Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Picture a condo off Pearl Street that your family uses six weekends a year. Nice place. Quiet. And starting in 2028, the City of Boulder wants $4,000 a year from it, every year, on top of the property taxes you already pay.
That is the deal with Ballot Issue 2J, and Boulder voters decide it on November 3.
Here is the short version. If a home in city limits is occupied 183 days or fewer in a year, it counts as vacant. Vacant means a flat $4,000 excise tax, regardless of what the place is assessed at. So a modest unit and a multimillion dollar second home get hit the same. The tax is tied to the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood consumer price index, and it is capped at $7,000 a year, which tells you the city expects this number to climb.
This is the part people miss. Colorado has never done this before. No jurisdiction in the state collects a residential vacancy tax like it. So there is zero in-state track record on how hard it is to administer, or what it actually does to housing. Boulder would be the test case, and you and your empty condo would be the experiment.
City Council referred the measure to the ballot and gave it final approval on August 6. The ballot language says 2J would bring in an estimated $6 million a year, earmarked for general city services. Police and fire. Parks and rec. Transportation and maintenance. All the stuff that sounds impossible to vote against when it is printed next to a tax.
But that $6 million number is where it gets interesting.
The Common Sense Institute ran the math and came back with
And look, we have seen how this plays out somewhere else.
Berkeley, California passed something similar. For the 2024 cycle they projected more than $4 million from 863 units. Sounds great on paper.
Then reality showed up. By January 26, 2026, the taxable count had dropped to 397 units. Collections? $393,000. And
That is the ghost haunting 2J. Owners change behavior. They rent the place out, they sell, they shuffle who lives there and when, and the taxable pool shrinks. The revenue you banked on does not show up, but the city services it was supposed to fund still need paying for.
If you own a second home here, or a pied-a-terre you use between trips, or a rental that just sits hard to fill in a tight market, this is the detail that decides your life. 183 days. That is the line. Half the year, basically.
Mayor Aaron Brockett said he wants an exemption for property owners who are actually trying to rent out their homes. Which is the right instinct, honestly, because there is a real difference between a landlord who cannot find a tenant and a buyer parking money in a unit they never visit. Whether that exemption makes it into the final rules, and how airtight it is, is the thing to watch.
Because here is the thing. A vacancy tax lives or dies on definitions and paperwork. Who proves they lived there 184 days? How? What counts? Every soft edge is a place where the revenue leaks or an honest owner gets stuck with a bill they did not expect.
Voters seem into it so far. A Probolsky Research survey of 400 likely voters, run June 2 through 9, found 64% backed the vacancy tax. And support climbed when people heard it would mostly apply to owners of a second or third home in Boulder. Which, I mean, of course it did. "Tax the other guy's extra house" polls well everywhere.
The citizen group Vacancy to Vitality originally pushed a bigger $7,000 version that swept in commercial properties too. They backed off that and now support 2J. On the other side, PLAN-Boulder County opposes it.
And this is not the only money question on the Boulder ballot. Voters face four city measures. One of them is Issue 2K, a $400 million facilities bond. The owner of a million dollar home would pay roughly $400 a year in added property tax for that one. So add it up if you own here.
For the record, a nearby town already said no to this idea. Crested Butte voters rejected a similar vacancy tax back in 2021, and they are looking at a related measure on non-primary residences and vacant land this November too. So the Front Range is not alone in wrestling with it.
If you own a second place in Boulder, or you are thinking about buying one, do not wait until 2028 to read the fine print. The definition of "vacant" and whether that rental exemption holds up are the two things that decide whether this costs you four grand a year or nothing at all.