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By Katie Farnan. Also published as a letter to the editor in the Daily Camera on October 29, 2021.
"Occupancy limits place caps on roommates, not families. And these limits do so regardless of the size of the home or number of bedrooms. It is tacitly understood that occupancy limits are designed to restrict certain kinds of people, not just crowds of people. Certain crowds of people are living perfectly legally within the occupancy limits, because they are deemed to be 'family' under the watchful eyes of the city.
This is government overreach and discrimination. This makes occupancy laws discriminatory. If five people want to share a five-bedroom house, and I demand to know just how those people are related to each other in the eyes of the law, then someone ought to tell me to mind my own business.
A large, multigenerational family living together under Boulder’s occupancy law, nor are they often even considered bothersome in the same way as unrelated living is, irrespective of the fact that both scenarios might be done for affordability. Because of the way occupancy restricts only certain kinds of living arrangements, it is discriminatory. That is why Measure 300 (Bedrooms Are for People) needs to pass.
There is already code enforcement for building standards to control crowds. There is already code enforcement for parking. Those can and should be enforced.
If the issue that opponents have were truly about crowding, the answer is that we already have the tools to deal with that in our city code. But enforcing living arrangements based on familial status is exactly the kind of social engineering that conservatives typically rail against. Stop allowing city government to tell you who you can live with. Vote YES on 300."