I’ve had a couple of interesting conversations with intelligent friends, in the past few days, wherein I was reminded — as if I had forgotten? — that the people we depend on to stock our retail store shelves… and bring us our steak dinners at local restaurants… and clean the vacation rentals after the tourist families leave… and hand out speeding tickets along Highway 160… and reaming out the tree roots from our clogged sewer lines…
… these people, upon whom we depend, seem to be showing less and less interest in working. Especially during a COVID pandemic. Especially, when these people are showing less interest in working for a wage of $12 or $13 per hour… when they can, for the moment, collect more than from federally-enhanced unemployment insurance.
My two friends are not happy about this situation.
Are these workers, who are supposed to enjoy working for minimum wage while paying maximum rents… are these workers feeling ‘entitled’?
What has happened to the Protestant Work Ethic, upon which the United State of America was founded?
That’s the essential question posed to me, by my two friends. Not really a question… more like, a complaint.
But, funny thing. These same two friends are retired. They own their own homes, and have no need to work. So they don’t work. Both are in their late 60s or early 70s. Both are highly intelligent, and both are in good physical shape. Both could be doing productive work in the community.
Both feel entitled to live off their pensions and property investments, and do no ‘work’.
I find this phenomenon fascinating — that my friends, who don’t want to work and have themselves lost any connection with the Protestant Work Ethic — that these friends would complain about people who don’t want to work.
Is the Baby Boomer generation setting the example of ‘entitlement’?
On Monday afternoon, April 26, the Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board heard a presentation by Mary Jo Coulehan, executive director of the Pagosa Springs Chamber of Commerce.
Ms. Coulehan is, by my estimation, one of the hardest working people in Pagosa Springs. In fact, I wonder sometimes if she works too hard.
The volunteer members of the Tourism Board also strike me as hard-working Pagosans.
Monday’s hour-long meeting, of a Tourism Board, focused entirely on Pagosa’s housing crisis. From Ms. Coulehan’s housing presentation:
“Housing Solutions of the Southwest was just awarded a grant to do a housing study — and I have a meeting with their person tomorrow, who wants to talk about any number of things.
“We know that these are the upcoming [“affordable housing”] projects. Obviously, Rose Mountain… 34 units of low-income housing… we understand the Springs Resort is renovating the Abracadabra Building for housing as well. There is a [Habitat for Humanity] house that will be coming onboard…
“We know that Habitat is working with the County government to secure 11 parcels in Chris Mountain Village II for long-term housing as well…”
To put those numbers into context. 34 + 8 + 1 + 11 = 54. Ms. Coulehan is here mentioned 54 units of housing that might someday be suitable for working individuals and families. Someday.
Meanwhile, the number of local homes that have been converted into vacation rentals over the past 10 years appears to be about 1,000 — according to AirDNA.
On top of that dynamic, the full-time population of Pagosa Springs has increased by about 2,000 people. To keep pace with that growth, combined with the vacation rental growth, we probably should have seen about 2,000 new dwelling units built since 2011.
But only about 1,047 new dwelling units were built in our community between 2011 and 2020… and zero multi-family apartments.
It might appear that, since the Great Recession, Archuleta County overall might be short 900 dwelling units or so — thanks to vacation rental conversions and a construction industry that can barely keep up with demand for higher-end homes. We have 54 affordable units in the works? Someday?
Yesterday morning, Ms. Coulehan made a proposal to the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners — three men who have thus far taken no concrete steps to slow the conversion of residential homes into vacation rentals. Ms. Coulehan’s proposal begins like this:
Currently, Archuleta County is experiencing a housing crisis as so many rural communities in Colorado are. Mid-price housing is unattainable for Pagosa residents due to the lack of inventory and rising building costs. According to the February Archuleta County Real Estate Market statistics, the median home price has increased 13% from $386,500 in 2020 to $437,500 in 2021 and the inventory has shrunk from 333 homes in 2020 to 72 in 2021 (a decrease of 78%). There are also only 5 condos or town homes on the market compared with 53 last year…
When I visited the Jim Smith Realty website yesterday morning and searched for properties with one or more bedrooms, I found the following search results, priced from “Lowest First”:
As you see, (highlighted in pink) Jim Smith Realty was not showing “72” homes as mentioned by Ms. Coulehan, but rather, only 64 homes. (Perhaps eight homes had sold since February?) Of those 64 homes, only nine of them are offered at prices under $400,000. We might note what appears to be a 900 square foot mobile home on Catchpole Drive, for $395,000.
The proposal Ms. Coulehan presented to the BOCC yesterday focused on a particular Archuleta County neighborhood: Chris Mountain Village II. (You can download the proposal here.)
We wrote about this unfortunate subdivision a few years back, when the BOCC was looking at the County’s particular problem: a large number of properties that have refused _ for many years — to pay their property taxes. As a result, about 50 of these unbuilt (and unbuildable?) parcels have County government liens against them.
In late 2017, a roomful of people gathered at the Archuleta County Administration Building on Lewis Street to discuss one of the more dysfunctional neighborhoods in the county. Dysfunctional, in terms of inviting the construction of actual homes along its scenic, rural gravel roads.
The 190-parcel subdivision shown on the map is often referred to as ‘Chris Mountain II’. It’s also known as ‘Chris Mountain Village 2”. But it is definitely not a village, at this point in time. More like a wasteland, perhaps.
It’s located just west of the Trails subdivision, which is located just west of the Vista mobile home park… which is, in turn, just west of Pagosa’s uptown commercial district. You might say, Chris Mountain II could be our version of the Wild West, if it weren’t for the existence of the Aspen Springs subdivision, several miles farther west. (Aspen Springs is our true ‘Wild Wild West.’)
The same folks who created the subdivisions in the Pagosa Lakes area — Eaton International — platted the lots and laid out the dirt roads in Chris Mountain Village 2, but they did a half-ass job (to use one of my father’s favorite expressions) of putting in the utilities. In fact, it appears that no utilities at all were originally installed.
Subdivision developers normally make sure that roads and utilities are installed before they sell the individual parcels to unsuspecting buyers, but the developer of Chris Mountain Village 2 neglected to provide water, sewer or electricity to the lots prior to putting them on the real estate market.
How the County government allowed this to happen, I cannot say. Here’s a map courtesy of the County Assessor’s website:
As far as I can tell, each of the 190 parcels now belong to either a private owner… or to this or that investment company… or to the County government.
From a cursory search on the County Assessor’s map, it appears that the quarter-acre lots were typically sold for about $14,000 each, back in 1981. Many of the parcels consist of a few inches of soil, atop solid rock. Not an ideal place for underground utilities. Especially when the County requires electrical lines to be underground.
But a perfect place for “affordable housing”? For people who don’t actually need electricity, perhaps?