Home, home on the range,
Where the deer and the antelope play.
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word…
Tuesday, February 2, was a little bit busy for me. I attended two Archuleta Board of County Commissioner meetings — a work session and a regular meeting — plus a regular meeting of the Pagosa Springs Town Council.
Both bodies are well aware of our current housing crisis. Two years ago, the BOCC provided a long-term lease of County-owned land on Hot Springs Boulevard to the Archuleta County Housing Authority (which, despite its name, is not a department of the Archuleta County government). The ACHA is now constructing a LIHTC (Low Income Housing Tax Credit) housing complex that will provide 34 units of housing to individuals or families earning less than 60% of HUD’s ‘Median Family Income’.
That was two years ago. I haven’t heard much about housing from the BOCC since then, but I also haven’t been paying especially close attention.
The Town government, meanwhile, has talked for years — maybe 16 years? — about the housing crisis without making much headway in facilitating any meaningful affordable housing. The Council has meanwhile been endorsing and permitting the conversion of private houses into mini-hotels called ‘vacation rentals’. About 14 percent of the housing units within the Town are now “Short Term Rentals”: STRs. The BOCC has been doing the same.
But at Tuesday’s Town Council Zoom meeting, the better part of the evening was taken up discussing to possible ways to address our housing problems, through two different projects.
The first discussion focused on “Tiny Homes On Wheels” — structures that generally look something like a normal American house, except built on a trailer and able to be transported here and there. But most end up parked for an extended period in a friendly community, or hidden in the woods.
These houses often use atypical design and construction techniques. They’re are not subject to the International Residential Code because they are technically “vehicles”. Unfortunately, in most Colorado communities, people are forbidden from living year-round in a vehicle, including RVs and tiny homes on wheels.
But a few communities and counties — Durango, for example, and El Paso County — have revised their land use codes to make tiny homes on wheels a legal option.
A very valuable option?
A few days earlier, I had registered to listen to a webinar hosted by Population Health Learning Collaborative, a group that’s striving to create conversations around some of the biggest issues facing Americans — particularly, Americans who are struggling to make ends meet.
Last week’s webinar dealt with innovative ‘solutions’ for homelessness, a condition that’s often hidden from view unless you’re one of the people without a home, or one of the people trying to help those living without permanent safe shelter. Here in Archuleta County, homeless folks are often living and sleeping in their vehicles, or in tents out in the forest, or crashing temporarily — and serially — on friends’ couches, or finding other uncomfortable solutions. In our small town, we don’t often see homeless people sleeping on the streets, though we might see folks begging, cardboard sign in hand, at street intersections.
One of the charts shared by moderator Bill Barberg at the beginning of the panel discussion summarized the wide range of situations that can create homelessness.
“This is a set of characters… where Sally might be a 75-year-old woman who’s been living in her little apartment for, you know, the last fifteen years, since her husband passed away. And she’s doing just fine. Except her apartment was sold to a corporate landlord who’s greatly increasing the rent, and now she’s at risk of homelessness — which she’d never imagined would be her scenario…
“Or Sam, who was a waiter, doing just fine — kind of living paycheck to paycheck, like many people — has a car — but then he lost his job, and has been juggling [his finances] and now he’s months behind on his rent and fearing that he’ll be evicted. And his landlord is frustrated because he’s behind on rent…
“That’s a very different situation from, perhaps, someone who has been in long-term homelessness, but doesn’t have major mental health or behavioral health issues… versus someone who has been homeless for most of the last 10 or 15 years…”
Homelessness is at the extreme end of America’s housing crisis; the people affected come in various flavors. Some have no income at all, some are among the working poor, some are retirees or handicapped or chronically ill. Some have severe addiction or mental health issues; some have only minor personality issues or none at all. The reasons and the needs are as different as the people themselves.
One of the presenters on that recent webinar, Colin DeForrest, discussed his organization’s attempts to connect with faith-based organizations — organizations that may have sizable parking lots that remain vacant six days a week — to allow Innovative Impact Strategies Consulting to set up “Safe Parking” arrangements for vulnerable homeless people living in their cars. Washington State recently passed a new law to make these types of emergency, faith-based solutions less fraught with bureaucratic red tape.
We can easily understand how physically uncomfortable an individual or family might feel, living in a car — a vehicle that serves as their living room, kitchen and bedroom. What we might not think about is how unsafe and unprotected that person or family might feel… subject to being told to “move on” by local police…and what a target they might be for local criminals…
We’re not talking here about “Tiny Homes On Wheels”. We’re talking about passenger cars and vans. These are not “homes” in any sense of the word.
The Town government is probably not going to make it legal to live in a car anytime soon, even though people are already doing it here in Archuleta County and elsewhere. But if the Council can find the political will, they could revise the Land Use and Development Code and create specific legal standards for Tiny Homes On Wheels.
The second housing item on Council’s Tuesday agenda dealt with a zombie residential lot at the corner of South 5th and Apache, around the corner from Town Hall. The lot was abandoned by the developer after the foundation was poured.
The Town government has purchased the lot, and is considering ways to turn an abandoned foundation into part of the local housing solution.
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.