TL;DR: Great neighborhoods weren’t planned all at once—they evolved slowly over time through countless small changes. We’ve made incremental change illegal in most of our city, forcing developers to build everything at massive scale. To create resilient, affordable neighborhoods, we must restore the right to build and adapt one property at a time.
The False Promise of Master Planning
I recently met a couple my age who have lived in Boulder County their entire lives, and their young garbage truck loving son. They are concerned about whether their son will be able to afford living in the same neighborhood where he grows up.1Entry level salary of $60,000 per year if he works in Longmont. A pretty good salary for the start of a career, but still not enough to buy a home in Longmont even in a 2 income household.
Like many Longmonters, they love our tree lined streets and quality of life, but understand change is necessary because our current approach is pricing out the next generation. They live across the street from their parents, but worry their son won’t have the same opportunity. How can we make sure children can grow up to live in their neighborhoods, while also making sure our neighborhoods stay great places?
If price is anything to go by, Old Town Longmont and Prospect are probably the neighborhoods that offer the highest quality of life. City Councilmembers compare proposed new developments to Old Town Longmont or Prospect and ask, “Why can’t we build like this anymore?” The question assumes these places were designed and built all at once, fully formed. But that’s not how any great neighborhood has ever been created.
Downtown Longmont wasn’t master-planned. Neither were the Historic East and West Side. They evolved, one building at a time, slowly over 70 years. Each property owner made independent decisions about what to build based on what was needed at that moment in time.
High quality of life is what results when a neighborhood is intimately tailored to the needs of its residents. To get high quality of life, our neighborhoods have to be allowed to incrementally change as our needs change over time.
Incremental Change Is Better Than It’s Reputation
Incremental change gets criticized for being slow, incomplete, and uncertain. It never delivers the perfect solution immediately. There’s no ribbon-cutting ceremony, no grand vision realized all at once.
But these aren’t flaws—they’re features. The uncertainty and open-endedness of incremental change are exactly what make neighborhoods resilient. Resilience means the ability to adapt to new conditions, to modify what exists for changing economic circumstances, new fashions, or a changing environment.
There is a word for places where change doesn’t happen – either because it’s too expensive or illegal. Stagnant.
How We Broke the System
Everything changed after World War II when zoning became mandatory for federal mortgage insurance. Before 1940, Longmont had simple zones marked with crayon. After the war, we froze incremental change everywhere except downtown.
This is why you can tell when various parts of the city were built just by looking at it. Each era became a time capsule of its planning philosophy. The historic core evolved organically. The post-war suburbs were planned as complete subdivisions. The 1980s brought us big box stores and apartment complexes built all at once.
The Problem with Building Everything at Once
When we require block-sized development, we force developers to make decisions today that no one will be allowed to undo for 50 years. Instead of allowing someone to build a business and someone else to add a boarding house next door for employees, we demand that one developer figure out the entire puzzle at once.
This is why homes in Longmont are built 300 at a time. It’s why they all look the same. When you make it as hard to build one duplex as it is to build 300 apartments, developers choose scale to spread the costs. When change is prohibited for so long that pent-up demand becomes overwhelming, the only relief valve is massive development.
Even Prospect had to be built entirely at once. Despite mimicking the form of something developed incrementally, it was in fact master planned with little ability to adapt over time. The developer bragged about the level of control he personally exercised over every single lot.
"It's an arduous review process," Wallace admits. "It is a three-tiered process. It takes about six weeks. The amount of detail, the level of scrutiny on the review process is very demanding. It has been difficult for some architects to contend with. It's like going through two municipalities-the City of Longmont, then us."
And yet look at Prospect today – a beautiful neighborhood, but one with constantly failing businesses.2Johnson’s Station. The Rib House. Two Dog Diner. Comida Cantina. We should learn something about the appeal of neighborhoods like Prospect that business owners keep trying to succeed there, despite the many failures. It just doesn’t quite work, because Prospect was built with the vision of only a single person at a single point of time. Cities are too complicated for that.
Envision Longmont has this same mistake. By designating “areas of stability” (I call them “areas of stagnation”) that prevent any change, it’s no wonder that the few areas where change is allowed experience sudden, dramatic transformation. We’ve eliminated the middle ground where neighborhoods can evolve gradually.
What True Resilience Looks Like
Look at downtown Longmont today. Even after the period of disinvestment once car-centric business locations became more fashionable in the 60s and 70s, it is thriving today. It works because years of small changes accumulated over 40 years transformed it from a place with pawnshops and strip clubs to a place where all kinds of Longmonters can find community. The Downtown Development Authority didn’t rebuild everything at once—they supported incremental improvements that added up to transformation.
This is what resilience actually means: the ability to continuously adapt rather than being locked into one configuration forever. A resilient neighborhood can add a corner store when families need groceries nearby.3The economics of small, neighborhood retail is more complicated than just zoning. Another major factor is federal government abandoning enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act. That era might be coming to an end. The Trump Administration is continuing this case, though they just dropped a similar one against Pepsi. It will probably always be more expensive to buy milk at the corner store than from a multi-national behemoth like Kroger. But the price difference doesn’t have to be as big as it is today. It can convert a large house into two small houses when housing is scarce. It can add a home office when someone starts a business.
Why We Must Legalize Incremental Change Everywhere
No neighborhood should be forced into stagnation, and no neighborhood should have sudden change imposed upon it. For both of these things to be true, we must allow incremental change everywhere.
This means legalizing duplex conversions throughout the city. It means allowing small businesses in residential neighborhoods. It means letting property owners respond to actual community needs rather than requiring them to predict those needs decades in advance.
When we allow incremental change, we get neighborhoods that can adapt to serve three generations of the same family. The young couple can start with an apartment, buy a small house when they have children, convert it to a duplex when the kids leave, and age in place with rental income and nearby services. And we can add enough housing for everyone who needs it, without suddenly changing what our neighborhoods look and feel like.
The Path Forward
Great neighborhoods aren’t designed—they’re cultivated. They grow through countless small decisions by people who understand their immediate needs better than any planner possibly could.
We already know how to build resilient places because we did it for the first half of our city’s history. We just need to make it legal again.
The solution isn’t to plan better neighborhoods. It’s to create the conditions where neighborhoods can plan themselves, one property at a time, responding to real needs as they arise.
Take Action
If you want neighborhoods that can serve multiple generations, that can adapt to changing needs, and that develop character over time rather than looking identical the day they’re built, then vote for me for Mayor.
I want to legalize incremental change again, because while it might not be the fastest way to build the 14,000 units we need, it’s the best way to prevent sprawl, enhance neighborhood character over time, build wealth for people, enhance quality of life, and avoid gentrification.
The future of our neighborhoods depends on restoring the right to build them the way all great places have always been built—incrementally, imperfectly, and continuously.
