Apartment City

Government loves to create winners and losers.  The Chad Mayes led Assembly Republicans , the seven of them, voted to force some companies to buy “credits” to stay in business—this is a tax increase.  Then they also said they prefer government transportation by making it more expensive to drive a car—Mayes and friends voted to raise gas taxes by 63 cents a gallon.  In zoning matters, government really likes to create winners and losers. “Facing down a record number of vacancies on State Street and a citywide backlog of building permit applications , the Santa Barbara City Council voted unanimously this Tuesday to enact a six- month pilot program to improve and accelerate the review process for prospective commercial tenants along the downtown business corridor. Applicants for properties between Sola and Cabrillo streets, where more than 30 storefronts currently sit empty, will now be bumped to the front of the line at design review board hearings . Two members of the city’s ...

1000 South Broadway Apartments . (Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite) apartment building; residential; real estate; denver; colorado; denverite; kevinjbeaty" width="1000" height="667" />The 1000 South Broadway Apartments . (Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite) When it was announced last week that Chipotle would be the first company to publicly partner with the city to subsidize housing for low- and moderate-income Denverites, a lot of people had the same question: Why doesn’t Chipotle just pay its employees enough money to afford Denver housing ? The answer, as you can probably guess, is in economics. “The balance between costs of housing in the city and wages… those two are grossly out of line,” said Erik Soliván, executive director of the Denver Office of Housing and Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE). “ We have a lot of people with jobs, the lowest — probably — unemployment rate in the country, but the wages are not keeping pace and are being far out-paced by the cost...