Why Boulder Needs Change
Here is what the Camera’s sentence steps over.
Boulder has stopped growing
The Census counted 106,742 residents in 2015 and 105,689 last year. Flat. Take the students out and the picture changes: CU enrollment rose 24.8 percent over that decade, and CU told the city that 32,957 of its students live here. The non-student population fell by roughly 7,000 people — about 9 percent.
The university grew. The rest of Boulder shrank.
The tax base is going backward
Sales and use tax collections rose 2.75 percent in 2025, to $178.7 million. That looks like it keeps pace with 2.7 percent inflation. It doesn’t. $3.2 million of the $4.8 million gain came from one line — construction use tax, up 21.4 percent in a single year.
Strip that out and retail sales tax — people actually buying things in Boulder — grew 0.64 percent. The city says so itself: “The twelve-month change for December sales tax of 0.6% lagged the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers of 2.7%.”
A quarter of our offices are dark
Office vacancy was 15 percent in early 2023. It hit 24.8 percent in the first quarter of this year. Of Boulder’s 6.6 million square feet of office space, roughly 1.6 million sits empty. Downtown has been near 29 percent since early 2023 and has barely moved.
Commercial property sales ran $1.5 billion across 313 transactions in 2021. In 2025: $331 million across 177. A 78 percent decline in four years. Boulder County has 3,700 fewer jobs than at its peak.
The classrooms are emptying
Kindergarten-age children living in Boulder fell from 962 to 454. Cut in half. Children under 18 are down 10.5 percent over the decade. Enrollment at schools inside the city fell 15.2 percent since 2019, from 14,248 students to 12,083.
The district is closing Douglass, Mesa and Flatirons, and relocating High Peaks and Community Montessori. All five are in Boulder.
Meanwhile, the City spent
From 2021 to 2025, Boulder’s operating budget grew from $272.3 million to $399.3 million. Strip the library out of both years and compare like for like: 52 percent in five years. Inflation over the same period: 19 percent. Nearly three times as fast.
Staffing rose from 1,307 to 1,539 full-time positions — almost 18 percent — in a city whose population did not grow at all. The General Fund grew 44 percent.
And the City spent north of $350 million on a new headquarters at Alpine-Balsam, on 8.8 acres bought with no competing bidders and no public vote. That parcel could have held 250 to 350 households — families paying property taxes, filling those closing classrooms, supporting those empty storefronts.
Now the same City asks for $400 million more. Up to $650 million with interest.
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