Bedrooms: Hoping to stay

By Cora Wiese Moore. Also published as a letter to the editor in the Daily Camera on October 26, 2021.

"Walking around my quiet Boulder neighborhood, children are playing on our street and neighbors are out to chat. I love where I live and the people I live near. I’m voting for Bedrooms Are For People, ballot measure 300, in hopes that it will allow me to stay.

When I moved to Boulder one year ago without a job, even the cheapest housing options stressed me out. I’m lucky – I have a highly marketable engineering degree that helped me start work after less than a month of unemployment. Even still, the rent that I pay in one of Boulder’s 'affordable' neighborhoods is pretty close to being 30% of my income, which is a common threshold for measuring housing insecurity. *https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-featd-article-081417.html

And I would love to have kids, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to have them in Boulder. Like so many other young professionals, I will have to move soon if I want to start saving up enough money to have a family. We need to protect today’s families, and also provide for tomorrow’s.

Measure 300 isn’t going to single-handedly make room in Boulder for all of us. But it might allow me and my two roommates, who are a couple but are not married, to legally sublet our third unoccupied bedroom. And if not that, at least it would let someone struggling to find a place to sleep make use of a space that is currently wasted."