Changemaker: Betsey Martens

Betsey Martens has spent more than four decades working in affordable housing and community development. She is committed to improving the lives of her neighbors in Boulder County and families across the country. Her career has been driven by her passion for building thriving communities and enhancing social equity while creating a place in which her children would want to raise their own families.

“I caught the housing bug early in my career when I was the Director of Community Action for Boulder County,” Betsey said. In this role, she worked on asset creation and capacity building for communities. She described how housing was a challenge in Boulder County even when she began her work in the mid-1980s. Through her work speaking with community members, Betsey was touched by stories of housing instability and its effect on families, particularly young children. When she was 26, the Boulder mayor placed her on the board of the local housing authority and Betsey was quickly immersed in the industry.

Betsey loved working through the complexities of affordable housing including financing strategies and overcoming political or community resistance. “I think people stay in housing because it’s so incredibly challenging,” she said. “I don’t know of another industry that marries the head and the heart like affordable housing.”

While serving on the board of the housing authority, Betsey helped to establish Thistle Community Housing, a nonprofit organization that develops, manages, and preserves affordable housing in Boulder County. Since the organization’s establishment, Thistle has grown to become a leader in community land trust models and resident-owned communities (ROCs) for mobile home parks.

Betsey also served as the Executive Director of the Lafayette-Louisville Downtown Redevelopment, leading revitalization efforts through development lending for the neighborhood in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

For over two decades, Betsey served as the Co-Executive Director and later CEO of Boulder Housing Partners, the housing authority for the City of Boulder where she began her career. Under her leadership, Boulder Housing Partners developed the organization’s first supportive housing project, helping neighbors exiting homelessness find stability.

“I always had a comprehensive vision for the housing authority,” Betsey recalled. “I thought that the fundamental question was: How can we be most relevant in our community to address the most acute needs?” Under this ethos, Boulder Housing Partners focused on community outcomes over unit count. “As Executive Director,” Betsey said, “I wanted my Board to assess me not just on the number of units we produced, but the number of children living in our developments who are going to preschool, are kindergarten-ready, and are graduating from high school. I was always about the outcomes that mattered.”

She spearheaded efforts to rebrand the organization while emphasizing its collaboration—among the first housing authorities in the country to do so. She is proud that other housing authorities have followed suit, dropping names that evoke bureaucratic agencies for ones that center community.

Betsey is most proud of her efforts in advocating for and working toward the transformation of public housing under the creation of HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD). “I’ve always had a passion for public housing,” Betsey continued, “but it’s been so underfunded and unattended to. As director of Boulder Housing Partners, I was able to enroll us into RAD early on. We were able to reposition, refinance, and renovate all of our public housing in Boulder to create livable, service-enriched housing, which was extraordinary.”