'SCRAMBLING FOR SOLUTIONS'
Affordable Housing Woes Plague Colorado Resort Region
By David Frey, 10-09-06
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In Summit County, where more than two-thirds of the houses are second homes, the average home price is nearly 10 times the average income. In Steamboat Springs, housing prices have risen so high that families are disappearing from town. In Grand County, home to Winter Park, the construction industry is booming, but construction workers have trouble finding housing.
Those are some of the problems communities across the state face as rising housing prices outpace incomes and threaten to change the face of towns throughout the resort region, housing advocates say.
"We're all scrambling for solutions," said Susan Shirley, director of the Mountain Regional Housing Corp., a nonprofit seeking affordable housing solutions in the Roaring Fork Valley. It was one of the hosts of an affordable housing workshop in Glenwood Springs aimed at providing solutions to an issue that is plaguing both high-end towns like Aspen, even with its extensive affordable housing program, and Rifle, long considered a worker's haven, where booming demand is driving up prices and driving down inventory.
"It's the No. 1 issue from Aspen to Parachute," Shirley said. "It's the key issue of employers, of school districts, for the health of communities. It's a balancing of the type of people in the community."
It's not just an issue of the poor, said Geneva Powell, director of the Garfield County Housing Authority.
"People making $40,000 to $70,000, which we would call middle-income America, are having trouble finding housing," she said.
Communities are having trouble figuring out what to do about it. Some are reluctant to get into the housing business. Some struggle with getting support from taxpayers, and from neighbors who don't want to live next door to affordable housing complexes. Some look for free-market solutions.
"Whenever you mention affordable housing, employee housing, you have those who don't want it," said Jim Sheehan of the Grand County Housing Authority.
Presenters looked to a range of alternatives, from building housing projects to offering loans to partnerships between governments and private developers.
In Steamboat Springs, the Yampa Valley Housing Authority built Fox Creek Village, a 30-unit deed-restricted condominium project. At $199,000, the priciest units are two-thirds of market prices, said authority director Elizabeth Black. The project finished Aug. 31, with 294 people lined up in the lottery.
"I got up at the open house and said, 'Yeah, we built housing,' but what did we do? We're keeping the people here. We're keeping our constituents here."
In Garfield County, home to much of the workforce for both Pitkin and Eagle counties, affordable housing is dwindling, according to a 2005 housing assessment. It found even a shortage of 628 units just for those who work within Garfield County, and some 2,895 new units needed by 2025.
While wages rose 18 percent between 1999 and 2005, home prices rose 48 percent and condo prices rose 22 percent.
"Our community is really losing its soul," said Carbondale Trustee Scott Chaplin. "People who were born and raised there can't afford to live there."
Rifle Mayor Keith Lambert said his town is seeing teachers and police offers unable to afford homes in town -- complaints that upvalley communities have voiced for years as they saw their workforce moving to places like Rifle. The city's police chief is seeking to extend boundaries that would let officers commute from homes in Grand Junction, he said.
"We were the affordable housing region, but we're not anymore," Lambert said.
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Comments
On the one hand, the primacy of real estate development for the highest dollar, means not having to say you're sorry about opposing affordable housing in your high-end neighborhood. After all, affordable housing can be tacky, what with eight or 10 worker bees jammed into a three-bedroom house or apartment. After all, if you've paid half a mil for a "cabin" in a ski town, you don't want to run the risk of losing some of the property's value, or appreciation, by having an affordable housing complex next door or across the street.
Yet you also want the ski area, restaurants, shops, schools, fire department, cop shop, hospital, town hall, etc. fully staffed and functioning to meet your everyday needs -- you just don't want those people as neighbors.
For a long while, the fantasy of ski town life continued -- nevermind that the middle class (or immigrant labor) that actually made the town work, were pushed into remote corners of "affordable" housing and trailer parks, or had ever-increasing commutes from neighboring towns, then neighboring counties. The fact that worker bees and their families were increasingly stressed and the fact that workers sometimes died on icy highways trying to get to work ("Would you like cream in your coffee?") was no nevermind to those who live the fantasy.
We're now seeing signs (it has been decades in coming) that the logical consequences of real estate primacy and resort town fantasies are now coming due. It is getting harder, not easier, to maintain the illusion that we can keep this up indefinately.
At some point, the gap will become too wide, too deep to ignore. Sure, you can import Third World workers and put them up in a Quonset hut dorm outside of town -- which is what a Crested Butte hotel did almost a decade ago, right after the new owners had fired all the locals. The local and regional political consequences of doing something like that don't seem very smart.
(Brodie Farquhar is a former newspaper editor for newspapers in Gunnison and Crested Butte -- the closest he ever got to ski towns.)
Our community has been over run by real estate workers, Mr. Jim Cook especially who, after awhole year or two in our town, tell us they work soley for the best interests of our town. Because the people making millions really know what's best for the hotel workers, the teachers, the Ski Corps, the waiters and the snow plowers. Several historic buildings, or unsightly trailer parks that housed the workers, have been plowed down to make room for "affordable" apartments and shopping complexes. (Ah Harbor Hotel, I at least will always remember you.) These new buildings are supposed to add to the "asthetic" value of the town.
Locals really are disappearing to make way for the second home owners. My family and I have known several long time residents, passionate citizens of the Yampa Valley, who had to leave because they could not afford to live there or stand how touristy it became. I know that as much as I love the Yampa Valley, it will be impossible for me to return to live in Steamboat for the same reasons.
This is another big problem that I would add to what Brodie said above. This kind of construction boom is stealing everything that used to be special about Steamboat. The community I grew up in has started to vanish. The wide open spaces that make the west such an appealing destination are disappearing. Everytown is filled with the same chains and the same style of construction. What's the difference between Aspen and Steamboat? Pretty soon all the things that rich second home owners and the tourist who fuel our economy came to see in Steamboat, picturesque mountians without houses on them, a unique down town with historic buildings, local cowboy culture, perhaps go skiing for less than $75 a day...all that won't be there. Why would any tourist bother to come visit Anytown USA? An expensive Anytown at that.
1 Locals elect people who will make decisions for the good of the whole community, not just the developers. 2. Restrict further devlopment until the housing and labor situation is resolved, make it stick. 3. Middle class must begin living within it's means and unleverage itself or sooner or later we all go over the cliff.
"Things that can't go on forever won't."
Monday, October,16th. Here is the link. http://www.steamboatsprings.net/index.php?id=152
If you need more information: call City Council at 970- 879-2060