Boulder Junction symbolic of divide over building boom

If you go

What: Boulder City Council joint study session with Planning Board to discuss development issues and the upcoming update to the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan

When: 6 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Boulder Municipal Building, 1777 Broadway

Info: To read the memo introducing the study session, go to bit.ly/1svp8hu.

The hotel and apartment buildings, the new streets and bustling construction at 30th Street and Pearl Parkway are the result of a plan that has been on the books since 2007, and yet they seemed to take the public completely by surprise.

Solana Apartments resident Carrie Kroutil walks her dog Kona, who checks out a wood chip along the Pearl Parkway side of the complex. The Solana Apartments, 319 market-rate apartments in four buildings and more than 8,000 square feet of retail, are part of the Boulder Junction development. (David R. Jennings / Daily Camera)

Boulder Junction, with its three- and four-story facades where parking lots and low-slung warehouses once sat, became, for better or for worse, the face of a building boom that has caused excitement and angst in Boulder.

Fans of a more urban Boulder bike and transit advocates, supporters of affordable housing, city officials and planners, even many residents laud the projects as the fulfillment of a vision for combining workforce housing and dynamic public spaces with local and regional transit connections.

Advocates of slower growth see a plan that was misguided from the beginning because the curving stretch of railroad track was incompatible with a train station, because commuter rail to Denver looks ever more unlikely, because it would draw more people to live in a community that is already at its carrying capacity, because it would not address the jobs-population imbalance that causes some 60,000 people to come into Boulder to work every day and now is marring the city's eastern gateway with unappealing contemporary architecture.

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Boulder Junction symbolic of divide over building boom