Bryan Bowen has been an architect specializing in housing in Boulder and around the country for about 25 years. He founded Caddis Collaborative in 2002 (originally bba). Caddis is a multidisciplinary design collaborative that explores ways of living more lightly on our earth in beautiful, healthy environments. He and his wife raised their kids in Wild Sage Cohousing in the award-winning Holiday Neighborhood, a new-urbanist mixed-income and mixed-use success story. Having designed several blocks of this project including Wild Sage, Silver Sage Village, and several multifamily projects for Flatirons Habitat, the lived experience of such an environment proved the concept and has acted as an informative lab to observe human habitation. His work has been informed by these personal experiences as well as his academic and professional background, and his time on the City of Boulder’s Planning Board immersed him in a deeper discourse.
As the cities and towns of the West are facing increased housing needs for families, couples, and individuals up and down the income spectrum, as well for previously underserved populations, most of which would ideally be served within existing areas of growth, these questions arise.
- In the front range and mountain communities, what’s being missed by the current systems that are creating most of our new housing?
- Thoughts: LIHTC and current successful financial mechanisms that are creating housing focus on certain characteristics: for rent, projects of a certain size, projects that meet certain criteria in terms of scoring – and this system is not naturally providing all of the housing we need nor is it resulting in great environments in and around the housing that is being built.
- How can we help envision a future version of our communities that is something that people will want to live in, which will also help to serve the severe need for housing (especially of certain types) as well as support broader goals of carbon emissions reductions and regional transportation?
- I sort of feel like there is a failure of imagination for small towns about what’s possible that’s also awesome – they are often nostalgically fixated on the past or fearful of bad outcomes in the future, instead of rallying around a positive shared vision for their communities. How can we get there from here?
- Given the relative inflexibility of land values and rising construction/materials cost and the increasing difficulty/duration of approvals, what assumptions are being challenged with innovative solutions and are some new opportunities arising?
- The concept of what a family unit is and how property is owned is being cracked open by the cohousing and cooperative housing movement. Groups like Boulder Housing Coalition are using a cooperative model to drastically reduce the cost of housing with the added benefit of the community. Sarah Wells is innovating some great things in the shared ownership world. Cohousing projects, which in some ways are not too dissimilar from a condo model, offer rich and shared amenities and a lifestyle that bakes in a lot of subtle yet meaningful affordability measures.
- Also, a new focus at the state level on macro development issues will hopefully shift some outcomes and set up better intergovernmental cooperation. Prohibition of occupancy limits, elimination of parking minimums, focus on transit-oriented development, etc. Improvements on construction defect litigation or allowance of rent control could also be big factors in the future.
- Which populations are not being served?
- We are working on market rate and affordable housing options for families with members experiencing intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD) – by working directly with families we are doing things differently than the usual affordable housing playbook suggests.
- We are seeing regular people banding together to create community-oriented and sustainable housing opportunities for themselves…if people are willing to work this hard to make it happen, surely there’s a market that’s being missed?
- There are bandwidths of affordability that are harder to supply with housing solutions with the current systems. Missing Middle housing is talked about a lot, but it can be hard to achieve. The gap between the top of the affordable housing system and the bottom of the market is growing each year.
- What are the biggest challenges facing affordable housing developers, non-profits, and housing authorities?
- High land costs and the fact that much of the easy land is already taken are biggies, and the cost of construction is the next largest hurdle. If the promise of prefabrication comes through at a broader scale, we might see this shift. Other big factors like labor, materials, and the costs of doing business (like insurance) factor in as well, same as the cost of money/investment characteristics. The one factor we might have more control over is the approval process. Our clients often have to secure land with no guarantee that they will get the number of units they want or even if they can get approval. If we can, either at a state or local level, lay out what these projects can do and what they need to be like, then skip or streamline the public approval process, we will have created more and better housing and made the outcomes more predictable to neighbors, city/county staff, and local elected officials.
- Have we perhaps gone too far with some of our sustainability goals?
- There has to be an end in sight – energy efficiency regulations do not have an infinite horizon. As innovative building codes catch up to local leaders, we need to allow them to result in optimized building performance that takes the building envelope and mechanical systems to the right level while also directing focus more on renewable on and off-site as well as transportation. Establishing a standardized EUI based on building type across the state could make the practice of developing, designing, and constructing these buildings more effective and with better results.
Bryan Bowen has been a practicing architect since graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 1995. He is dedicated to the design of sustainable structures of all scales that serve client needs and that create thriving neighborhoods that are great to live in. A sustainability expert, Bryan was a LEED Champion during the program’s pilot phase for the Oquirrh Park Speed Skating Oval for the 2002 Olympics, has been trained in Passive House and the Living Building/Community Challenge, and is a cohousing wonk. He was named as the AIA Architect of the Year in 2015 by the Northern Colorado AIA chapter. He served as chair of the City of Boulder Planning Board during several of his eight years on the board.
