Bagley, Waters, and Martin are of a mind on one relevant topic, that Longmont should have an affordable element to its housing; and in distinction from my previous suggestion on this website (that if Longmont wants to assure such housing, it could buy up some houses and lease/rent them out), they would cause builders to build such houses.  I dunno, this sounds a bit as though one is planning for eventual slums, but never mind that just now.  These three reckon that without such forced spectra of the housing, Longmont property will all end up in the hands of old rich white guys.  (Being by some definitions old [turn 80 this year], rich [cvil servant annutiant from my days at NASA], and a guy [straight married one, in fact], whom some would describe as white [though I don't check 'race' boxes on forms since we are all humans, after all], and having a house that suits Darcy and me just fine, I suppose they are describing me.) Clearly, per the three, it would not do for the whole community to morph into my kind of resident.

In order to sustain a vital community, they claim, we have to force a housing mix on builders so that some of the houses can be afforded by the young first-time homeowners who are in entry level jobs and don't want to have to live in their cars or their parents' basements anymore.  I guess that's kinda laudable, but engineering an affordability mix by external pressures seems destined to fail.  To keep the houses affordable into the future, they have to be be built smaller, or more tightly spaced, or to a lower quality than will be continually livable in our environment.  I am not a builder, and I am guessing here -- I have not seen reports on what makes houses affordable -- but I can imagine some of them.  Single-pane windows? Less attic insulation? Cheap siding? 2x4 studs rather than 2x6?  10-year roofs rather than 30? Little landscaping?  Placement near noisy industry?  Plastic rather than copper plumbing?  Really small "tiny houses"?  Cheap crumbly concrete with little re-bar?  Builder-grade carpet that will be gone in five years with kids or pets?  Aluminum wiring rather than copper?  Underpowered heating and air conditioning?  No builder-supplied space reserved for playgrounds?  Low-cost cabinet materials?  Thin paint?

In other words, planned slums.  Maybe not instantaneously, but comparatively soon. 

What's my solution?  I don't have one.  But the housing market is flexible and responsive to market demands.  If all the potential buyers are 29-year-olds trying to move out of cars and parental basements, the builders will build to that customer without forcing from the City.  Darcy and I could not afford the physical equivalent of our house in Boulder, so we looked around and moved to Longmont.  That was 20 years ago, and nowadays it seems that growth occurs in Erie and Firestone to a greater extent than Longmont, and driven by the same mechanism.  I am not particularly concerned with Erie's and Firestone's affordability index, but if they take our tired, our poor, yearning to have a house, that's kind of OK with me.  Beats building slums in Longmont.