At today’s joint Town Council-Board of County Commissioners meeting, the 54-page “Roadmap to Affordable Housing, 2019-2025” report will be summarized — briefly, I expect — by the staff of Pagosa Housing Partners. A five-minute presentation, perhaps? Maybe 15 minutes, tops?
A terribly complex problem… the solution to which will involve “the whole village.”
We understand that the Town Council is very interested in the housing crisis, and possible solutions, so long as those solutions don’t drain an excessive amount of money out of the Town budget. We also understand that the Archuleta County BOCC is focused on one particular form of housing — inmate housing, in the shape of a new 54-bed County jail — and is unlikely to spend even one penny on the housing crisis in 2019.
A curious little coincidence… A 54-page housing proposal… A proposed 54-bed jail? God clearly has a sense of humor.
The “Roadmap” itself begins with a very short summary of the affordable housing efforts here in Archuleta County over the past couple of decades. Generally speaking, the development of subsidized housing solutions in Pagosa took place here during the 1970s and 1980s. I’m not clear why nothing much happened in that regard after 1990, although we know that our local governments had shifted their focus to tourism promotion and ‘economic development’ after 1990.
Here’s an excerpt from the PHP “Roadmap”:
During the 1970s and 1980s, the small rural community of Pagosa Springs was discovered. Developers grew the community using the “recreational communities” model. Over the next four decades, the population of Archuleta County doubled, and then doubled again, from about 2,500 (1972) to about 12,500 residents (2007). Much of the housing development was aimed at second-home owners and retirees, and the local economy grew, based around tourism and a flourishing construction/real estate industry.
During my tenure with the Water Supply Community Work Group, back in 2010, I learned that only about half of the platted residential lots in Archuleta County — the subdivision lots created during the 1970s and 1980s — had homes built on them. That suggests that we could grow our population to perhaps 20,000 residents without adding a single new subdivision lot to our inventory. (I don’t expect that growth to happen in my lifetime, for a number of reasons. But I’m willing to be surprised.)
Up until the early 1990s, vacant land was dirt cheap, and even existing homes were generally very affordable. Those conditions attracted a mix of retirees looking to build their dream home in paradise, and working class families willing to accept the isolation and the low wages available in Pagosa Springs.
From the PHP history:
Local governments first became concerned about housing affordability issues in the late 1990s, and subsequently the County Community Plan (2000), Town Comprehensive Plan (2006), and the County Strategic Plan (2007) identified ‘workforce housing’ as a critical issue, leading up to a jointly-funded 2008 Archuleta County Housing Needs Assessment. But the Great Recession — and the resulting drop in local real estate values — resulted in a slowdown of focus and funding for the housing issue.
Between 2008 and 2014, numerous single-family homes in the county went into foreclosure and some were purchased by investors at bottom-of-the-market prices. During that same period, vacation rental websites like AirBnB.com and HomeAway.com attracted many property owners, and a thriving vacation rental market developed, with more than 600 properties listed in Archuleta County on
the VRBO.com website in 2017. During that same period, very little new housing was constructed in the community to meet the growing demand for rental housing and the needs of local residents seeking to buy.
As we can see from this short history, the affordable housing crisis has been a long time coming, but nothing much was actually done about it — in terms of government action — until very recently. Yes, some “plans” and “reports” were created, but the community didn’t make workforce housing a priority, the way some other Colorado mountain towns did.
From the “Roadmap” report:
The Town of Pagosa Springs and the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners agreed in 2016 to jointly fund an update to the 2008 housing study, and also convened a group of local volunteers as the ‘Archuleta County Housing Workgroup.’ The work group studied various facets of the housing crisis and delivered a set of reports to the BOCC and Town Council in September 2016. In 2017, staff, elected officials and volunteers attended the Community Builders Housing Institute, and identified a need to hire housing specific expertise to create a housing plan and implement specific housing projects. Economic and Planning Systems also issued an updated housing needs report.
That’s a very simplified history of how we got here — to this moment of crisis, in 2019.
Practically speaking, almost nothing has occurred since the late 1980s, neither in the private sector nor in the government sector, to specifically address the community’s need for workforce housing — other than the creation of a few “plans” and “reports.”
But the PHP report promises that we have the ability to finally address the crisis, if we put our minds and our wallets to the task:
Overall, the strategies PHP recommends are:
- Utilize Town and County owned land for potential housing development.
- Offer incentives and develop policies to expand the diversity of housing choices available for local residents and workforce.
- Create opportunities and prepare renters and homebuyers for success.
- Retain and transition non-conforming homes to legal, safe status.
- Engage employers, nonprofits and community in workforce housing solutions.
- Require affordable and workforce housing to be produced as part of new residential developments as the community grows.
These are all techniques for putting the bell around the cat’s neck. But which mouse, exactly, has the courage to bell the cat?
Maybe… all of the mice, working together as a team? Maybe the mice can agree that we have a problem, and by God we can solve it…
But what I actually wanted to talk about, first, was hip-replacement surgery.