No matter what your income, a home is a place where you build equity and memories; it is a financial and emotional investment. That is not what I learned as a kid playing Monopoly. In the Parker-Brothers game, the goal was to buy up choice properties and build, shut out competitors, and try to avoid jail. Even if you had the money, Baltic Avenue was not worth the time or the energy. The young entrepreneur desired Park Place and Boardwalk; those were coveted locations, and that’s where the money was. We know where Boulder is on that game-board map. Everyone wants to roll the dice and land on financial fortune. It also matters if you’re the racecar or the shoe. My wife and I purchased our first home in Boulder on 10th and Maxwell Ave in the early 1990s for less than $100,000 with 20% down and a great mortgage rate. The place needed some work, but that was OK, this “shoe” made a good move and didn’t even know it.

Medium-income earners can get a toehold in the Boulder housing market by applying for an interest-free $200,000 loan to be paid off in 15 years through the Middle Income Down Payment Assistance Pilot Program. This means that a family of four with a yearly income between $93,000 and $175,000 can secure a down payment on a million-dollar home. The average price for a house in Boulder is between $900,000 and 1.3 million, but there is a deed restriction that mandates capping home appreciation at 5.2% if and when the owner decides to sell. The problem is that over the last 15 years, homes in Boulder have appreciated by 147%. So, while your neighbor is building a nest egg with a conventional loan, your home equity stagnates. You get to live in Boulder, but you had better have other investments besides real estate. You will “pass go” a few times and collect $200, but that is not enough to live in Boulder.

The House to Home Ownership Program allows a potential buyer to secure a no-interest $100,000 loan to be paid off in thirty years with no deed restrictions.

The transformation of Boulder from a college hippie town to a financial and cultural mecca happened over decades. The landscape has changed along with the people. Money changed hands; some developers got rich. Forty years ago, one could choose Boulder as a place to live, coupled with many other options along the Front Range; now it is Boulder that chooses who gets to live along the Flatirons.

The official slogan of Monopoly is “Own it All.” Sadly, one cannot “own it all.” No one has applied for the city loans that contain deed restrictions. I imagine young working families want both equity and memories from their homes, even if it means living outside the City of Boulder.

Jim Vacca, jamespvacca1@gmail.com

I got stuck trying to think about this week’s question. I was considering why the Middle Income Downpayment Assistance Pilot Program attracted zero applicants when I bumped into an inconvenient truth: we were working very earnestly to develop an equitable plan to regulate the use of land that had been stolen. This project seemed far too similar to sanctioning the sale of art that had been stolen by the Nazis, as long as such sales complied with relevant import/export regulations.

The question of why Boulder residents have not applied for the Middle Income Downpayment Assistance Pilot Program can probably be answered most accurately by empirical means. To that end, I suggest that the city commission a study to explore potential recipients’ familiarity with and attitudes toward the program. The results could then contribute to the development of alternative housing-related options.

In the meantime, I suggest we rethink our perspective on property ownership. Let’s take some time to digest the absurdity of the contrast between our current minutely detailed regulations governing the ownership and transfer of property, on the one hand, and the origins of this system in colonialism, on the other. As much as we would like to forget it, the original “deeds” validating who owns what were based on practices that current laws and rules would prohibit — at least domestically. As a society, we have allowed ourselves to ignore that the rationale for an entire legal domain rests on a contradiction.

While current owners cannot be expected to simply return their property to the original owners, we can find ways to use our legal system to compensate this country’s original inhabitants for what has been stolen. Let’s treat the apparent failure of the Middle Income Downpayment Assistance Pilot Program as an opportunity to consider whether we’re really comfortable with adding layers — however sweet — to a stale cake. Let’s work toward achieving some measure of justice for those Native Americans whose “ownership rights” have been conveniently exempted from the regulations governing all other aspects of private property.

While we’re at it, I suggest we also recognize how the pattern of simply taking what we want and then developing a legal structure to protect our ownership of the stolen goods is continuing to play out in our contemporary international relations. Is what’s happening in Venezuela, Iran and Gaza really that different from what happened in this country when the European immigrants arrived? One of the few psychological truisms holds that the beginnings of events exert an outsized influence on how they play out. While this may be most evident when it comes to the impact of early childhood on adult development, it is also often relevant to historical events. Just as parents who hit their children are more likely to raise children who hit their own offspring, our founding fathers have produced progeny who accept property theft as long as it is sanctioned by an official arm of the government. Similarly, children who are allowed to steal with impunity are more likely to grow up to be suspicious of the motives of others. After all, we tend to assume that others are working from the same intentions that shape our own behavior. A history of colonialism can prepare the descendants of colonizers to feel threatened by every fresh crop of newcomers.

As we contemplate ways to make housing affordable, I suggest we also consider whether we want to continue a practice based on an invidious contradiction: that the rules that we have so carefully fashioned to protect the sanctity of private property actually obscure their profane origins. At the same time, let’s think as well about how our fears of immigrants may reflect attributions based on our own ancestors’ histories of taking what wasn’t theirs.

Elyse Morgan, emorgan2975@gmail.com