70% of Boulder's noise complaints come from one corner of the city

A resident data project has mapped every noise complaint in Boulder's police calls-for-service data from January 2023 through mid-August 2026 — 9,011 records in all.

6,297 of them, 70%, came from within a 15-minute walk of the University of Colorado. About 28,000 permanent residents live inside that area, 26% of Boulder's population, including nearly 4,000 children. Measured per resident, they absorb noise complaints at 4.1 times the rate borne by permanent residents anywhere else in the city.

The report is free and every dataset and script behind it is published, so any reader can check the arithmetic or run it differently.

One methods note: a single block in north Boulder generated 950 calls from one ongoing dispute unrelated to this subject, and it is excluded from every figure. That block sits outside the university area, so including it would put the headline at 63% rather than 70%. Both numbers appear in the report.

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