I am a social worker in Pagosa Springs, and I help families find housing, among other things. The other day when I looked in the Pagosa Springs SUN classifieds, there are three long-term rentals advertised. A client of mine was told by each of these potential landlords that there was a list of 40 applicants already.
That is, 40 families and/or individuals with nowhere to live. And these are 40 families that have decided that they can attempt to afford the average of $2,000 or more in rent that is being advertised.
After working with clients for hours each day and telling them that their only solution at this point is to purchase a tent, I typically take a walk around the neighborhood that surrounds my office. Beautiful townhomes, condos, apartments and single-family homes surround me. Not one of those homes is occupied year round. I would go on to predict that not one of those homes is occupied for more than a month a year by the homeowners.
So here is the important part that I need our community leaders to think about. “Who are your constituents?”
Who are we, as a community, choosing to support? Is it the people who live here one month of the year? Is it the tourists who pay those people to stay in their homes? For the majority of the year, these visitors are supporting their home communities, while the people working at our small businesses are going to be living in tents. How will small businesses keep employees, when their employees have to move out of town so they can have shelter at night?
Let’s re-imagine something. Imagine our residents are able to afford housing year round. That means, for 12 months, every person living in Pagosa would have sufficient resources for safe, secure housing, and still have enough left over to support our restaurants, outfitters, hot springs… you name it! That would mean for 12 months our business are thriving, not just for a few months a year. So how do our leaders do this? How do they support their constituents?
I am asking our leaders to get creative. I am asking them to re-imagine how we can get full-time, hard-working constituents into homes that are already in existence.
Because we do not have a housing shortage. There are plenty of houses in Pagosa that are sitting unoccupied.
It is time to make policy changes now. Because if our leaders don’t, we are going to have our streets lined with hundreds of tents before summer hits and I am sure we can all imagine how that will impact tourism.
What is one small way our leaders could start supporting your constituents and the community? By creating policies, for example, that give everyone equal rights to housing. A 5% density limit on vacation rentals is probably the bare minimum that the Board of County Commissioners could do right now to stop this massively detrimental public health crisis of homelessness.
The stance that government should stay out of affairs involving housing and vacation rentals just doesn’t work for me. When roads are crumbling, you ask the government to step in and fix them. When there is crime on the streets, you ask the government to eradicate it. When there are natural disasters such as forest fires, you expect the government to come protect your homes.
But some people want the government to leave them alone, when it comes to accumulating wealth.
Human greed is what is impacting the health, safety, and security of our workforce, in this housing crisis. I hope everyone can see the hypocrisy in that.
I hope that, over the next 30 days, our BOCC and Town Council will be working tirelessly to solve this immediate community health crisis.
Lisa Sifrit
Pagosa Springs, CO
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