Longmont's Growth Is Coming Whether We Want It or Not. The Question Is Where It Goes.

Longmont is not the small city it used to be. With a population approaching 100,000 and a median home price that has more than doubled in a decade, the community is at an inflection point that most of its residents haven't fully processed: the Longmont of 2035 will look fundamentally different from the one we live in today. The only question is whether that change is guided by deliberate policy or left to the market alone.

Right now, Longmont is mostly leaving it to the market — and the results show. Single-family homes dominate the landscape. The townhomes and duplexes that provide the middle step between renting an apartment and buying a $500,000 house are scarce. Accessory dwelling units, which the city reformed its regulations to allow in 2022, remain rare because permitting costs and construction prices make them financially impractical for most homeowners. Meanwhile, new developments are being approved on the city's eastern and northern fringes, adding infrastructure costs that future taxpayers will bear for decades.

This is a pattern with a name: sprawl by default. It's what happens when a growing community focuses its political energy on blocking density in established neighborhoods while approving greenfield development that requires new roads, new utilities, and new services — all funded by the public.

The Numbers That Should Alarm Anyone Who Cares About Affordability

In 2015, the median home sale price in Longmont was approximately $270,000. By 2024, it had risen to over $490,000 — an 80% increase in less than a decade. Over the same period, median household incomes in Boulder County grew roughly 35%. The gap between home prices and wages has made homeownership inaccessible for a large share of the workforce that keeps Longmont running: teachers, nurses, firefighters, restaurant workers, retail employees, and the small business owners who depend on them.

The consequences are not abstract. They show up in a 45-minute commute from Greeley or Loveland for workers who can't afford Longmont rents. They show up in a school district that struggles to hire and retain teachers when a one-bedroom apartment requires a salary that starting educators don't earn. They show up in a fire department that has trouble retaining paramedics when the cost of living in the city they protect is out of reach.

Longmont has done some things right. The city adopted a Housing Strategic Plan in 2021 that recognized affordability as a core challenge. The ADU ordinance reforms were a meaningful step. The city's rental assistance programs have helped vulnerable residents stay housed during economic crises. These deserve credit.

But incremental reforms haven't moved the needle enough, because the fundamental problem is a mismatch between supply and demand that can only be addressed by adding more housing — specifically, more of the kinds of housing that working families can afford.

Missing Middle: The Housing Type Longmont Desperately Needs

Walk through almost any neighborhood within a mile of downtown Longmont and you'll notice something: the blocks are almost entirely single-family homes. Duplexes and small apartment buildings — the housing types that filled American cities before World War II and postwar zoning codes effectively banned them — are nearly absent from the established neighborhoods where transit access, walkability, and community amenities are strongest.

This is what urban planners call the "missing middle": the townhomes, duplexes, triplexes, cottage courts, and small apartment buildings that can house more people per lot than a single-family home without the scale or character disruption of a five-story apartment building. Missing-middle housing has historically provided workforce housing — the kind of home that a teacher, a firefighter, or a young family could buy as a first step toward financial stability.

Several Colorado cities have moved aggressively to legalize missing-middle housing in recent years. Denver's 2023 zoning reform allowed duplexes on any residential lot in the city. Boulder passed significant upzoning near transit corridors. Fort Collins has expanded ADU allowances and simplified permitting to make small-scale infill economically viable.

Longmont has been more cautious. The political dynamic is familiar: residents of established neighborhoods worry about parking, neighborhood character, and property values. These concerns are legitimate and deserve a genuine response. But they need to be weighed against the housing needs of the teachers, nurses, and small business workers who want to live in Longmont and can't afford to.

Density Doesn't Have to Mean High-Rises

One of the most persistent misconceptions in local land-use debates is that the alternative to single-family zoning is ten-story apartment buildings. It isn't. The most effective housing reforms in peer cities have focused on modest increases in density: allowing a second unit on a standard lot, permitting a four-unit building where a single house now stands, removing parking minimums near downtown where transit access makes car ownership less essential.

Done well, infill development of this kind often improves neighborhood character rather than diminishing it. A well-designed duplex with two-car garages looks substantially similar to the single-family homes around it. A three-unit cottage court nestled behind an existing home adds gentle scale to a block without dominating it. The historic neighborhoods that people in Longmont most love — the streets near Roosevelt Park, the older blocks of the East Side — were built at densities that current zoning would prohibit.

What Longmont needs isn't a blank-check upzoning that ignores legitimate neighborhood concerns. It needs a thoughtful, targeted expansion of missing-middle housing in locations where it makes the most sense: within a half-mile of the downtown core, along major transit corridors like South Hover Street and Ninth Avenue, and in neighborhoods where the infrastructure — sidewalks, parks, transit — already exists to support additional residents.

The Infrastructure Argument for Density

There is a financial argument for density that rarely gets made clearly in local land-use debates: sprawl is expensive.

Every new single-family home built on a greenfield site at the edge of Longmont requires a share of new roads, water mains, sewer lines, stormwater infrastructure, and eventually school capacity. These costs are partially covered by development fees, but they are also substantially subsidized by existing taxpayers — who then bear ongoing maintenance costs for the new infrastructure in perpetuity.

Infill development in established neighborhoods, by contrast, leverages infrastructure that already exists. A duplex built on a downtown lot uses streets, utilities, and parks that are already there. The marginal infrastructure cost is near zero. The city collects more tax revenue from the same footprint. The housing gets built in locations where residents can walk to downtown, access transit, and drive shorter distances — reducing traffic pressure on the road network that everyone uses.

This is not a theoretical argument. Strong Towns, the nonprofit urban planning advocacy organization, has spent years documenting the long-term fiscal math of development patterns: dense, walkable urban infill generates far more tax revenue per acre of infrastructure than low-density suburban development. Longmont's long-term fiscal health depends in part on developing in ways that make the math work.

What We're Calling For

TownPost is not a land-use authority. We don't get a vote on zoning variances or subdivision approvals. But we do have a platform, and we think it's worth using to say plainly what the data, the history, and the regional experience of peer cities all point toward:

Longmont needs more housing, more types of housing, and more of it in established neighborhoods near transit and services.

Specifically, we'd like to see the city council:

• Legalize duplexes citywide, following Denver's lead, as a baseline expansion of missing-middle supply.
• Streamline ADU permitting to reduce the cost and time burden that currently makes ADUs financially impractical for most homeowners.
• Reduce or eliminate parking minimums in the downtown core and along primary transit corridors, where car ownership rates are lower and land costs make parking requirements economically prohibitive.
• Adopt a transit-oriented development overlay for the city's highest-frequency bus corridors, allowing four- to six-unit buildings by right in those locations.
• Fund a housing impact study that quantifies the long-term fiscal cost of continued greenfield development versus targeted infill — and present those findings to the public honestly.

Longmont's community character is worth preserving. The city's commitment to being a place where working families can afford to live is worth fighting for. But preserving character and expanding housing opportunity are not opposites — in cities that have done this work thoughtfully, they reinforce each other. The question is whether Longmont's leaders have the will to make that case to the neighborhoods that don't want to change.

The growth is coming. The only choice is whether Longmont shapes it.