On Friday, in Part One, I mentioned the October 2 meeting of the Pagosa Springs Town Council. The Council, chaired by Mayor Don Volger, recently added a seventh member — a young Pagosa Springs native named Maddie Bergon — to replace former member Clint Alley, who had resigned for personal reasons. During her appointment interview before the Council on September 20, Ms. Bergon was asked how she would be most effective serving on Town Council.
Ms. Bergon cited “enthusiasm” as her primary quality.
“I talk to a wide array of people — I’m a bartender at a bar here in town — so not only do I talk to a lot of locals who come in to hydrate…”
The word “hydrate” generated some polite laughter.
“… I also talk to a lot of visitors. So I feel like I bring a pretty broad understanding of what people are looking for in our community. What their experiences are, whether it’s short-term or long-term.”
I’ve been reporting on Town Council for about 14 years now, and I believe this is the first time the Council has seated a bartender. A youthful bartender, to boot.
In fact, at the moment, the Council composition includes quite a few younger community residents… younger, meaning, “under 50 years old,” which is the median age in Archuleta County. I count five of the seven Council members as fitting into the “youthful” category.
I presume, then, that our Town Council currently has good representation from the class of residents most seriously impacted by our worsening housing crisis. Whether these young leaders can see their way to start solving that crisis, locally — well, we will have to wait and see.
At any rate, Ms. Bergon was in her seat as the seventh Council member on October 2, when Pagosa Housing Partners — Director Lynne Vickerstaff and Analyst Joanne Whitney — presented some preliminary findings from their 2018 Housing Needs Survey conducted during August and September.
One of the slides shared by PHP showed the ages of the survey respondents — except that Ms. Whitney had excluded the respondents who had classified themselves as “retired.” (PHP has assumed that, for the most part, anyone who can afford to retire to Archuleta County probably does not have housing issues, so they are analyzing ‘retirees’ as a separate demographic sector.)
Here’s the slide showing the ages of the respondents who classified themselves as employed:
As we see, nearly half of the employed respondents — 48 percent — were between the ages of 45 and 64. (That’s a 19 year spread.)
Only 21 percent of the employees were between 18 and 34. (That’s a 16 year spread.)
And here’s a PHP chart that indicates the industries in which the employed respondents are working, as indicated by the blue bars:
(We’ll discuss the shorter orange bars later.)
The largest group of respondents in the PHP survey were working in education and healthcare services — that is, generally speaking, working for the Archuleta School District or Pagosa Springs Medical Center. The second largest group was working in “Leisure, Hospitality, Retail and Arts,” followed by “Business Services” and “Public Administration/Government.”
These survey categories were chosen to align with US Bureau of Labor Statistics employment categories, to allow comparisons with other communities, and other surveys.
As mentioned in Part One, 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 results suggest, however, that more than half of Archuleta County households are paying more than the recommended 30% on housing. In the housing assistance business, such households are referred to as “cost burdened.”
But the stress is not evenly distributed among the various income levels, as we discussed in Part One.
The PHP survey attempted to define respondents’ income according to commonly used housing income definitions, based on “Area Median Income” — the community’s “AMI”. Some housing programs qualify applicants according to 30% AMI, 60% AMI, 80% AMI or 100% AMI.
PHP used those same approximate values to sort responses. What the chart above illustrates is that none of the surveyed Archuleta County households with incomes above $5000 a month — that is, above the Area Median Income — are ‘cost burdened.’
But of the 81 responding households earning less than $2000 a month, 14 households had no housing at all — they were living in tents, cars or staying with friends or relatives. That’s about 17 percent of the survey respondents.
According the survey analysis, about 83 percent of the households that earn less than $2000 a month (30% AMI), and 81 percent of the households earning between $2000 and $3200 per month (60% AMI), are cost burdened. But we also have many middle class families living in difficult housing situations, as shown in the chart below:
If the survey data truly reflects the larger community, we can estimate that our overall community has about 2,400 low-income ‘cost burdened’ households, and about 1,000 middle-class families who are likewise paying too much for their housing.
Survey respondents were asked if they were satisfied with their housing situation, and those who were dissatisfied were asked to give the reasons for their dissatisfaction. Multiple responses were allowed. The cost of housing was by far the most common reason given for respondents’ dissatisfaction:
Presumably, our community leaders truly want to address this crisis, in a meaningful way. To date, however, our Town Council and Board of County Commissioners have dedicated relatively little funding towards a solution — compared to, for example, the amount of funding dedicated to tourism and recreation over the past decade. Admittedly, part of the reason our leaders have hesitated to tackle the housing issue is related to a lack of meaningful data, and a lack of meaningful proposals that could effectively address the problem.
For example:
If we are going to create housing solutions for the lowest income groups in our community — or even for middle-income groups — what types of housing would be most appropriate?
Condos? Tiny Homes? Apartment complexes?
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.