Boulder Junction symbolic of divide over building boom
“The hotel and apartment buildings, the new streets and bustling construction at 30th Street and Pearl Parkway are the result of a plan that has been on the books since 2007, and yet they seemed to take the public completely by surprise.
Boulder Junction, with its three- and four-story facades where parking lots and low-slung warehouses once sat, became, for better or for worse, the face of a building boom that has caused excitement and angst in Boulder.
Fans of a more urban Boulder — bike and transit advocates, supporters of affordable housing, city officials and planners, even many residents — laud the projects as the fulfillment of a vision for combining workforce housing and dynamic public spaces with local and regional transit connections.
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Advocates of slower growth see a plan that was misguided from the beginning — because the curving stretch of railroad track was incompatible with a train station, because commuter rail to Denver looks ever more unlikely, because it would draw more people to live in a community that is already at its carrying capacity, because it would not address the jobs-population imbalance that causes some 60,000 people to come into Boulder to work every day — and now is marring the city’s eastern gateway with unappealing contemporary architecture.
The Boulder City Council is in the process of determining how — if at all — to change its development requirements and how it reviews proposed projects in the aftermath of a public outcry that led Councilman Sam Weaver to propose and quickly withdraw a moratorium on all new development until the city had determined the community’s vision for the future.”
Meltzer, Erica. Daily Camera 11 October 2014.
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