Members of our Community Editorial Board, a group of community residents who are engaged with and passionate about local issues, respond to the following question: Gov. Jared Polis recently signed a bill that will block cities across Colorado from creating or enforcing residential occupancy limits based on family relationships. Your take?
On the plus side, the rancorous city council decision to override the will of the people on occupancy is now moot, though the gall of some members was astounding. Praise Mark Wallach for speaking out on principle.
This issue, like many, is colored gray. People passionately disagree on the methods, but the goal of such laws is to increase the availability and decrease the cost of housing — a goal we can all rally around. The libertarian in me wants people to be free to use their property as they see fit. But most of us don’t live on islands. We have to play nice with our neighbors, our community and now our state.
This law will increase housing availability, and putting six people into a house that previously had four people will also definitely lower rents. Those are both good things. But it will also push up the cost of buying a house, as now houses will be more valuable as rentals. So, it will make renting cheaper and house-buying more expensive.
But the real target of the bill was Fort Collins and Boulder — towns with the only active occupancy laws on the books, for good reason. What do these towns have in common? They are college towns.
The name of our nation is more than a moniker. We formed as a collection of states because we feared the power of an overarching government that would make rules for everyone. Our founders recognized the need to allow different communities to govern themselves differently. That’s why the Tenth Amendment reserves all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government to the states. Within states, we allow cities and towns to govern themselves further. People self-select on even finer gradations — half of Coloradans live in HOA neighborhoods, freely accepting further governing.
I don’t like the heavy-handed way the state has imposed its will on Boulder. Why can’t towns decide for themselves? College towns are unique and it’s reasonable for them to have unique laws. People can always vote to enact change or vote with their feet and move to another community. But no longer can we decide on occupancy. That vote has been removed from us. At least as long as we want to stay Coloradans.
Bill Wright, bill@wwwright.com
The categories we have invented to make sense of the world have become a kind of contemporary Frankenstein: created by humans but more powerful and enduring than their creators. Specifically, the various ways of differentiating “us” from “them” that humans have constructed to transform an infinitely complex environment into manageable cognitive chunks that promote survival have taken on lives of their own. In this context, the new law prohibiting family-based occupancy limits can be viewed as an acknowledgment that the distinction between “related” and “unrelated” has outlived its usefulness — at least in the domain of housing policy. While this may seem trivial, I am hoping it signals an institutional openness to re-examining the classification systems used to distribute other resources and guide other policies.
The problem is not that we make distinctions. The problem arises when we treat these human-made distinctions as if they were a priori, context-independent, infinitely generalizable, God-given, absolute, reflective of an “objective” reality and/or morally imperative. Evidence of the destructive effects of treating such classification schemes as freestanding phenomena that exist “naturally” is omnipresent in our current world. Indeed, the distinction between “related” and “unrelated” that underpinned our occupancy limits until recently is isomorphic to those between female and male, Palestinian and Israeli, documented and undocumented, and so on. These distinctions, which were created by humans for particular purposes under specific conditions, have become divorced from their origins and are being used to justify the vastly differential treatment accorded to members of the very species that created them.
I wonder what would happen if we took back control of our creation. I wonder what would happen if we identified and challenged the often-invisible frameworks we use to define ourselves in relation and in opposition to others. In practice, this would mean recognizing and respecting that there are many legitimate frameworks for making sense of the world and defining our place in it. I bet we would learn a lot by experiencing the world using a classification system that draws distinctions among individuals based on unmet human needs.
Elyse Morgan, emorgan2975@gmail.com
