According to the weekly Pagosa Springs SUN, the public hearing on the Archuleta County Land Use Regulations — held on Tuesday, April 20 — was “improperly noticed” and has been rescheduled for May 18. Following the hearing on Tuesday, however, the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners voted on the proposed amendments anyway, and approved almost all of the changes recommended by the County Planning Commission.
Two significant amendments were rejected unanimously by the BOCC. The commissioners — Alvin Schaaf, Ronnie Maez and Warren Brown — rejected a proposed rule that would require vacation rental properties to display a sign on their property, listing number of allowed occupants and vehicles, and contact information for the owner or manager, so that neighbors could easily determine if the property was operating in compliance with County regulations.
The BOCC also rejected a rule that would have capped the number of vacation rentals within each subdivision at 5% of the parcels (not 5% of the homes, but 5% of the parcels) within that subdivision. According to my research, about half the parcels in a typical neighborhood in Archuleta County currently remain vacant. In such a case, the cap would have been more like a 10% cap on the available homes in a neighborhood.
But those approval votes were apparently invalid, because the public hearing was incorrectly publicized.
Yesterday, I proposed that the biggest problem currently facing the Pagosa Springs community is ordinary human selfishness. Entitled people, desperately embracing their entitlements — and usually, I suspect, not even noticing that they are acting selfishly.
The problem is certainly not unique to Pagosa. It’s the same problem everywhere.
I also mentioned that I’d received an email from a Daily Post reader on Tuesday, questioning the AirDNA numbers I had quoted to the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners during their April 20 public hearing.
My email friend also stated his belief that ever-increasing real estate prices are the basis for a successful community. So I’d like to address that very common belief. I will quote from that email:
I am a big believer that its a good thing when housing prices increase. This is the biggest investment most of us will ever make in our lives. Real estate is the greatest contributor to wealth and the most consistent, best investment one can ever make. We just gotta get more entry level points for our lower income individuals and families.
It’s also why I’m not a big fan of the tiny house development going in behind Walmart. Because the developer is basically renting land. You’re not owning anything. Except possibly a tiny home on wheels, which we don’t know yet how well those things will appreciate. I’m a big fan of tiny homes, but only on land that you own and can watch appreciate. But also do them well, on foundations that will build wealth for those just entering the housing market.
The belief stated here — that perpetually increasing real estate values have been an overall benefit, for our nation and for our home towns — seems to be eagerly embraced, and endorsed, by most Americans…
It’s a “fact” that’s been beaten into our heads for the past 40-plus years… the charming illusion that simply owning property results in ever-increasing wealth and happiness. It’s a “fact” that has been shown to be devastatingly incorrect, in the case of Pagosa Springs and numerous other Colorado mountain towns… unless we are looking at only the most entitled people in the community, and ignoring everyone else.
Once upon a time, not too long ago, a “house” was a place where you lived. Now, Americans have come to believe that it’s “the biggest investment most of us will ever make in our lives.”
A house is no longer a place of shelter, where you raise a family. It’s now primarily seen as “an investment.” This works very well for the privileged 10 percent of Americans who have more money than they could ever hope to spend, and it works well for the mortgage industry.
It’s been a disaster for the middle class, for workers in general, and for our younger generations now yoked to massive student debt.
Here in Pagosa Springs, the price of housing (as I’ve noted previously) has doubled since 2012… due in part to people viewing houses as investment tools. Meanwhile, wages have barely budged… and housing solutions range from people living in tents to government proposals for “tiny home villages” — basically, mobile homes shrunk to ridiculously small sizes.
Here’s a graph from the “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” website, showing “actual” median home prices in the United States (the blue line) and also the prices adjusted for inflation (the orange line):
Between 1950 and 1973, the American housing market was basically flat, adjusted for inflation. Homes were not “investments”… they were “homes”. If you bought a home in 1950 for $20,000, you might have sold it for $30,000 in 1973. Taking inflation into account, you would have lost money on the sale.
But this was also the most equitable period of economic growth in American history, when ordinary people moved steadily into the middle class and an effort was underway to address poverty and inequality. We didn’t need inflationary real estate prices, then, to have a thriving economy. Quite the opposite. With homes prices stagnant, Americans at all economic levels were doing better and better.
Then we began to hear that steadily-inflating home prices were a wonderful thing.
The chart shown above ends with July 2019. The current median home price in the US has gone totally off this chart. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the median home price at the end of 2020 was $346,800. Here in Pagosa, it’s more like $400,000.
It’s a well-accepted lie that ever-increasing housing prices are good for the economy. The belief serves, basically, wealthy investors.
Meanwhile, American workers are falling into a financial hole, created by stagnant wages and skyrocketing home prices.
The widely-shared faith in “ever-appreciating home prices” took about 40 years to ruin the country, but we are now entering a nightmare. Some people want to blame “the Republicans” and just as many want to blame “the Democrats” but the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of all of us, for putting greed ahead of functional communities.
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.