Housing survey Boulder wants to hear from people who live, work or study in the city about their housing choices. The survey is open until Feb. 18. To participate, visit surveymonkey.com.

Boulder wants to know where you live and why as it launches a yearlong effort to create a comprehensive housing strategy that officials hope will bring more middle-income “workforce” housing to the city.

Officials in the city’s Housing and Human Services Department are in the information-gathering stage of the process right now, and, as part of that effort, they have launched an online survey about housing choices for anyone who lives, works or studies in Boulder.

“We’re trying to evaluate what people are seeking in their housing and compare that to what the market is providing,” Boulder Housing Division Manager Jeff Yegian said. “And the connections or disconnects between those will help us identify policy options that will bring those into better alignment.”

The survey will be open until Feb. 18, and Yegian said the city is hoping for thousands of participants.

“The more people who take it, the more conclusive the analysis can be,” Yegian said.

Recent analyses have found that Boulder provides plenty of housing for the well-to-do and does a decent job of providing low-income housing through a variety of programs, though demand far outstrips supply.

However, the city is losing middle-class residents, especially middle-class families with children.

Some of the ideas that have been floated to create more affordable housing in Boulder are lifting the occupancy limits to allow more unrelated people to live together, changing the rules for accessory dwellings to allow for more carriage houses and in-law apartments and promoting more cooperative housing.

City Councilman Andrew Shoemaker suggested at the recent council retreat that Boulder should identify “opportunity sites” that would be good for housing and encourage developers to bring forward projects that meet the city’s goals.

However, Boulder doesn’t have good data on why people make the housing choices they do and whether city policy could change those.

For example, someone splitting a commute with a spouse might not choose to live in Boulder no matter what the options.

And many proposals for increasing the supply of affordable housing focus on increasing density. That won’t attract middle-income families if they’re looking for a stand-alone house with a yard.

There are different versions of the survey for people who live in Boulder and people who work here but don’t live here. The survey asks about household composition, living arrangements, income, the cost of housing, what people are looking for in their housing, what they enjoy about Boulder and what they would change.

The survey also asks about connections to the University of Colorado.

Yegian said the city is working closely with CU because employees of the university account for 9 percent of all in-commuters to Boulder and the university has an interest in seeing more of its employees live here.

In addition to the online survey, the city is doing a needs assessment that uses census data to look at household size, income and which populations are “cost-burdened” by housing, a market analysis of housing types and costs in Boulder and a survey of best practices in housing policy from around the country.

That information will be presented to the City Council in a study session sometime this spring. Based on feedback from council members, city staff will develop concrete policy proposals.

City housing staff and planners hope to make policy recommendations to the council before the end of the year, with the goal of having the comprehensive housing strategy adopted in early 2015.

Contact Camera Staff Writer Erica Meltzer at 303-473-1355, meltzere@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/meltzere.