Up until about World War II, both neighborhoods remained quite stable.  Changes to the housing stock were more common for larger houses throughout the neighborhoods as families, especially during the Great Depression, claimed “hardship” in maintaining large homes.  There was a city board that then would grant permission to split the big house down into smaller units. The Kohler House, formerly owned by the family of Edward Kohler, a prominent banker and rancher at 942 Pine, once had 14 rooming units!

Following “the War,” an influx of GIs attending the university on the “GI Bill” placed further demands on Boulder’s housing stock resulting in more house conversions to apartments in both neighborhoods.  The need for housing was so dire that Minnie May Cunningham, the “Goat Lady” near 4th and Linden, was able to convert her low ceilinged chicken coops to rental housing. In those days, there were no rental licenses!  As the University began accommodating more married students in family housing, originally in Quonset huts and then in the apartments located south of Canyon and west of Folsom, there was less demand on the neighborhoods for student housing. The City instituted zoning regulations with more control, in particular segregating apartment housing from single-family housing.  Single-family housing was further defined by size of lots and the general mix of housing types.  The area north of Mapleton included a number of houses that were originally built as duplexes.  This, coupled with small lot sizes, resulted in a MR-E zoning (medium density, established) designation for the area–the same as much of Whittier.

By the mid-1960′s, Boulder had begun to expand to the east.  Apartment complexes in areas zoned for high density began to spring up, relieving some of the demand on the big old houses for higher density housing.  Housing was reasonably priced so a family could buy a “run down” apartment house and convert it back to single-family use.  Because the housing stock was not expensive, developers could also buy little old houses for demolition to be replaced by small multi-unit buildings given a large enough lot or two in the MR-E zones.  The Whittier neighborhood and the east end of Maxwell both had quite a bit of this kind of in-fill development through the mid-1970′s.  For a brief time, I lived in one of those brand new four-plexes in the 1700 block of Spruce.  Crystal Gray was my next-door neighbor.  Her family occupied the upstairs apartment, one of three, in the same house where Crystal still lives. At about the same time that I bought my little house west of 9th on Maxwell, Crystal and her family bought their house from their former landlord and converted it back to single family.

It wasn’t very long before development activity began to creep across 9th Street into the north part of Mapleton Hill.  The families living in Mapleton Hill organized an effort to both change the MR-E zoning to LR-E and have Mapleton Hill named an historic district–one of the first in the City of Boulder.  Neighbors were notified of the doings about town via “The Mapleton Leaf,” a 1 page newsletter that was distributed by the Eco-Cycle block leaders.  (Later, the sixth grade children at Mapleton School took on the responsibility of passing out the newsletter.)  We gathered around the table at Judge “Bud” and June Holmes’ home enjoying June’s home baked cookies with “Bud’s” Mayna bird caged in the kitchen screeching something that sounded like “Get me outta here!”  We worked together to change our neighborhood and were known as the Mapleton Hill Mob down at City Hall.  I was in Council chambers the night Bill Winter stood and said, “Mapleton Hill is an anachronism and, as such, ought to be preserved!” Council agreed and made the changes that the neighborhood had requested. No more of our small housing stock was demolished except for one “new” condo complex at the northwest corner of 9th and Maxwell.  (The permits for that project were issued just prior to the changes that the neighborhood requested of Council went into effect.)

While the Mapleton neighbors were busy preserving our historic housing stock, Whittier neighbors were busy revitalizing their school through the creation of an International Baccalaureate program.  How would each neighborhood be different today had the residents made different choices thirty and forty years ago?  How will these two exceptional neighborhoods change in the next fifty years?

In the last few years, the weakness of the Plan has become evident. In 2005, that council decided to “keep the 5 Year Update open” for some years in case they wanted to annex land in Area III – Planning Reserve for a big box store. This was a clear violation of the Plan’s procedures. But the County Commissioners were silent about this abuse, in spite of significant prodding. Just a few years ago, the Council wanted to put more dense development on the Washington School site than the Plan allowed, so they simply amended the Plan. In addition to being an ad hoc change to the Plan, what they proposed would have amounted to an illegal spot zoning. Fortunately, the citizens who live in the area were able to gather signatures from throughout the city to refer the Council’s scheme to the ballot, and the next Council created a process to balance needs of the neighborhood with those of the developer. And just last year, a very similar process occurred with the Boulder Junior Academy site on Fourth Street. This time, faced with an election, the Council that was pushing the development backed off.

These incidents exposed the fundamental flaw in the Comp Plan – the citizens have no power to enforce it. To identify a couple of other policies that are in the Comp Plan but are not enforced, there is a requirement that “growth pay its own way” (in the Policy section) and another for “zero growth in vehicle miles traveled” (in the Transportation Master Plan that is attached to the Plan).  The Council has not bothered to implement these policies in any consistent or complete way.

The current Comprehensive Plan update is supposed to focus on “sustainability.”  The notion is to come up with measures of economic, social and environmental sustainability, and then see how various plans measure up. This all sounds great, but based on what I have observed in the past, various interest groups in the City will want their favorite measures included. Many of these measures will conflict with each other – that is, what is sustainable under one group’s idea would not be under another’s – and many will also conflict with the real notion of sustainability, which is, “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”  And after all this , the city council will continue to make decisions based on a majority vote, irrespective of what the Plan says. So the Update process will have added nothing.

To make the Comprehensive Plan meaningful again, the Council should grant power to the citizens to enforce it, and grant neighborhoods and the community at large the power to set limits on development that they can live with.  Doing this will force the Council to consider what policies and zoning they really want to be bound by and what the citizens actually want. Hopefully, then the Comprehensive Plan will return to being a truly useful document on which the citizens can rely.