Rents are falling in Boulder. Families are leaving anyway.
A home is affordable only if people can earn enough to buy it. Boulder has worked on its housing prices while the jobs that pay for a home here have gone elsewhere.
BOULDER, Colo. On Sept. 22, the Boulder Valley school board voted to close four elementary schools, three of them in Boulder, because there aren’t enough children to fill them. The district has lost roughly 3,700 students since 2017.
The city’s explanation for why families leave is cost. “High housing costs are driving many people from Boulder, including families,” it says on the page for one of its housing initiatives.
For renters, though, Boulder is getting cheaper. The city’s median rent dropped 3.8 percent over the past year, according to Apartment List, and new apartment complexes are advertising specials to fill empty units. Families are leaving anyway.
TWO SIDES OF THE EQUATION
Whether a family can afford a city depends on two numbers: what homes cost and what jobs pay. Boulder’s housing policy has focused almost entirely on the first.
The median single-family home in Boulder sold for about $1.375 million in 2024, according to the Boulder Chamber’s economic council. Carrying it takes a household income well over $300,000 a year under standard lending guidelines. The University of Colorado, the city’s largest employer, pays a median salary of about $71,000, according to public payroll data. That supports a home of roughly $290,000. Two CU paychecks stretch to about $580,000, less than half the price of the median Boulder house.
Meanwhile, the families with the most room to choose are choosing elsewhere. In Erie, households led by someone 25 to 44 earn a median of about $174,000, according to Census Bureau estimates, far more than the same households in Boulder. They could afford much more of Boulder’s housing than most Boulder families can. They buy in Erie instead.
THE OPPORTUNITY MOVED
Boulder built its name as a place where professionals came to build careers. Crispin Porter + Bogusky made it a destination for the best talent in advertising, and Techstars made it a launchpad for startups. Crispin is gone. Techstars moved its headquarters to New York in 2024 and is only now restarting its Boulder program, with help from local founders and investors. The Colorado Chamber of Commerce’s latest tracker of companies leaving or scaling back in the state lists Pfizer’s Boulder research operations, the biotech firms Inscripta and AGC Biologics, and Sunflower Bank, which moved its headquarters to Dallas. Twitter once employed as many as 300 people here; it was evicted from its Boulder office in 2023 for unpaid rent.
Investors still believe in Boulder startups, which raised $1.7 billion in 2024, according to the Boulder Chamber. Keeping those companies here as they grow is harder. The number of employers in the city fell in 2025, and average wages for jobs here dropped nearly 3 percent, according to CU Boulder’s Business Research Division. Average wages in Broomfield County are now the highest in Colorado, and Denver County’s are higher than Boulder County’s, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For a company deciding where to grow, Boulder is an expensive and slow place to do it. Based on brokers’ asking rates, a 10-person team in a small downtown office can expect to pay roughly $10,000 a month once taxes, maintenance and newly higher parking rates are included. Comparable space in Broomfield costs thousands less, typically with free parking. And The Colorado Group, a downtown brokerage, says new tenants on Pearl Street wait months on a city permit process it described as having “never been slower.”
A REASON TO STAY
A family weighing Boulder weighs more than a mortgage: whether there’s a career here, whether the neighborhood school will stay open, and whether the city is building toward something.
Boulder hasn’t made much of a case on those questions lately. Many of its highest-paying jobs are at satellite offices of companies based elsewhere, or are remote jobs that don’t depend on Boulder at all. Its violent crime rate in 2024 was more than 10 times Erie’s, according to FBI data. And when three of its neighborhood schools came up for closure, the city council took no position, while Lafayette’s entire council asked the school board to pause.
Boulder still has what first drew people here: the Flatirons, a great university, and a history of people who came to build something. The city is betting that more townhomes and duplexes will bring young families back. They might, if the rest of the equation works.
If you want a family of four to choose a townhouse in Boulder over a four-bedroom house in Erie, you have to give them a reason to.