Over a five-year period, local housing production has averaged 320 units for the Town and the County combined. An additional 4,500 housing units are expected to be built over the 2005 to 2020 time period...
— 2005 Economic Development Plan for Pagosa Springs, by Economic & Planning Services (EPS).
Well, that didn’t happen.
The housing boom in Archuleta County — the boom that we once thought was going to be one part of an inspired economic development plan — slowly staggered to a halt, beginning in 2006. The Town of Pagosa Springs collected $165,000 in building permit fees in 2006. The total collection of building permit fees in 2011 was less than $6,000.
I don’t blame EPS for missing the mark, however. Back in 2005, almost no one in America — and certainly, almost no one in Archuleta County — was predicting a crash of the construction market.
A recent meeting of Pagosa Springs government leaders — the April 28 joint Town Council-board of County Commissioners work session — concluded with at least one significant statement scribbled on the dry-erase board. Our local elected leaders decided (unofficially and provisionally) that ‘affordable housing’ was one of their highest priority issues, an issue at which the Council and the BOCC could — and should — direct their collaborative energies.
This agreement is, as noted, provisional. Since the meeting was advertised as a “work session,” neither government board formally approved any of its decisions with a vote of its board members. (Such a vote might conceivably happen during a future Council or BOCC meeting?)
Alternately, the agreement might wind up on a dusty shelf and lead to no real action. Past agreements about affordable housing have had just such a sorry fate.
Few political issues are as complicated as the “need” for affordable housing in rural Colorado communities, and I can certainly understand the failure of our local leaders to fully understand the problem, and its possible solutions. I’m not sure anyone, anywhere, fully understands the problem, and its possible solutions.
When EPS came back to Pagosa Springs on 2007, their charge was the creation of an affordable housing assessment. Our local governments had come to a cooperative agreement to fund a Housing Needs Assessment.
The resulting 2008 report written by EPS noted that, in 2005, Archuleta County had a grand total of about 6,100 jobs. (The report failed to mention that each average worker held two or three of those jobs. That kind of thing is hard to measure… and besides, it doesn’t look so good in these types of reports.)
You can download the 2008 report here.
The EPS report went on to note that about 260 of those 6,100 jobs were “Agricultural” — or, in other words, about 4 percent of all the jobs in Archuleta County in 2005. The report also noted that in 2005, 16 percent of the jobs were in “Construction” and 8 percent were in “Real Estate and Leasing.”
That was in 2005, at the peak of Pagosa’s real estate boom. As we all know, a lot of those “Construction” and “Real Estate” jobs have since disappeared — although the number of “Maintenance of Empty Buildings” jobs had increased significantly by 2011.
Unfortunately for those of us who might be interested in understanding the community’s current need for affordable housing, the 2008 Archuleta County Housing Needs Assessment was based mainly on government statistics from 2005, so much of the report has very little bearing on current housing conditions in Archuleta County.
And we don’t have a current assessment. We don’t understand much about where our community stands at the very moment, in terms of housing needs.
One thing we do know, however. A substantial amount of the housing built in Archuleta County between 1995 and 2005 — during our housing boom — was built by, or purchased by, retirees and second home owners.
That boom ended, as we said, ten years ago.
Although I don’t always trust government-generated statistics (and I don’t recommend anyone else to do so) my research over the years has suggested that Americans used to retire at around age 65. (Nowadays, we are more likely to be still working as Walmart greeters at age 65.) That would mean that the average retiree who built or bought a second home or a retirement home in Archuleta County in 1995 has reached his or her average life expectancy.
What happens to a lovely retirement home in a quaint rural Colorado community, when the owner dies, or takes up residency in a nursing home?
Not a pleasant topic for dinner conversation, but I think our elected and appointed official at Town Hall and at the Archuleta County Administration Building will have to address that question fairly soon… if they really want to understand our current housing needs here in Pagosa Springs…