guiler said. “The council still has judgment as to any changes we make to the land use code and how they think state law should apply, but I think those are the two options we’d be looking at.”
The new law goes into effect July 1. That gives Boulder officials a relatively short window to review the law, but Guiler said the city will likely decide on a path forward in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, Boulder housing advocate Eric Budd, a co-lead of Bedrooms Are For People, celebrated the bill’s passage. He told the Daily Camera it was “surreal” to see an occupancy bill passed at the state level that would prohibit the type of occupancy law he’s been fighting for years to change.
“When we started the Bedrooms Are For People campaign in 2020, our focus was really Boulder, and we thought that that was going to be a hard enough lift. So I think for everyone that has worked on this issue in the past several years or several decades — hundreds of people in Boulder — it’s a huge, huge victory,” he said.
The Bedrooms initiative would have increased the allowable occupancy to one person per bedroom plus one additional person per home. Although it narrowly failed on a 48% to 52% vote in 2021, there’s been a strong push to increase residential occupancy limits and allow more people to cohabitate as housing in Boulder grows increasingly scarce and housing prices continue to spike.
State Rep. Manny Rutinel, D-Commerce City, one of the bill’s prime sponsors, said he’s excited to have “finally banned discriminatory occupancy limits” and that he looks forward to the “positive impact it’s going to have on housing affordability, environmental protection and the social isolation epidemic.”
Rutinel said although the bill encountered some opposition in the state legislature and a few minor amendments were made, the amendments didn’t change the overall substance of the bill that was originally introduced.
