The Pagosa Springs Town Council considered a couple of crucial items on Tuesday, October 2.
The first item was a ten-minute presentation about affordable housing, provided by the Pagosa Housing Partners (PHP), the new local non-profit charged by the Town with developing a community-wide ‘housing choice’ strategy. The Town donated $50,000 towards that effort. (The Archuleta Board of County Commissioners declined to match the Town’s funding in 2018, even though the two governments had made a previous agreement to cooperate.)
We’re going to dig into that presentation.
The second crucial item was the Town’s draft 2019 Budget. We will be digging into that presentation as well.
The two items — a presentation on housing availability, and a presentation on a municipal budget — might be viewed as separate and unrelated. But I would argue that point.
When I moved to Pagosa in 1993, housing was remarkably affordable compared with other places I’d visited in the American Southwest. At the same time, the Town Council — under the leadership of Mayor Ross Aragon — was focused on “growing the economy” so that life would be better and people would be happier. The type of economy Mayor Aragon and his Council wanted to grow was primarily based on tourism and the development of a related second-home market.
25 years later, we have a lively tourism economy, augmented by a retiree economy. But our workforce cannot find housing — or if they do find it, they can’t afford it.
But enough of history. Let’s get back to the October 2, 2018 Town Council meeting.
The housing presenters were PHP data analyst Joanne Whitney and PHP executive director Lynne Vickerstaff. The data came from a survey of Archuleta County residents conducted during August and September, and included responses from 495 participants who answered a 16-question survey. Key questions involved household income and household housing costs, and the survey also asked respondents if they were “considering moving away from Archuleta County,” and if so, why.
The survey was constructed around the assumption that many Pagosa Springs residents — especially working class residents — are struggling with housing costs and housing availability. That assumption was supported by the 2017 Archuleta County Housing Needs Study commissioned by the Town and County (cooperatively) and delivered last December. You can download that study here as a PDF.
But exactly how bad is the situation? And which residents are most deeply affected?
Is the housing crisis causing people to leave?
Those questions were not thoroughly answered in the 2017 study.
Ms. Whitney kicked off the presentation with some non-controversial facts, taken from the survey results.
HOUSEHOLD SIZE
The above graph illustrates the size of our typical households in Archuleta County. As shown, the majority of our households include one, two, three, or four persons, with two-person households being the most common type. (The analysis excludes retiree households, based on the assumption that retirees are facing less housing stress than the community’s working class.) This information might suggest that “one-bedroom” dwellings are the most appropriate size for the community’s working class households, when we finally get around to building enough workforce housing.
I’ve come across numerous articles, over the past couple of years, that suggest the need for smaller, one-bedroom dwellings, due to a couple of demographic trends: Baby Boomers who are choosing to downsize now that their children have left home, and the younger generations choosing to delay marriage and children into their 30s and 40s.
But we need to consider that much of the housing data available is based on national (or even international) trends. But all housing is local. The housing we have in Archuleta County is based on our particular local economy and our particular historic housing patterns.
This morning, I reviewed the January 2018 Durango Housing Plan, which you can download here as a PDF. Some folks might think that the housing problems in Durango — and the solutions Durango is proposing to solve those problems — would be relevant to a neighboring community like Pagosa Springs.
But maybe not.
Curiously, the 57-page Durango Housing Plan does not even mention household size. That seems to me an obvious shortcoming, for any viable housing strategy.
HOUSEHOLD MEMBERSHIP
The survey suggests that almost all of our two-person households consist of married couples or cohabiting couples. Very few of the existing households include roommates, while a fair number include one or more children. (I found the absence of roommates to be somewhat surprising, considering the seriousness of our problem.)
PHP is still in the early stages of analyzing the survey data, and we do not yet know if the household size and composition is correlated with a lack of housing availability or financial stress.
In other words, are the households that include children facing more stress than the households that include only adults?
I hope that analysis will be forthcoming.
HOUSEHOLDS FACING FINANCIAL STRESS
National housing organizations typically recommend that individuals and families should not pay more than 30 percent of their household income (before taxes) for housing costs, which includes mortgage or rent, utilities, taxes and insurance.
The PHP survey suggests that more than half of Archuleta County households are paying more than the recommended 30% on housing. In the housing assistance business, these households are referred to as “cost burdened.”
But the stress is not evenly distributed among the various income levels.
What the chart above illustrates is that none of the surveyed Archuleta County households making more than $5000 a month are cost burdened. But of the 81 households earning less than $2000 a month, 14 of them had no housing — they were living in tents, cars or staying with friends or relatives. That’s 17 percent of the survey respondents.
If this survey represents an accurate cross-section of Archuleta County — and that’s admittedly a big ‘If’ — then nearly one-in-five of our lowest paid employees have no permanent housing.
81 respondents equals 16 percent of the PHP survey total. If we were to take 16 percent of the 6,200 households in Archuleta County (the number estimated in the 2017 Housing Needs Study) we could calculate that 992 households earn less than $2000 a month, and that 169 households are living in cars, tents or crashing on friends’ couches.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.