Boulder again at a Crossroads: long-suffering Mall reborn as '29th Street,' but city's residential plans still in question.

• Author: Titus, Stephen
• Position: Pearl Street Mall

Visitors strolling the downtown streets of Boulder's Pearl Street Mall or driving the tree-lined avenues of the Mapleton neighborhood may think they've discovered the idyllic community. It's clean, it's diverse and the scenery is beautiful. But all that has come at a price. For years, Boulder has struggled with high housing costs, traffic congestion and difficult redevelopment puzzles. The city may be on the path to fixing some of those issues, but major hurdles remain. While some important new projects are underway or in the long-range planning process, to understand Boulder's future redevelopment it's important to understand the current land use and how it got that way.

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Boulder is the most expensive city along the Front Range. With home prices at about $250 per square foot and up, a 1,200-square-foot, 1960s-era cracker box in Martin Acres easily sells for more than $300,000. Compounding the problem is a decades-long move by the city to surround itself with open space and parks, creating a development island that is now completely built out and leaving only redevelopment opportunities.

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Making matters worse is a requirement that developers set aside at least 20 percent of their residential projects for affordable housing. This city-mandated "inclusionary" policy has pushed the Boulder real-estate market toward more commercial than residential development, and while that creates plenty of jobs, (currently about 110,000 jobs for 101,000 people) many of the workers who fill those jobs can't afford a home in Boulder. And that forces the workers to commute, creating traffic problems along U.S. Highway 36 and other feeder streets leading into the city.

During the late 1990s, therefore, Boulder put a moratorium on commercial development and retooled its long-term plans to include more residential construction to increase the town housing stock and perhaps quell the rapid rise in house prices. In the meantime, Boulder's single biggest source of sales-tax revenue, Crossroads Mall, which once accounted for 10 percent of sales taxes, was suffering. Sales in the stores were down, and so was sales-tax revenue for the city. The impending completion of Flatirons Crossing, just 10 miles away in neighboring Broomfield, was guaranteed to make the city's sales-tax collections worse.

But Crossroads Mall's owner, Macerich, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based real-estate investment trust that also owned Flatirons Crossing...