The Archuleta Board of County Commissioners met in a work session yesterday morning, to discuss, informally, a few items of passing importance…
One item on the agenda involved a presentation by Davey Pitcher, president of Wolf Creek Ski Area. We’ll discuss that item a bit later in this editorial series.
Another topic dealt with more of a ‘bookkeeping’ matter: adjusting a lease agreement with Archuleta County Housing Authority (ACHA). Back in October 2018, ACHA leased about 2.5 acres of County-owned land at the southern end of Hot Springs Boulevard, for the purpose of constructing Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) project there — possibly 40 units, aimed at households and individuals making between 30% and 80% of the Area Median Income. The lease terms specify an annual payment of $1 per year for up to 99 years. In other words, the Board of County Commissioners gave away 2.5 acres of public property, in the name of affordable housing.
Making a gift of land to a worthy organization is one of the ways our local governments can help address the current housing crisis in Pagosa Springs. And we all know it’s a problem that needs to be addressed.
Following the 2018 lease approval, ACHA has been working diligently on the LIHTC project, and in October 2019, was approved for “tax credit financing” from the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority (CHFA). The total estimated project cost is around $12 million, and CHFA awarded $1.2 million in federal tax credits to the investors who are financing the construction. The Town Planning Commission approved final plans for a 34-unit complex in April of this year… and construction of the Rose Mountain Townhome Project is now underway.
Yesterday, Commissioner Ronnie Maez expressed some confusion about the number of units planned for the low-income housing project. As County Attorney Todd Weaver explained, the original ground lease mentioned “approximately 40 rental units”, but the project has since been scaled back to 34 units. So maybe the BOCC would like to change the number of units mentioned in the ground lease?
Commissioner Maez:
“Okay, so the main question is, what’s the main reason why you can’t fit 40 units on there? Is it because of the land? Or the building? Or what is it?…”
Colorado developer Bill Simpson, who is overseeing the Rose Mountain project, explained:
“We originally intended to do 40 units. But when we did the market study, and we did the site planning with the Town of Pagosa Springs, given all of their setback requirements, density requirements, design requirements… 34 units was the maximum number of units we could get on there. And that was quite honestly an issue with CHFA, when we submitted the tax credit application; they would have preferred more density to reduce the development cost per unit. But we couldn’t because of the restrictions the Town has on that particular site.”
Commissioner Steve Wadley:
“The Town actually… it’s hard to build in the Town. It’s tough to meet all of their needs. We’re finding that out with the jail. And everything else.”
Commissioner Maez:
“I just wanted some clarification, why it was going down from 40 units. I would prefer at least 38 units, if there was a compromise to be met there… but it doesn’t sound like there’s a compromise to be met… It we could get even 36 units, that would be excellent. We need that affordable housing. We need that workforce housing.”
Bill Simpson:
“The issue there really is, the only way you could have got more units is by doing a multi-story building, with a higher number of floors. But again, the zoning doesn’t allow [three story buildings]…”
Commissioner Maez conceded that 34 units is better than no units at all.
Apparently, CHFA was disappointed that the Archuleta County Housing Authority was proposing only 34 units. In fact, it sounds like pretty much everyone directly involved in the Rose Mountain project would have been happier with more units than what was allowed by the Town government.
Pagosa Springs — like many places in America — currently has a shortage of workforce housing, and we don’t know what to do, as concerned community members, about the problem. We don’t have a big sheet of instructions, for how to get out of this difficult situation. It seems we’ve come to believe, generally, that our problems ought to be fixed by someone else… by professionals who really know what they’re doing, perhaps? We expect our houses to be built by professional contractors, who are in turn following a rule book written by professional bureaucrats and adopted by elected government leaders.
At some point, within the past 50 years, the professional bureaucrats and elected leaders in the Pagosa Springs community made a determination that — if we adopted more and more rules — we could slowly change Pagosa from a funky, working class town into a first-class tourist resort. I can’t say when, exactly, that decision was made. When I moved here in 1993, that was a word I used to describe my new hometown. “Funky.”
But “funky” wasn’t good enough for professional bureaucrats earning above-average salaries, nor for our elected leaders with dreams of making Pagosa into a classy mountain resort town.
In order to bring about the necessary transformation, we needed comprehensive plans, and books full of regulations, to prevent people from building funky, working class homes. The arrival of “affordable” housing in a residential neighborhood — an apartment building, say, or God forbid, a mobile home park — will negatively affect your “property values”. We all understand that.
And property values have become the name of the game, over the past half century. A “house” has become, for the typical American family, much more than “shelter from the storm”. A house has become “real estate” — an investment that is most certainly going to increase in value, year after year, without any real effort on our own part. A house, even with a big mortgage, is destined to turn us a handsome profit at some point.
My house is my own personal opportunity to be a capitalist, and make a “profit” without doing any real work. I bought into that dream when I moved to Pagosa. Heaven knows we all want to be capitalists… by wringing every possible dollar out of the house we live in. And to help us on this path to prosperity, our local governments have developed policies and regulations to enhance “property values”. Yes, some regulations are aimed at public safety, but many are aimed at forcing neighborhoods to “upgrade” as each new home was constructed on each ever-more-expensive parcel.
One of the key goals of a modern local government is “to make the community more expensive to live in.” Our government leaders would never describe their policies with those particular words, but that’s essentially what’s taken place in once-worker-friendly towns like Pagosa Springs.
We can continue down that road, if we wish. The likely outcome can be observed already in many Colorado resort communities. Aspen, Vail, Breckenridge, Telluride are the most extreme examples. No one can afford to live in these towns, if they work at a normal job.
So we ask top dollar for our homes, when we get ready to sell them. We legally prohibit the types of shelter that might make a town look… “funky”.